Living in China. 10 years on

Leifeng Pagoda, Hangzhou

Just About 10 Years on.

On March 4, 2016, Tanzinne and I got married in a very low-key ceremony held at an old cinema house. A week later, we were on a plane to China for a year.
Well, that’s what we told ourselves and our family. “We’re going for a year to save as much as we can, and then we’ll come back and see from there.”
It’s now creeping up on our 10th anniversary in China, and we have NO intention of going back home to live. We’ve built a home here in China, and we’ve grown fond of the safety and the kind of lifestyle we’re afforded here. ( That’s not to say that there aren’t things about China that grate our cheese, but overall we’re happy here.)

I don’t think we plan on living out the rest of our days in the Middle Kingdom, but for now, we intend to use this as our ‘Home-Base’ while we try and explore as much of the world as possible, and as much of China as possible. (Embarrassingly, we haven’t YET explored much of the beautiful country we now call home.)

December 2014

The Early Days of Us

Hope & Dreams.

We moved to China because we had a dream of working with children, being involved in education, and fertilizing young minds; we also had a dream of doing that and still being able to afford to live and travel. South Africa did not really provide any opportunities for us to have those dreams.
We moved to China a week after our wedding, filled with trepidation, but mostly hope. We relocated halfway across the world to a rather small (by Chinese standards, at least) town called Lingxi, although that’s not what we were told during the negotiation process; we were told we’d be living in Wenzhou City.

Wenzhou is a prefecture-level city in Zhejiang province with thriving commerce & financial industries. Wenzhounese are famous throughout China & the world for their entrepreneurial prowess, and Wenzhou is often called ‘The Cradle of China’s Private Economy.”

Lingxi is not in Wenzhou city, but it is part of a smaller county within Wenzhou’s jurisdiction, and whilst it was immense in comparison to South African small town standards, it was not the city we had thought we’d be living in, and we weren’t our happiest there.

Even though we weren’t at our happiest in Lingxi, we were happy, and we were making friends and growing fond of this new place. We explored the province a little, heading to its capital Hangzhou, falling in love with it, and deciding that’s where we want to live.

After completing our year-long contract in Lingxi, we endeavoured onwards to Hangzhou, and it became home for the next 8 years.

The View from our apartment in Hangzhou. Image by Darren A Fielding.

8 Years in Paradise… for the most part.

Hangzhou is tremendously beautiful, and is widely regarded by the majority of Chinese to be The Most Beautiful City in China. There’s even a very famous poem written about Hangzhou, claiming it as heaven on earth. > 上有天堂下有苏杭 ( Above there is heaven, below there is Suzhou & Hangzhou.)
In fact, even the famed Venetian explorer Marco Polo visited Hangzhou and claimed it as “the most beautiful and magnificent city in the world,” and called it “City of Heaven.”

When we visited Hangzhou for the first time in October 2016, we were greeted with an immense crowd of people (as we would come to learn, October is China’s National Holiday and is Hangzhou’s prime time to shine as a tourist hub, greeting over 28 million tourists within Golden Week. So, we weren’t able to see much of the city, but we did visit Lingyin Temple, West Lake, and ….. Uhm, yip, that’s about it, actually. The rest of the time was spent hiding in our hotel or on a bus. The city was utter chaos; nevertheless, we fell in love and wanted to make it home.

So we found a dream job in Hangzhou, moved, and established a life there. Our parents came to visit us in 2018, they fell in love with it and understood why we couldn’t return home.

We had many adventures in Hangzhou, not all of them fun, but all of them leading us forward and steering us to where we are now. We went on our first overseas vacation from Hangzhou to Thailand and got hooked on travel. Tanzinne had her first art exhibit, I started photography, we flirted with the idea of starting a YouTube channel, in fact, we even filmed a few episodes, of which I still have the footage. But, ultimately, we still wanted to be in Education; however, it would seem education would not want us.

Fake Venice, Hangzhou

Hangzhou is home to Fake Venice & Fake Paris.

Sweeping Changes.

Cue 2020 and the COVID pandemic, which brought about sweeping changes within education nationwide. We found ourselves having to hide books, teach fake curricula, or pretend to teach art, and it just seemed to get worse from there. So we pursued other opportunities in Hangzhou and other nearby cities. The opportunity that seemed best to us was in Wuxi, a much smaller city in Jiangsu Province, which was right next to Suzhou (of the heaven poem fame). So we moved after 8 years to Wuxi and started working at a Cambridge International Affiliated High School Center. - Not anywhere near as illustrious or glamorous as it may sound.

The school we worked for is run on two principles, albeit they are not advertised; Get paid lots of money from parents and make sure that the students pass by any means necessary. We then came to learn that those same core principles have seemed to be adopted by the majority of educational institutions worldwide. We had numerous interviews with some highly prestigious institutions and learned the same from them.

Due to COVID and the international travel standstill, we had not left China for almost 4 years, and we had started to become very, very claustrophobic. We started to resent our adopted home, and we were highly unhappy, unhappy in our employment, and unhappy with feeling stuck. We felt stuck career-wise as we had invested more than 10 years in bettering ourselves as educators, and now we didn’t want to be in education anymore.

2024

In 2024, the travel restrictions were lifted, and we were finally able to travel. We seized the opportunity and visited Vietnam over the Spring Festival in Late February. We were very quickly reminded how much we love travel and how enthralled we are by learning about different cultures, different people, and the places they’ve been framed by. We knew that we wanted to make travel a very consistent part of our lives, but we just didn’t really know how.

As the summer holiday had now happened upon us and we had some time off, we decided to visit Japan for the first time ever, and in our excitement, we also decided that maybe we could film our travels and share them on the internet on a little site called YouTube.

We knew nothing about filming and editing together video logs of our travels, but we were deeply excited by the idea, and we went through with it, filming the very first vlogs that appear on our YouTube channel.

Thus, we started to see YouTube and travel as an amalgamation of our passions for educating.

The Two of Us in one of our first YouTube exploits in Tokyo

Where to from here?

So now it’s June 2025, and we’re about a week away from the Summer Holidays, almost a year of doing YouTube, and we’re just getting started. We have a lot of ideas, a wonderful selection of dreams and visions for Weird, but I like it, and we have high hopes.

I guess, you’re going to have to stick around to find out what they are and what comes about…