Chapter 2

“What the hell are you doing in China?” my uncle asked me, belligerently, over Skype, soon after I’d arrived.

Well, I’d come to work, to teach at a university, in hopes of a better position back home...

The university I accepted a position at had only been open for 10 years, as a partnership with the Florida university system.

It was yet another American school hungry to cash in on the growing Chinese market.

Given the dismal state of most Chinese universities, and how desperate many parents in China were to send their kids to a Western school, having a Western school open in China made sense. And many such international schools had opened. From kindergarten through college, international schools were all the rage.

Which is where I came in. I’d been an adjunct professor, teaching cultural studies courses at Florida International University, in Miami, plus a few local Broward, Miami-Dade community colleges.

Life for an adjunct is no cakewalk. It used to be a college professor could score a tenure track position pretty easily, with the right credentials, of course, but these days, as even higher education has become part of the gig economy, tenured professorships are growing increasingly rare.

After scraping together a meager existence in my hometown of Miami, I decided to jump at the chance of a possible tenure track post that FIU was offering. However, the post wasn’t in sunny Florida. Nope, it was far, far away from the land of swaying palm trees. Far as can be imagined. Far east.

In the industrial heartland of central China. In Nongzhou, Henan.

Not exactly my dream job. But, if I stuck with it for the entirety of the 3-year contract, I could, possibly, secure a tenured position in the International Studies Department back at FIU in Miami.

It was too good an opportunity to pass up. Plus, it allowed the once in a lifetime opportunity to travel in Asia.

So, I sold off most of my stuff, packed up only a few essentials, like clothes, my computer, an external drive stuffed with eBooks, and navigated a maze of bureaucracy to attain my Chinese visa.

Finally, on a cloudy September morning, I boarded a plane bound for China.