My life in China, Part 30- Shock of re-entry

Coming back to the US after two years abroad wasn’t easy for a variety of reasons. Actually, who am I kidding? It was quite the storm, with major life decisions made on a forced and short timeline- the kind of experience you could only have when you’re young. Everything ultimately worked out in the end, but that wasn’t apparent at the time, and things were rough going at first.

The last semester I was in China, my wife and I were making decent money and living very comfortably. To give you a sense of what I mean, we were faculty in a University making roughly an equivalent to the pay a faculty member in the US would make. They paid me in cash with no income taxes. The University also provided me with comfortable housing, health care, and a portion of my utilities (heat, internet, water/sewer). My expenses amounted to electricity and paying like 5 RMB a week for drinking water delivery. We rarely cooked and could easily afford to eat out for all our meals, so we did. We could buy what we wanted when we wanted, travel, and could still save a large portion of what we made. On top of our regular salary, I worked three well-paying part-time jobs, and my wife was also working part-time tutoring an American engineer in Chinese and doing some other part-time teaching. In Baoding, we were easily upper-middle-class, and even with all of these jobs, we worked roughly 20 hours a week, giving us a considerable amount of free time to explore and play, and I could work on my new passion, writing. I won’t lie, it was a remarkable life, and we had a great time. I look back to those years as the best in my life.

On top of salary, we were both teachers, a highly respected position in China. People valued our opinion and listened to what we had to say. On my working visa, it even said foreign expert, and really, that’s how the Chinese treated me. Being a foreigner in a city with few foreigners, I lived a celebrity life. Everyone would turn when I walked down the street. People would ask to take pictures with me. On several occasions, people approached me to be a model. Me! Job offers were everywhere. When I stepped into a busy restaurant, it would go silent for a moment, and then they would usher me to the front of the line and then to the very best table. Everyone knew me and wanted to be my friend. Strangers would come up and toast my existence in their land. We were treated to meals, given gifts, provided special treatment, and invited to weddings and celebrations. One of my part-time jobs was working with the CEO of a joint venture company, and each week, a driver would come to pick me up in a black luxury sedan with tinted windows. I would go to the CEO’s mansion-like home and help him understand essential business communications worth millions.

The fall from grace was far indeed.

I’ve already discussed why we left here, but I didn’t detail how much of a shock it was. The first was the culture shock, and I’m not talking about my wife. I’m talking about reverse culture shock for me. The first thing I noticed was the English. I could easily tune out Chinese, but I was overwhelmed as soon as I was in an American airport. Suddenly, I could understand everything again, but I couldn’t block it out. My starving ears just latched onto every word in the crowd. It was bizarre. Then, I realized when purchasing my lunch that everyone could understand me too. I could communicate with fluency once more instead of fumbling through my broken Chinese. These are just a couple of examples, but needless to say, it took some time to get used to the states again.

The second shock was the quickness of it all. When my wife got her green card, we had a short window to prepare for our transition. The visa process moved along quicker than we expected. I think we really believed we would be in the country for another semester or more and would have time to make arrangements for such a significant move to enter graduate school in the fall. But that’s not what happened, and we had to balance entering the US within a certain window for my wife’s green card with the expiration of my contract and visa in China. Thus, we had to jump six months before we were ready and hoped everything would work out.

The third shock was financial. The quick timeline mentioned above meant we weren’t prepared financially, and we had to live with my parents from January to August. Being in my mid-twenties, I was embarrassed living with my parents again. I can’t thank them enough for taking us in, but it was tough on all of us. Sure, we had savings, but we were six months short of where we planned to be, and with the conversion rate, we saw our wealth divided by seven. Just think about that for a moment. Imagine you had to reduce all your savings by a factor of seven just before a significant move between two very different countries. Not to mention, everything is more expensive per capita in the US, especially food. We also had the impending unknowns of Boston’s living costs and graduate school tuition to boot. Thus, we needed jobs quickly.

I had remarkable experiences in China, but I soon found they were not easy to translate and certainly not applicable in my parent’s neck of the woods. They came in handy later, but at this point, they were worthless. On my wife’s side, even though she’s brilliant, capable, and had a teaching career in China, it all meant virtually nothing in the US. She even had experience teaching Chinese and was just as much an expert in her language as I was in mine, yet, Chinese teaching jobs were scarce, and she couldn’t teach in the US without certification.

So, we became temporary workers at the US Postal Service, which was the biggest shock of them all. We knew it would only be for a few months while we applied to other jobs and got situated for our move to Boston, and they did pay reasonably well, but it was a shock for both of us and certainly more for my wife, who was very new to the country. The USPS is not a good introduction to the United States (well, hell, maybe it is). I had worked for the Post Office during my college summers and knew what to expect, but that was as a mail handler moving mail. This time it was short notice, and the only openings were for custodial work at night.

In China, we were somebody. In the US, we instantly became nobodies.

Now, cleaning up after people is an essential and unappreciated job, and our experiences over the next few months taught us many life lessons. However, it’s still a base-level position, and being temporary workers, we were bottom of the bottom. If you’re not aware, the US Postal Service is unionized, so people bid for jobs based on seniority every single day. Thus, we always got what was left- the absolute worst of the worst for custodians in a bulk mail facility. It meant eight months of cleaning bathrooms or some other dirty and nasty job working with some very bitter and angry human beings. Our co-workers would go around and see what route was the dirtiest (or trash it for us) and avoid bidding on those jobs.

The US Postal Service has many stereotypes, and let me tell you, some of them are true. It’s hard for me to be critical sometimes because my father worked for the Postal Service for almost 30 years, and it provided for our family growing up. I should also be fair. Not all of our co-workers during that time were nasty. There are always flowers in the weeds. We made some great friends and had our share of fun. We were also undoubtedly appreciative to have a job. Keep in mind this was 2007 and the beginning of the financial crisis. But, I will be crystal clear, there were plenty of absolutely terrible people who fed off our youthful energy like leeches and did what they could to smother our spark. How? Let me explain.

Several of our co-workers were ex-cons, one of whom had spent fifteen years in prison for beating his brother almost to death with a baseball bat (funny enough, he lived with the same brother after prison). I’m all for the concept of reform and giving people second chances, but our prison system doesn’t reform, and this guy didn’t deserve a second chance. I had known some bad dudes in my life, but not like this. A good portion of the others were veterans dealing with severe mental disabilities. It certainly wasn’t their fault and I felt bad for them, but it also made them have very short fuses and they had terrible mood swings. They’d be friendly one moment and threaten to kill you the next (I’m not exaggerating). Some of the others were alcoholics who sweat booze or heavy drug users that would disappear for days. We probably weren’t dealing with employees of the month here. Nothing brought this group more joy than playing “pranks” that often included feces. In particular, the ex-con mentioned above liked to hang used toilet paper on the coat hooks in the stalls so when you opened the door, it would fall on you. If paired with one of these individuals, you would be doing all the work while they watched, and there was nothing we could do about it. They had union protection. We did not.

But although unsavory, our fellow custodians weren’t the worse. Even though they bullied us, there was still some solidarity there. That can’t be said for some of the other postal workers. These people treated us like dirt and went to extraordinary extra lengths to make our jobs harder, including purposely missing the toilet or hiding our cleaning supplies. They would dry their hands and look at us as they threw the paper towels to the floor or duck under our wet floor signs to walk across our freshly mopped floor with their dirty feet. Sure, they were adults on the surface, but I had taught kindergartners in China that were better behaved.

The USPS employs 600,000 people in the US, so I’m sure my comments above will ruffle feathers, but I don’t care. It’s what I experienced, and I’m unapologetic after the way they treated me, and more importantly, treated my wife. How Americans treat guests to this country is in stark contrast to how these guests would treat them if they visited their countries. This is not just a statement. It’s my bitter experience, and it added to the shock of this transition in our lives.

We were poor with all our worldly belongings in three suitcases, had no home of our own, and we struggled. We often felt that no one understood what we were going through because they couldn’t see the juxtaposition we experienced or appreciate our financial worries. There is a vast cultural difference around the concept of debt and saving between the US and China. It was wisdom that I wholeheartedly agreed with (my generation still suffers from the 2008 financial crisis). We didn’t want to depend on credit cards, we didn’t want to spend beyond our means, and we certainly didn’t want to take on heavy student loan debt. That meant we needed to save every penny. Thus, it required us to find ways to cut corners, at times be cheap and stingy, and we certainly couldn’t socialize or go out to eat with friends and family. I’m sure many thought we were selfish, but we had to live our lives too. We had to make hard decisions and balance them against our desire to go to graduate school and make something of ourselves. I won’t lie. It sucked and led to conflicts and some cutting of ties with those that couldn’t understand.

We regretted our decision to leave China almost immediately and for a long time after, especially during those months at the post office, but we were stuck and had to keep trucking on. Ultimately, everything worked out, and we found our way, but for years we were poor, scared, depressed, and disenfranchised.

Things got a little better when we stopped working for the USPS, but not much. We moved into a studio apartment in the Boston area, one of the most expensive areas to live in the country, and eked out a living. That was a tiny apartment, but it was ours. Living with my parents for eight months was rough, and at times the relationship suffered as a result. Any space of our own was a breath of fresh air. I got a base-level position at a local university, and my wife worked as a receptionist at a start-up. At first, we both worked part-time and went to school full-time. That switched when I got my first job at MIT. Soon after, my wife began working full-time at a university as well. It dragged out our graduate school time by several years, but at least we could afford to go out to eat every once and a while and our tuition benefits helped too. We both got our graduate degrees without incurring student loan debt, and we’re pretty proud of that. It allowed us to purchase our first home, a small condo, which then let us buy a single-family a few years later. We still live in this home, and it’s quite nice now, but it was in rough shape when we bought it. In a future post, perhaps I will explore the challenge of renovating a home.

I didn’t write this post to get sympathy. We made a few poor decisions and some good ones just like anyone. As I’ve discussed in other posts, we could have stayed in China, but things have changed drastically over the last 15-20 years, and it was probably a good decision that we moved when we did. We were perhaps getting a bit too comfortable, and our quest to improve ourselves had its benefits even if there were some rough patches. Sometimes in life, we are presented with choices and need to make leaps of faith. It felt like we made a wrong decision back then, but I kept my grandfather’s mantra always in mind; this too shall pass, and it did. We clawed and struggled, and we finally reached the surface for air and now look back at some of those challenging moments fondly. They made us who we are today, and we turned out alright.

Cheers!