Beware of working illegally in China.

It’s frightening how easy it is to be on an illegal visa in China.

Despite the increasingly difficult visa process in China, landing a teaching job and living in China continues to become an attractive prospect to many would-be teachers. I have loved my time in China so far and am considering staying another year, even though finding honest employers can be difficult. Luckily, I’ve found a great contact to get me direct employment under schools themselves, which is the best way of finding legal, stable work as a teacher in China. If you decide to use an agent instead, be extremely cautious.

If you’re caught working illegally you can end up being arrested and sent to jail for up to a month, to then be deported and not allowed to return to the country. Agencies such as SeaDragon Education,  FirstLeap and even Disney themselves have had employers become in trouble and forced to bribe their way out of situations, hide from the police or abandon their employees when they end up in jail. This is despite the agencies promising to give their employees a legal visa, yet failing to do so. Even if it isn’t your fault, as a foreign employee you can still be punished.

So how can you ensure that your experience in China is a friendly, legal one?

Make sure you have a bachelors degree

It’s illegal for schools to employ you if you do not have a bachelors degree. A TEFL certificate is also necessary and must be approved and recognised by the particular area of China that you intend to work on. (Some regions will have different requirements and will refuse certain TEFL certificates) You should not be able to get work as a teacher if you have a TEFL degree but not a bachelors degree. Likewise, you should not be able to become employed if you do not have a TEFL degree.

Make sure your visa states that you can work as a teacher

On your visa there will be in English a heading that says ‘purpose of residence’, underneath it must say that you are being employed as a teacher. Unfortunately, the characters underneath will be in Chinese, so you must find a way to translate them through someone you trust or a very good app.

Make sure your visa is issued at the correct place

Some people in Beijing have been caught out, because their agency has registered them at a cheaper place in a different area in Beijing.

You should never have to give away your passport

Your employers may require your passport at occasion to change your Z visa into a residence permit and they may use it to help you register with the police (which is also a legal requirement you must do when you get to China!) but you should always be able to go with them. Do not allow anyone to borrow your passport for sometime.

Leave if your agency gives you excuses

The fact is, there’s still high demand for teachers in China. If your agency gives you any kind of excuse on why your visa is delayed or they give you the wrong visa… Leave. You don’t even have to give them warning. Just pack up and go. Remember, it’s always illegal to work on a tourist visa. What I would recommend you do is to stay in Hong Kong legally for a while as a tourist, find legal employment online or through WeChat for China, fill out the relevant paperwork and return to China comfortably with a legal visa and a good employer.

A good recruiter is your best friend

Sometimes, life in China comes down to who you know. If you want to find a good honest recruiter who will find you legal employment as a teacher in China, just send me a message and I can put you in touch with my favourite recruiter.

Leaving your first school as a TEFL Teacher

Leaving China is complicated, as well as finishing your teaching contract. 

After a great deal of thought and reluctance, I have decided to leave my current kindergarten in China due to my terrible agency. It was difficult at first to find another genuine agency that could offer a legal visa, but eventually I was able to find a good recruiter and will be moving to Suzhou in the late summer. My advice: Make friends with locals and expats and someone will always known someone who can help!

But lo and behold, agencies don’t like it when you leave them. You need something called a ‘cancellation letter’ if you want to transfer your visa to another school, which is your legal right to receive if you ask. But agencies have been known to try and prevent you leaving by ignoring the law. You also need a release letter, which is again your legal right to receive and again, can be ignored by your agency. Well, to be honest, agencies like to ignore the law in general, so that really should be no big surprise.

It’s also recommended to get a criminal record check at the police – And you will definitely need one if you plan to leave China for good. Before my contract was officially ended my agency specialists were like “Sure, sure! We’ll help you!” but now the contract has ended it’s more like “Ok, 200 yuan for our time please.”

Ending your contract with your landlord is also a pain, so try to do that as early as possible. If you plan to stay for another year in the same place, do not tell your landlord that you will be away from a couple of months. And make sure your agency doesn’t either – Because guess what, they told ours, and now wanting to evict us early! Another good idea is to change your lock without telling them, because the likelihood is your landlord will try to rent your apartment when you are away, or at least ‘take a look’. This is a widely known thing, for landlords to charge double event and for expats to come back to find someone else living in their apartment!!

You also need to contact your SIM company and end your contract with them if you are leaving China for good. Otherwise, they will continue to bill you and well… It just makes me uncomfortable.

But what about the emotional side of leaving the kindergarten for good?

Actually, it was okay for me. I expected to be more sad than I actually felt. I was likely enough to have complete control of the day so I designed lessons that I knew they’d behave in and would have the most fun in. We went through what we did in the year, and I even got to play guitar in front of them, being able to play through a goodbye song that I made up myself – And have them sing a long! It was great.

Should you offer to keep in touch with the parents? Since I’m interested in online teaching, I offered some parents my email address, (unfortunately my WeChat broke!) Some parents absolutely did not want to keep in touch and that hurt a little, but it shouldn’t – It’s not against your character, it’s against needing to be in contact with an old teacher. But some parents were delighted to keep in touch, and while I didn’t expect ANYONE to send an email, I did actually receive one from a parent I got along rather well with, so that was fantastic.

And then there is dealing with the external school events that the school really wants you to ‘volunteer’ for. Once your contract ends, that’s entirely up to you. It’s awful if the school is depending on you to turn up even though you’re not being paid for it.

And finally, one needs to clean up and move on! Time to get rid of all those school projects (though take photos of your work, you can use them as part of your portfolio to get into a new school!) and start a fresh new leaf. And that in itself can be very exciting. Sometimes its good to reflect, but not for too long. What is done is done, now move on!

5 Very Awkward (and often illegal) Aspects of TEFL in China

Teaching in China has it perks and I love the kindergarten I work at. Yet as the contract and the visa meets expiration, I can’t help but face some of the awkward realities that come along with teaching as an TEFL teacher in China.

1. A large majority of TEFL agencies will outright lie to you

There is no excuse to not receive your Z visa before you enter China. It’s absolutely illegal to work without a Z visa, no matter what excuse the agency comes up with and the Chinese authorities do perform random searches, some of which you may be tipped on beforehand, other times you won’t be.

My friend who works at the same agency as me had to hide in a cupboard when authorities came to inspect his work. Oh, it’s all a misunderstanding, our agency said later, refusing to apologising to the friend. ‘You wouldn’t have gotten arrested.’ Yet past news stories speak otherwise, including Disney’s own TEFL teachers.

Our agency told us we would get a Z visa as we arrived in China, but took 3 months for it to actually happen, and it nearly sent us home.

2. A lot of TEFL adverts are downright racist

Once you’re settled in China, it’s not hard to find new work in the TEFL industry. Unfortunately, I can’t begin to describe how many schools and agencies ask for white teachers (and often American, them presuming all Americans have a single accent and are white), as if their English is magically better. China officially accepts TEFL teachers from Australia, UK, America, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland. Yet if you are not from America, and especially if you are from South Africa, it can be more difficult to find work.

I am British and am also white, so it is technically easier for me to find work. Yet on principle, I do not want to work with schools and agencies who ask for such characteristics because clearly their understanding on the English language and Western Culture is appalling, and they will be helping you teach English and Western Culture to their students!

3. Resources you create for teaching will be stolen by both your agency and your school

Even for a strict curriculum, you may find you need to develop your own resources. Very likely your agency will have a disclaimer in your contract stating that your resources and lesson plans immediately become copyright to themselves, and it may also say you cannot use them for other schools.

More often than not, these resources you need to develop are made out of hours, so agencies and schools steal your work which they have not paid for, and then claim it’s theirs in front of parents, advertisers and unsuspecting TEFL teachers who think they’re getting these wonderful resources when they start work.

4. Parents bully their children

Parenting has become a recognised hot topic in China, and there are many adverts in Chinese media encouraging families to visit their aging parents. Many of these parents don’t see their relatives for months, or even years, and may be struggling to cope by themselves.

Yet perhaps this could be due to children not forming a strong bond with their parents. The current trend if you are rich is to send your child away to boarding school at as young as 6 years old. In the meantime,  many parents will bully their students to perform their absolute best during school and cannot understand or acknowledge the amazing effort and hard work their child has put into their school life.

Honestly, why would you keep in touch with someone you hardly know, who’s done nothing but told you you’re not working hard enough?

As a TEFL teacher, it can be expected to attend “voluntary” (therefore unpaid) events to meet parents and their children, and join them on various activities. During these events I’ve had parents shove their children at me and told them to perform various songs or use complex English at me.

They’re 3 – 4 years old.

And these are events when exciting events for the children are happening – there’s musical chairs, there’s tug of war, there’s beautiful exhibits to look and interact with. The last thing any child on Earth wants to do is hang out with their teacher and perform like a dog.

And don’t get me started on open days.

5. Decisions that personally affect you can take a long time to be decided

It can be very frustrating as a TEFL teacher, because your decisions are pressured to be made very quickly, yet Chinese agencies and schools will often take a long time to make their own decisions.

For example, you can be given only hours to find your passport or a certain document at your school or teaching agency’s request, and within those hours you need to work as a teacher, too. (Though do be suspicious, this is often an indication of a scam!)

Yet your school can take 6 months to decide on whether they’ll keep your agency or not, and then decide actually, it’ll take another 3 months for them to decide (which at that point your visa runs out, and you’ll need to restart the application process all over again).

Lo and behold, your agency can also take months to give you the correct legal documents, including the document that states you have finished your contract which is a legal requirement you can request in advance and is very necessary for your next TEFL job. Requests for changes in a contract will take a very long time… And often, they’ll “forget”. It doesn’t matter how important or urgent those requests are.

I have a friend who has been waiting for her agency to correct their mistake on her own Z visa, as it ends before her contract does. This could mean she would need to leave the school at their most important time of the year – The wave of school performances, and the student’s graduation.

The thing is, agencies are very quick to blame the negatives on others and we all want good references from our schools. It can be a very difficult situation.

Alas.

I definitely want to continue working in China. I love my life here, I love my students and I believe that there are many great opportunities for TEFL teachers in this country. But it doesn’t reduce some of the awkwardness one is bound to face.

Tombs, Agencies and Cinema Tickets

No raiding involved however!

At the time of writing it is Tomb Sweeping Festival, a festival acknowledged by many people in China where relatives travel huge distances to meet each other and sweep their ancestor’s tombs. Sometimes it is not just remembered relatives whose tombs are swept. Some people will be busy sweeping the tombs of relatives such as their great-great-great grandfather’s cousin’s. In the Guangdong district this is particularly recognised as a time of importance, which means school is closed and I finally have time to update my blog.

However, despite this appreciated time off, it does mean I will be working on this Sunday to make up for the festival. Yes, because the festival begins on the Thursday, we also get Friday off work. But to make up for this, we have to work on Sunday this week. It seems it is preferred to get days off work in a row and make up for the days off later. My guess would be to help people travel to their relatives and back.

And yes, this means students will be coming back into the kindergarten on the Sunday too.

During the time off I will be refreshing my CV and looking for new work. Currently, there is an… interesting situation where my agency may no longer be employed to work with the current school I am with. If that’s the case… And if this new agency the school ends up hiring instead cannot offer a good (or legal!) deal then I will probably try to find work somewhere else.

After all, there is good reason for the school to drop the current agency. They failed to meet the school’s demand for teachers, and have continuously let down the teachers on several occasions including visas, missing documents and failing to correctly insure the teachers. They nearly cancelled Christmas. We do get paid on time however. I hear that some teacher agencies in China fail to do that, too.

The whole situation makes me wonder if I want to stay and work another year in the country. Many teachers get better contracts if they can negotiate directly with the school, but this often requires fluency in Mandarin and understanding of Chinese law. If I want to continue to work in China, I will have to work with a teaching agency for now.

But there is so much about China that I enjoy and I feel I have made some nice progress in learning Chinese Mandarin, despite never being good at languages. (And even a couple of Cantonese words!) There is also char sui bao here and interesting things to explore and to learn about – finding out about Tomb Sweeping Festival is certainly one of them.

And there are many benefits to staying at the school. Although some feel… Rather uncomfortable. Now and then the teachers will get invited to parties or offered gifts. I received a starbucks card for about 300 yuan and my partner was given a cinema voucher a few days ago. In the UK we do not accept bribes and these almost feel like them. But on the other hand, free cake is free cake… And we’re often given cake.

Alas, lots to think about and lots to do.

How Christmas was Nearly Cancelled

I took a good look online for a 100% honest and trustworthy agency for TEFL teachers in China. I don’t think they exist.

I had a lovely Christmas but my goodness, the days leading up to it were stressful. My partner and I had decided to leave our apartment to visit the beach and holiday parks in Hong Kong, which is only an hour and a half away by ferry. We love our local area but we wanted a change of scenery for the holidays, and Hong Kong offers some staggering views.

We are both TEFL teachers and our specialist from our TEFL agency in the area promised, yes, that’ll be fine. Have a lovely holiday. Yadda, yadda. Our agency is responsible for all of our legal documents. Turns out of course, that they forgot to renew them. Oh, it won’t be a problem, they say. It will only take a couple of days, they say.

That’s fine, if they didn’t make a costly mistake on filling out these vital documents incorrectly in the first place. As they were incorrect, the usual procedure is to redo the documents all over again. Yeah. That means applying for a new visa from scratch. Something you need for working in China is an up to date criminal record check from your respective country. The agency were sure to tell us to get them asap before we left, so we did. Now they’ve expired, so it’d be impossible to sort out in China. We’d have to go back to the UK.

The agency ended up having to ‘plead with the people in charge’ to make an exception.  We had already booked our main hotel, and ended up being in limbo about whether or not we should cancel it in order to get a refund in time. Would our agency compensate us for our financial loss? Nah. We were sure they wouldn’t. This agency has been quick to blame others for their mistakes.

So we didn’t book transport to get to Hong Kong, neither did we book a hotel in Shenzhen (where we had to attend a compulsory ‘party’ which was a load of rubbish, of course). We didn’t want to waste further money and it didn’t look like it was going to work out.

Turns out, we received our passports the day before we left to Shenzhen. The plead was accepted.

But what troubles me is that…

A) Three fellow colleagues did not receive their passports in time, so had to spend Christmas in Zhongshan despite concrete plans to travel.

B) The agency knew that the procedure for renewing documents had changed.

C) The agency should have sorted out this situation in October.

D) We lost money as we could not book transport and the Shenzhen hotel in advance.

E) We found out that there was a problem through second hand information, not by the agency themselves until days later.

F) If the plead didn’t go well we would have to leave China. What would happen then? We’d do the entire process all over again? We’d have to go back to the UK in order to repurchase a CRB check, as well as pay and travel to notarise and authenticate it. No thank you! Of course, the agency would have to pay for this (unless they went 100% loopy, which might be possible?), and while I would absolutely love a free trip home, it would severely damage the children’s education and create tension between the Chinese teachers and foreign teachers, ultimately making it a negative place to work when we’d get back. Not only that, but we’d have to take all our things home, in the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to get back!!

I’m also frustrated because I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted to do. I wanted to plan the trip, get excited about it, schedule all these video calls I wanted to have with friends and family, buy a Christmas jumper – that kinda stuff. But while Hong Kong was brilliant, I was so tired from all the stress leading up to the event that I simply didn’t have the energy or ‘Christmas spirit’ I was hoping on.

To all my friends who have been wondering where I’ve disappeared to – I hope that explains it a bit.

At some point soon, once I’ve uploaded all the photos I’d like to talk about my adventures in Hong Kong in detail. But I also think it’s important to remember the not so great experiences too.