Culture Shock Teaching in China: I Almost Booked a Flight Home
Culture shock teaching in China is real — and week five almost sent me home. Here's my honest story of what that night looked like and what kept me in China for 7 years.
🏙️ CITIES & LIVING IN CHINA
The Moment I Almost Booked a Flight Home — And What Kept Me in China
There is a specific kind of loneliness that only reveals itself when everything around you is technically fine.
No crisis. No emergency. No single event you can point to and say — that is why I want to leave.
Just a slow, quiet accumulation of being far from everything familiar. Of navigating a world where you cannot read the signs, cannot understand the conversations happening around you, and cannot find the specific brand of coffee you used to drink every morning without thinking about it.
That was week five for me in Tianjin.
Culture shock while teaching in China is more common than most recruitment materials will ever tell you — and week five is almost always when it peaks. Most teachers experience it. Almost none of them are warned about it clearly enough before they arrive.
And I almost left.
This article reflects my personal experience living and teaching in China for the past seven years. It is not psychological or medical advice. If you are experiencing significant distress, please reach out to a qualified professional or appropriate support service.
The Night I Opened My Banking App
I remember the exact setting. My apartment was dark except for my laptop screen. It was a Tuesday night — I know this because I had taught six classes that day and my voice was slightly hoarse in a way it only ever got on heavy teaching days.
I had eaten dinner alone. Again.
Not because I had no colleagues or contacts — I had plenty at that point. But there is a difference between having people around you and having people who actually know you. At week five, I still had plenty of the former and almost none of the latter.
I opened my banking app without really deciding to. Started looking at flights. Not seriously at first — the way you might scroll through real estate listings for cities you have no intention of moving to. Just to see. Just to know the option existed.
Then I found a route. A decent price. A departure date twelve days away.
I sat with the browser open for a long time.
What Stopped Me — And It Was Not Motivation
I want to be honest about this because I think the honest version is more useful than the inspirational one.
What stopped me was not a surge of resolve. It was not a sudden reminder of why I came here or a pep talk I gave myself about perseverance. It was not even a particularly profound thought.
It was a small, quiet deal I made with myself almost by accident.
If I still feel this way in thirty days, I will seriously consider going home. But I am not making that decision tonight.
That was it. No grand commitment to China. No renewed sense of purpose. Just a decision to not decide — at least not tonight, and not based on how I felt in that specific apartment on that specific Tuesday.
I closed the browser.
What the Following Weeks Actually Looked Like
I wish I could tell you that the next morning everything shifted. It did not.
Week six was still hard. Week seven had some genuinely good days mixed in with some genuinely difficult ones.
But somewhere in that window — I cannot pinpoint the exact moment — the texture of my daily life in Tianjin started changing. Not dramatically. Almost imperceptibly at first.
A colleague named Li Wei invited me to dinner at a restaurant near the school. It was the first time anyone had invited me somewhere that was not school-related. We sat for three hours. His English was limited. My Mandarin was almost nonexistent. We managed anyway, in that way that shared food and goodwill sometimes make possible.
I found a noodle place two streets from my apartment. The woman who ran it had three photographs of the same dog on the wall behind the counter and always smiled when I came in, even in the earliest weeks when I could not order properly and had to point at what the person next to me was eating. I started going every Friday. Then most Fridays. Then it became the thing I looked forward to most about Fridays.
My WeChat — which for the first month had been mostly empty beyond school contacts — started filling up. A teacher from Australia who had been in Tianjin for two years and knew which metro exit to use for everything. A couple from the UK who had a dog and hosted irregular gatherings in their apartment that somehow always lasted until midnight.
None of these things were dramatic. They were ordinary. But ordinary, it turns out, is exactly what the human brain is looking for when it has been operating in a state of constant low-level foreignness. Ordinary is a form of relief.
The Culture Shock Curve Nobody Explains Clearly Enough
What I know now — and genuinely wish I had known before I left — is that what I experienced in week five is not unusual. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you or with your decision. It is a documented, predictable phase of psychological adjustment that has been studied and observed across cultures, professions, and contexts.
It is commonly called the culture shock curve, and it follows a pattern that is remarkably consistent across the experiences of people I have spoken with over seven years:
Weeks 1–2: The honeymoon. Everything feels like discovery. New food, new sounds, new stimulation. The novelty carries you through the discomfort.
Weeks 3–6: The dip. The novelty fades. The discomfort remains. The gap between where you are and where everything familiar exists feels suddenly very large. This is the phase most teachers who leave early are in when they make that decision.
Months 2–3: Early adjustment. Routines begin to form. The city starts to feel less like a foreign place and more like a place. Small anchors accumulate — a favourite food stall, a route you know without thinking, a face that recognises yours.
Months 4–6: Real adaptation. You stop translating everything. You stop comparing everything to home. You start existing here rather than surviving here.
The critical insight is this: most teachers who leave China early do so during the dip. They make a permanent decision based on a temporary state — and the state was always going to pass, whether they left or not.
Three Things That Actually Helped During That Period
I am not going to suggest that pushing through is always the right answer. Sometimes the right answer is to go home. Only you can make that assessment for your own life.
But for what it is worth, here is what genuinely helped me during the hardest weeks — not strategies I read somewhere, but things that actually worked for me specifically:
1. Giving myself permission to feel exactly what I was feeling without making it mean something permanent. The feeling of wanting to leave is not the same thing as the decision to leave. I learned to treat them as separate. Feeling is just information. The decision was something I gave myself more time and better conditions to make.
2. Finding one anchor — one specific place, person, or routine that felt like mine. The noodle restaurant was mine. Not because it was special in any objective sense. Because I chose it and kept choosing it and eventually it chose me back by recognising me when I walked in. Belonging somewhere in a new place does not happen all at once. It happens in very small, very ordinary increments.
3. Staying connected with family back home on a predictable schedule rather than constantly. This one surprised me. I found that checking in with home too frequently actually deepened my homesickness rather than easing it. A regular, anticipated connection — a Sunday call, a weekly voice message — worked better than the constant low hum of being partly here and partly there.
Seven Years Later
I still live in Tianjin. I still eat at that noodle restaurant most Fridays, though the photographs behind the counter have changed. Li Wei and I have had dozens more dinners since that first one, and my Mandarin is now good enough that I can have a real conversation if the topic is concrete and neither of us is in a hurry.
I have watched many teachers go through their own version of week five. Some of them left. Some of them stayed. The ones who stayed — not all of them, but most of them — describe that period in almost exactly the same terms I do now: as the hardest part that turned out to be a phase, not a verdict.
If you are currently sitting in a dark apartment somewhere in China with a browser open and a flight date on the screen, I want to tell you what I would have wanted someone to tell me:
You do not have to decide tonight. Give yourself thirty days.
Thinking About Teaching in China?
This is the kind of experience — the honest version, not the brochure version — that I built my complete guide around.
Teaching in China: The Complete Insider Guide — 2026 Edition covers everything from practical arrival logistics to the emotional reality of the first months, based on seven years of living it myself.
If you are actively planning a move and want to talk through your specific situation, I also offer 1-on-1 coaching sessions — including a free 30-minute discovery call with no obligation.
Disclaimer: This article reflects personal experience and is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not psychological, medical, or professional mental health advice. Individual experiences of cultural adjustment vary significantly. If you are experiencing significant distress, anxiety, or depression, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional or appropriate support service in your area.