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Posted this month via a recruiter: High School Music Teachers needed at Chengdu, Sichuan
http://cafe.anesl.com/jobdetail.aspx?id=20150902092313329
Starting in March, salary is low, but they do provide an apartment (which may be just one bedroom for a single person). Or they may be glad enough to hire someone who doesn’t need an apartment.
These ads have expired, but may be worth contacting them
Another thing related to health you should read before departure, and it doesn’t just apply to Beijing. Thousands of people die of rabies every year in China, and that isn’t just in the countryside.
“Rabies is dangerously common here in China,” emphasizes Dr. Richard Saint Cyr, a family medicine physician at Beijing United Family Hospital and Clinics. “China is in second place, only behind India, in the number of deaths per year from rabies—usually around 2,000 persons, and many of them are children. For comparison, in the USA, only one-to-two people die each year from rabies.”
“It’s so much easier to get the three preventive vaccines over one month, and if you are ever bitten in the future then you would only need two shots over three days, and no immunoglobulin injection.” Otherwise, he notes, you need to do four-to-five shots and the HRIG injection. “This is always much more complicated, not to mention very stressful, and the immunoglobulin injection can be expensive, painful, and sometimes difficult to keep in supply.”
http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/article/china-health-watch-rabies
OP, there are many problems in this situation, most arising from a lack of money. Let me address some.
Many have to do with housekeeping/logistical issues that may be of concern to the mother of three children.
HOUSING First, I’m surprised the university doesn’t offer housing, traditionally they’ve done so in China. Usually such apartments are free, (more or less) furnished with a few basic appliances and include at least some utilities. Referring only to the salary is not a useful comparison, because Chinese families a) usually only have one child b) often have at least one pair of grandparents, or at least one grandmother, living with them, or if in the same city, visiting daily, which takes care of many logistical issues c) usually pay less for almost everything than foreigners for obvious reasons.
Renting an apartment commercially can often involve several months rent in cash. Landlords often want 4 months — one will be a deposit, the other 3 for advance rent. The agent will get a month.
If you are not going to use an agent, is someone going to help you find and rent a place? The vast majority of agents, owners and property management offices don’t speak or even read English. If they do, they will be handling expensive housing aimed at people with expat benefits. The lease will almost certainly be in Chinese. Repair staff will not speak English, and you may be calling them a lot b/c as others have observed, the quality of housing is poor even at high rents.
Breaking a lease usually involves a 2-month rent penalty. Also, while most people have uneventful tenancies, there is no system or concept of tenants’ rights, and no system of landlord-tenant courts or arbitration procedures. One reason Chinese people are so keen on ownership is, as one told me, that it can and does happen that people can find themselves turned out of their apartment on little or no notice with no recourse. It doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen, and it’s up to you to negotiate with the landlord.
Also, in many compounds, if you hire a truck to move your stuff out, the guards may require you to have a note from the management office before they let the truck leave. The management office will generally call your landlord. So if you do have some major dispute with your landlord and decide to just leave, it may not be that easy.
I’m not saying all these bad things happen to everyone, but they can and do happen and these are things people don’t know or think about much when deciding to move here.
Also, in almost any residential compound of any size, there will almost always be apartment renovation going on. When apartments change hands, it’s almost invariable that a major renovation is undertaken, even in relatively new units, because the initial quality was low. Bathrooms and kitchens are ripped out, walls are knocked out … renovation work might go on 7 days a week at almost any hour. You’ll have to listen to all this. Some compounds will control this, some won’t. Calling the police or the management office may not produce any lasting result.
You will probably have to rent an older apartment in a less convenient or desirable location. Location will influence your commuting time and cost, along with the availability of services/stores. People have alluded to the lower quality of such buildings. I’d like to be more explicit. An old apartment can have many or all of the following issues.
The kitchen and bathroom will not be at all what you are used to. The cooker may be a two-ring gas unit that’s grimy with oil from previous tenants. Landlords don’t necessarily clean an apartment before renting it, nor do they necessarily do any number of seemingly obvious repairs.
Really old buildings may have no elevator (if only a few stories high) or have a few really ancient ones that only serve every other floor (you’ll drag your kids and groceries up or down a floor). I have seen exactly these situations in Beijing, so I imagine they exist in Chengdu as well. Some really old buildings even halt elevators after a certain hour.
In really old buildings as well, people feel free to more or less dump garbage or household debris they don’t want to bother doing proper disposal of, in the stairwells, where there may or may not be real garbage cans. Or they may throw it out the window, which is not very pleasant especially if you have a landing outside your window. The stairwells and halls in these old buildings can be barely or totally unlit, windows may be broken, security in the building may be minimal.
In the kitchen, storage and counter space will probably be very limited. The fridge will be well-used, small and not very efficient. Most Chinese families usually shop every day, and because of the tiny fridge, you will too … shop for five people with three kids in tow.
There may be no hot water in the kitchen, so you’ll either wash dishes in cold water or heat some on the stove. Kitchens rarely have ovens except in top-end, top-priced housing, so if you want to bake, you will have to buy an electric countertop oven. These might cost a few hundred RMB.
Bathroom. You’ll probably have a Western toilet, but you won’t always have a tub. The shower may be just that, a showerhead mounted on the wall with a shower curtain (no glass doors). The water is expected to run down the drain in the middle of the floor. Piping systems are not very good, meaning you’ll smell a lot of things going down the drain from the bathroom(s) above you. The lower the floor, the worse the problem. The washing machine will probably be in the bathroom and it will probably be a well-used, small top-loading model that only has cold water. There won’t be any dryer in old, cheap apartments, so you’ll have to hang your washing from a pole on the balcony.
As to hot water, you might have a gas heater that will supply a fairly decent uninterrupted supply. Or you might have an electric tank in the bathroom, which can take 20-30 minutes to heat up. If it does supply the kitchen, you could use it up doing the dinner dishes. Giving one or two kids a bath will easily drain it. Three kids plus two adults ….
UTILITIES These could get expensive because, as far as I know, a lot of buildings in Chengdu do not have any central heating (I am in Beijing, where basically all buildings do). Winter in Sichuan can be chilly and damp. If you are in a newer building, which you probably cannot afford, you might have an individual gas-heating unit. And that might cost RMB500 a month or more to run. If you’re in an older building, it would be more likely that you will have an A/C unit in each bedroom and the living room: these produce some heat. It is expensive to run them and they will have to be supplemented with electric radiators, which will also be expensive to run.
As to water: technically you can drink the water in most major cities in China. Meaning, you won’t die of cholera tomorrow. In practice, people with any reasonable amount of money buy bottled water. At present, a 4-liter bottle in Beijing costs 8-9 yuan, depending on the brand and retailer. Even if you cook with tap water, drinking water for a family of five could easily require a couple of those a day. Multiply by 30.
POLLUTION: Are there air purifiers in your apartment? If not, who’s going to pay for them? They can run to a couple of thousand RMB each.
MEDICAL: If you currently have insurance, you might want to find out if it can be used in China. Some of the big international hospitals or clinic chains do accept such plans as Blue Cross. Many Chinese employers say they offer insurance. This is usually reimbursement of some portion of costs, up to a certain limit or percentage, perhaps only in local wards of local hospitals — where as others said, there may be no English speakers.
Be aware that medical care is cash upfront, even the emergency room, and you pay for each procedure as you go. This may involve numerous trips back and forth from the treatment area to the cashier, which will be the case in the overcrowded public hospitals. Do you want to do this with kids in tow? Do you want to do this at 3am if one of the kids has a fever?
Also be aware of the tendency to over-prescribe, which is how doctors in most hospitals earn most of their money, especially antibiotics. And be aware that you may not always be able to get the exact counterparts of OTC or prescription medicine you are used to.
Hospitals can be surprisingly grimy. It’s not uncommon to go into the bathroom in one and find no toilet paper, or no soap for handwashing (perhaps only cold water). I have seen this more than once in major hospitals in Beijing. Public bathrooms, even in relatively new modern buildings, can also be shockingly filthy.
CITY LIFE: Daily life in urban China can really grind you down. Crowds absolutely everywhere almost all the time, pushing, encroachment on personal space, people darting ahead of you to save 3 seconds getting on the escalator first, relentless competition for seats on the bus, a seat on the subway, pollution and traffic jams, people ignoring you and grabbing the taxi that you thought you were hailing, kids relieving themselves anywhere and everywhere (not long ago, I saw a woman helping a little boy pee into a bottle while on the cafeteria line at Ikea, they were standing right next to the pastry shelf), waiting an hour or more at the bank to get to the teller window, etc.
Once you’ve seen the pandas, this is the reality.
You need some stress relief, but how will you and your family afford it? You won’t be able to take those quick overseas breaks or ‘staycations’ at local top hotels that those on expat packages can afford, you won’t be eating out much, etc.
If it was just the two of you, that would be one thing. With three kids, I think it’s a really bad idea.
My $0.o2 worth.
