The way I lived then....

My recent professional ponderings on salary levels and the standard of living for foreign teachers here in China got me to thinking back - oddly wistfully - to my early days in this country.

I had an archetypally dreadful Chinese employer in my first year (to whom I had been 'sold' by a more-than-archetypally dreadful recruitment agent in the UK), and was being expected to survive on a salary of 4,250 RMB per month. Back then, that was round about £350; today, with the ever-increasing strength of sterling, it would be barely £280. Now - rather mysteriously, and probably illegally - I wasn't being asked to pay any tax on that (or only a negligibly small amount; I can't quite recall now). And I was getting a small additional allowance that was supposed to cover my utilities bills (although one of the many annoying, penny-pinching sneakinesses of this college was that they contrived to calculate the monthly electricity bill on our compact two-room apartments - paid to them, rather than directly to the power company - as considerably in excess of that allowance; considerably in excess, as I now discover, of the utilities charges I run up today with an enormous three-bedroom apartment).

So, basically I had a little above or a little below 4,000kuai to spend every month. That's fairly typical: most teachers over here on their first gigs seem to get offered between 4,000 and 5,000 by the state sector and small private Chinese schools, and only slightly better from larger schools and foreign education franchises.

The problem was that I had completely exhausted my savings in the UK: I came here with nothing. Thus, to be able to afford to fly back and spend a month or two with my family the next summer, I figured I'd have to save at least 2,000 RMB per month, a full half of my pitiably small salary.

I was ruthlessly disciplined about that. Every month I set aside 2,000 RMB, and then tried to survive on slightly less than that for my living expenses. For a local, that would be a pretty good salary (heck, it would be a very good starting wage for a graduate, and considerably more than most blue-collar workers can ever expect to earn). But for foreigners, it's really hard to get by on that. We don't live as simply (we're not content to wear the same clothes 3 days in a row, for example; or to subsist for days on end on instant noodles.... well, not to the same extent that the Chinese are, anyway!). We get charged more for things (even when we get smart and savvy and ruthless about our shopping technique - we still can't live as cheaply as the locals). We want our own Internet connection, and we want to make a lot of international calls. And of course, we have our other expensive vices too (beer, cigarettes, pizza, etc.).

What would typically happen would be that I'd allow myself 2 or 3 "nights out" early in the first week or two (nothing too extravagant - just a token visit to a decent but not-too-dear Western restaurant, a few hours in a nice bar at a subsidised networking party, the cheapest seat at a classical concert), and blow most of the money by the mid-point of the month...... leaving me to limp through 10, 12, 14 days with just a few hundred renminbi. Now that really does require you to tighten your belt and live like a local.

Things got better. After my first Christmas, I started to find quite a bit of lucrative part-time work outside the college. Although I still mostly tried to set this additional income aside as 'savings', I did start allowing myself a few more of the 'treats' that had earlier been only a rare and guilty first-half-of-the-month indulgence.

I did rather enjoy that poverty-constrained existence, though. (Hell, it wasn't so different from the way I'd been living in the UK for the last few years before my departure!) The beer here - in small restaurants and streetside kiosks, anyway - is virtually free. And tiny, grungy local restaurants have far more 'character' than the swisher places. I love that life. I'm a little regretful that I have grown slightly away from it as I - and, more to the point, most of my friends - have become steadily more affluent in recent years.

Many of the habits of thrift I developed as essential to survival in those early months still persist, however. I still quite like taking a bus or the subway (unless it's in the height of the rush hour) rather than a taxi (although - heavens! - the taxis are really very cheap in this town). If it's less than a few miles, I'll usually just walk. And I much prefer sitting out on the sidewalk with a 2kuai or 3kuai Yanjing beer to paying 5 or 10 times as much for a half-size bottle of disgustingly gassy Tsingtao in a raucous 'foreigner bar'.

I'm not cheap. I just know that I still don't have that much money, and I have clear priorities about how I like to spend it.