We’ve left China. In a way, this won’t come as a surprise. I’ve been trying to leave the country since 2018, and I have talked in previous posts about being done with my China journey. That isn't to say that China is a bad place to be. The country has so much diversity in food, and the cost of living is reasonable, though on the rise. I had a good job, with coworkers I admire, and I made a decent salary which included benefits, like housing. We lived comfortably as expats, being able to travel and meet interesting people from all walks of like. We could have continued to build a life in China if we so desired. However, the following will explain many of the threads that wove together into the decision to leave.
Thread: Education and Air Pollution
When I was pregnant with Alaya, Bochuan and I made plans to leave China no later than Alaya’s third birthday because we didn’t want her to go to school in China. We felt that international schools were out of our budget, and local schools would be too stressful. We didn’t want to join the rat race of trying to make our daughter stand out from the considerable crowd that was the norm in China. Even if we aimed not to pressure her, she would get it from every other avenue, and I don’t think we could stand up to it ourselves as parents. So, we were going to leave China at latest 2022, when Alaya would be three-years-old and need to start her formal education.
Beyond this, we had concerns about the air pollution’s impact on Alaya’s health. For instance, when we completed centralized quarantine in December last year, the air pollution was terrible, and we had no air purifiers in our hotels. After 10 months of clean air and mostly blue skies while stuck in the States due to the pandemic, the air pollution was an awful shock to the system. Every day I woke up in the hotel feeling like I had smoked a pack of cigarettes in my sleep. I hated the thought of what was happening to Alaya’s still developing lungs. Things got so bad, Bochuan and I seriously considered buying an air purifier just for the remainder of the time we’d be in quarantine. Ultimately, we felt that the expense was too much, though I wondered at the cost to Alaya’s health as well as ours.
I know that people manage to raise kids in China all the time despite the air pollution, but it’s one of the most important threads in our decision to leave. I don’t want to first check the air quality every time I think about taking Alaya outside of our apartment. Decisions about play dates, walks in the park, having a dinner out, or simply taking Alaya with us to go pick up a package from the South gate of our apartment complex all start with the question, “What’s the air quality outside?” When I read up on the impact of air pollution in hopes of putting the issue into perspective or to ease my mind a bit, I’m just faced with more data that says to me, “If you can leave, leave.”
Thread: Back to School, but not in the US
The original plan was to return to the United States, get a background in psychology, and apply for PhD programs in Counseling Psychology. I was particularly interested in doing research with a professor at the University of Toronto who worked with women who had been sexually assaulted. However, while we were stuck in the US last May, Bochuan mentioned he didn’t want to raise Alaya there. I said, “Okay. Where do you want to raise her?” He then shared with me the following graphic that would essentially alter the course of our lives. This graphic, “Income Mobility Across Generations,” looks at the “number of generations it would take for those born in low income families to approach the mean income in their society.”[1] In China, it would take 7 generations, in the US, 5 generations, and in Denmark, just 2, followed closely by Finland, Sweden, and Norway with 3 generations.
Initially, I was just interested in Denmark, partially because it takes a lot of effort to investigate the situation in one country, much less four. The other reason was that 2 generations was meaningfully faster than three generations. The most important reason though was that I found an English-taught program in cognitive science that really excited me. However, this would mean starting back at the bachelor’s level because 1) I didn’t have the background to do a master’s directly, and 2) Denmark would only evaluate your preparedness for a master’s program based on your bachelor’s degree, regardless of any post-baccalaureate work you had completed.
I didn’t mind, though, because the time it would take to complete a bachelor’s to PhD in Denmark (approximately 8 years) wasn’t much different from doing a post-baccalaureate in psychology, followed by a master’s, and PhD in the US (approximately 7-9 years). Also, I would slowly begin to understand that bachelor’s programs in these Nordic countries were closer in equivalence to the upper-level bachelor courses in the US, which is likely why they were three instead of four years in length and countries like Sweden required applicants from the US to have completed a year of bachelor’s studies before applying to their programs.
So, over the summer, I took Danish classes instead of online psychology courses. At the time, it was still the plan to leave China in 2022. I would apply for this program this year, and if I got in, I would defer to the following year. If I didn’t get in, then I would know to make another plan for our departure in 2022.
Thread: Work-Life Balance and Changing Careers
Then one day last October I just reached a point where I knew that both Bochuan and I working at the university was unhealthy for our family. It was unhealthy for our marriage, and we needed to make a change. At a start-up university like the one where we were working, it’s all-hands-on-deck all the time. Creating boundaries is very difficult, especially so if both you and your spouse work there.
I got serious again about investigating school options in Denmark. Unfortunately, this second look revealed the “Master’s Rule.” Denmark had a rule that those who already had a master’s degree would only be considered for a second bachelor’s or master’s program after every other candidate had been considered. The only exception to this was in extreme cases, such as a surgeon having lost a hand, leading her to have to change careers. In other words, I had a very slim chance of getting into the already very competitive cognitive science program because I already had a master’s. This particular discovery took me on a long soul-searching journey.
Why did I want to change careers?
Wasn’t it indulgent to pursue a second bachelor’s and master’s degree when so many people didn’t have access to pursue just one?
Perhaps Denmark had it right to view education as a resource that needed to be mindfully distributed to as many individuals as possible, and the US’s free market education, where those with privilege and the right amount of capital could reinvent themselves at the least dissatisfaction with their current work, was simply creating a market of professional students.
In hindsight, I enjoyed the mental work of questioning my every assumption about what it was I wanted, why I wanted it, and who I wanted to be. I thought a lot about the kind of person I wanted Alaya to see me as. That was an interesting change too. In the past, I used to make decisions based on who I thought young Maxi would be proud of. Would 8-year-old Maxi be proud of adult Maxi? Would she want to grow up to be me? Now, I was asking myself, what kind of role model did I want to be for Alaya? How would my work impact the kind of life she led, the kind of people she encountered, and how much of the world she would see?
I started looking for jobs in my field in the Nordic countries. What I discovered was that teachers in Finland are highly-regarded, and they rarely change careers. From a pay perspective, they were somewhere in the middle in comparison to other OECD countries, but there are unions and one’s pay is based on a level system that feels transparent and more objective than what I’ve known. That all seemed very good, but it also meant that jobs were not easy to come by. In contrast, in Sweden, they were in great need of teachers, but this was because teachers were not paid well nor highly regarded. I would also likely need to go to Sweden first and then try to find a job in person as jobs are rarely posted online. In Norway, teachers make a good salary, but the cost of living is astronomical due to taxes and their effort to minimize the salary gap. If your waitress is paid a decent salary, then the meal at the restaurant will be quite a bit more expensive than it might be otherwise, which I think is reasonable, but finding a job there is also hard despite the remarkably low unemployment rate there. The main finding from this research was that going back to school was going to offer the clearest, most certain path to living in one of these countries in the near future.
Thread: Choosing a Nordic Country
Unlike when we tried to leave China in 2018 and I had put all my bets on one program, I decided to apply to multiple programs in multiple countries. So, I started to look at bachelors programs in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. I first got excited about Sweden because it had a program in International Social Work which I felt could still lead me to a PhD in Counseling Psychology. The application process also seemed fairly straightforward, and, most importantly, they didn’t have a master’s rule. When I looked at programs in Norway, there were not nearly as many options as in Sweden, but their programs in Development Studies looked interesting. The two programs I applied to had requirements to do field work in countries like Tanzania and India. I felt Development Studies could provide me a platform for looking at issues related to human trafficking, with a specific focus on sex trafficking, issues that I’ve been interested in since reading Half the Sky. Further, these programs made international travel a required feature of graduation.
However, when I began investigating programs in Finland, it started to feel like it was the best fit. The primary reason is that Finland is actively trying to recruit people to study and work there. They had a weekly webinar series that spanned October to December entitled the Future is Made in Finland. You can still watch the whole thing on YouTube. In the first episode, they state that they are an aging population, and they need people to come study and work there. In other words, I was looking for a new country, and they were looking for new citizens. It felt like a good match.
This was important because my research suggested that in Sweden, they weren't looking for more citizens. Upon graduation, international students were being encouraged to find jobs in their home country or in other countries due to Sweden's employment and housing shortage. In fact, even though I was ultimately accepted to the Social Work program in Sweden, the housing situation made it impossible to accept. Housing was hard to find even for students who were going alone, and it was near impossible for those with a family. The university's advice was to first begin your studies alone, and only after you had secured long-term housing, have your family come and join you. Securing long-term housing could take several months, and even as long as a year and half. As for Norway, it seemed to be where the Swedes who couldn't find housing or jobs in Sweden were going, and they had a competitive advantage over other foreigners in finding jobs because they pretty much already spoke the language.
So, Norway didn't need more people. Sweden seemed to have more than it could support, and Finland was in need of about 30,000 immigrants per year in order to maintain their current standard of living.
In addition, Finnish is an interesting language. Okay, all languages are interesting, but Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are so similar to English and each other, it isn’t as interesting to me. Finnish, on the other hand, feels completely foreign and is similar only to a few other languages in the world. This really excites my inner linguist and makes Finland feel like a place I could spend the next decade or two while Alaya completes her elementary to high school education.
Also, unlike Sweden and Norway, which had course-related requirements for entry into certain bachelor’s programs, Finland only required SAT scores. In other words, if I was interested in pursuing a STEM bachelor’s degree in Norway or Sweden, I would have to have already taken a certain number of “elementary” courses in this area. This goes back to the topic of how bachelor’s programs in these countries are really starting at the upper-level thing I mentioned earlier. Much to my surprise, I actually didn’t qualify for many bachelors programs in these countries. And while I’m willing to go the non-traditional route of doing a second bachelor’s, I wasn’t going to do high school again. I’m not entirely sure that’s even possible.
So, ultimately, I studied for and took the SATs... again. In Finland, this gave me the opportunity to pursue any field of study that interested me.
Thread: STEM for an International Lifestyle
Now, you may ask, Maxi, STEM? What about clinical psychology or cognitive science or development studies? I’ll get there.
Part of this relates to another reason Bochuan didn’t want to raise Alaya in the States: We had lived there. He brought up a plan we’d made shortly after getting married about living on different continents throughout our lifetime. This might have been during the time when I was considering becoming a diplomat. Yes, a diplomat. Yes, I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Anyway, I gave up the diplomat plan when Trump took office in 2016. That said, the idea of living on different continents did relate to one of my core values, and it was one of the reasons I had chosen to be an English language teacher. I felt like this profession could give me access to travel the world and teach. But, again, doing that in these Nordic countries had the issues I discussed above.
So, while doing all this research and considering a life of continent-hopping every decade or so, I found counseling psychology a restrictive career choice. Even within the United States, licensure is limited to the State level. So, if I get licensed in North Carolina, I won’t be able to work in Georgia, and to what extent I could work outside the country would be uncertain. Now, I’m sure that it’s possible to get additional licenses, but there’s also the language limitation on world travel. How comfortable would I be counseling people in my second or third language? And wouldn’t this language issue impact the countries I could get a job as a counselor?
As for cognitive science, there just weren’t any programs like it being taught in English in Norway, Sweden, or Finland that I saw. And development studies? Well, I did get into both of the programs in Norway that I applied for, but did I mention that it costs an arm and a leg to live in that country? For instance, I heard first from Norway, and not knowing whether I would get into the programs in Finland, I initially accepted the offer, applied for housing, and applied for daycare for Alaya. The housing I received for a 48 square meter apartment was 1100 euros, or 1300 US dollars, or 8400 CNY, which was 50% more than what I was paying for my apartment in China, which was 3x as large. Even though Norway offered everyone free tuition, the housing alone would make that benefit feel meaningless.
It also felt like I could see only one clear path way for the field of Development Studies: a PhD. To be honest, I’m still not sure I want one of those. Yes, I said it. I thought that one day I would come across a question that would make me desperate to pursue a PhD and find the answer, but the day still has not yet come. I remain on the lookout though.
So, I began just looking at job boards in English for these countries, and a clear pattern stood out. They wanted people with a STEM background. They wanted data scientists, mechanical / electrical / software engineers, and biologists / chemists / etc.; you get the idea. I then looked at trends in the job marked globally, and it seemed that a career in STEM, particularly technology and engineering, would give me a highly sought-after set of skills that would allow me to find a job in most any country I wanted to work in. In addition, being black and female, people like me are underrepresented in these fields, and I seem to like exploring environments where there aren't many people who look like me.
Thread: Going Beyond the Mold
When I got down to reflecting on why I didn’t pursue mathematics, despite it being my strongest subject when I graduated from high school and having the opportunity to receive a full scholarship to Penn State had I chosen to study a subject in mathematics, I realized two things.
One, I am driven to pursue the subjects that I feel I know the least about or which I feel I am least skilled. For instance, I wasn’t at the time a good writer (though I guess that’s still true now, but I was much worse). I also couldn’t speak another language, which I really wanted to learn how to do. I felt that speaking multiple languages was similar to the super power of flying or invisibility. And I still do. I also wanted desperately to leave the United States. All of these desires at that time led me to pursue a degree in Applied Linguistics. I am now a better writer from having taught writing for the last 8 years. I have lived on another continent for just as long, and I can communicate in two languages (though I still have a lot to learn in terms of studying Mandarin).
Today, the thing that I know the least about and of which I am least skilled are STEM fields. This is why I was most excited to study a degree in Technology and Engineering Science, which has 3 parts of the STEM acronym in its name, and I know it will involve a lot of mathematics as well.
The second reason, though, I think was more implicit. I do think I got the message that women like me don’t study STEM. There was also the message that a job that paid too well was trying to compensate for doing work that wasn’t meaningful. The black women I knew were all working in education, non-profit organizations, hospitals, and other positions that involved care and education. So, I think I also got the implicit message that working in technology and engineering (as well as industry, big companies, corporate law firms, and so on) was not something that someone like me does, and those who might start out there, ultimately will give up the high paying job for work that’s more “meaningful” and in support of the community. Take for instance the decision Michelle Obama made in Becoming.
So, I had the question: Can I do meaningful work in support of the global community in fields where I am underrepresented, while maintaining global mobility, having a family, and making a salary that supports an intercultural family lifestyle (i.e. making enough money to be able to travel annually to see extended families in different countries)?
I wasn't sure, but I was going to try.
Thread: Don't Forget You're Going to Die
What this blog is trying to show is that I thought a lot this past year. I had moments where I have asked myself:
What am I doing? I have a good job, good benefits, and a wonderful community here. Why rock the boat? Why move to a country where I have no friends and family and the winters are longer and colder than anything I’ve ever experienced?
While the government in Finland might see the need to bring more people into the country, does the average Finnish person feel the same way about this call for people to come to Finland to study and work? What will I encounter when trying to build a community in Finland?
What will Alaya’s definition of beauty be growing up in Northern Europe? How will she perceive herself and construct her identity? What will happen to her Mandarin? Will there come a day when she can’t communicate with her grandparents?
Can we actually afford for me to not have an income for 5 years while I pursue a second bachelors and masters? 5 years?!
What about baby number 2? We wanted one of those, right? Can we do that and school? Can we afford baby number 2? Can I afford to wait until I’m done with school? Baby number 1 was already so much work to create.
What if the long winters makes Bochuan more likely to have depressive episodes?
And many, many more questions. However, I push forward due to the inspiration of the following quotes:
“You may do this, I tell you; it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.” Jane Hirshfield
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” Doris Lessing
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." Steve Jobs
These quotes and a bunch more are from an app on my phone, WeCroak, reminds me five times a day: “Don’t forget you’re going to die.” I think that this basic reminder is really what has motivated me to do something now, to make the change now. Yes, my life has been comfortable and beautiful in many ways, but I need a change. I don’t have a clear why in truth. I’ve decided I don’t really need one. It’s just that all of my musings for the last several months, all of the questions I’ve asked myself, have led me to one clear answer. I want to go back to school; I want to study something challenging and different; I don’t want to put it off any longer.
When I first came to China, I always thought it was a rest stop before going back to school. I ended up stopping here much longer than planned. The original three years turned to eight. But it’s finally time to get back on the road.
Next stop: Finland
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