I moved to China expecting to teach for just 2 years. I've been here for nearly a decade and have no plans to move home.

• Aidan Fairhall was a public school teacher in England.
• He moved to China nine years ago.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Aidan Fairhall, a 34-year-old international school chemistry teacher based in Shanghai. This essay has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider verified his rent and employment.

After four years teaching in public schools in England, I was at a breaking point and on the verge of leaving the profession.

The workload was intense, I was struggling to make ends meet and going into debt, and at one point was even sharing an apartment with 10 others.

That's when I decided it might be fun to go teach abroad and see the world. At first, I only planned to be away for two years as a little adventure, but after teaching in China for close to a decade, I don't intend to go back to England unless I have to.

It took about a month of being in Guangzhou to realize I was never moving back to England

In England, I was teaching in schools in pretty deprived areas — where around 70% of students were on free meals as they were under the poverty line. The workload was intense, preparing eight curricula weekly for students with lots of behavioral needs. It felt like crowd control and constantly redirecting this torrent of energy that's always blasting at you.

In Guangzhou, the job was so wildly different.

I taught at an international school, where the kids were well-behaved. I had only three different types of classes to prepare for. And class sizes were 10 to 20 students, much less than the over 30 you'd typically have in England.

All of this meant rediscovering what work-life balance was. When I was in England, I'd mostly just travel back to my hometown for the holidays. In Guangzhou, I was spending weekends in Hong Kong — sometimes renting out junk boats for 40-person parties — and flying out to Taiwan, India, and Southeast Asia for vacations.

The move also meant going from living in a room in a shared apartment to having a place to myself.

Today, two international schools later, I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Shanghai's French Concession district, which I pay around 19,000 yuan in monthly rent for — or around $2,600. Most of this is covered by my school's housing allowance.

I'm not allowed to say how much I make in my current position, but my school publicly advertises roles with a base annual pay (excluding housing allowance and other benefits) between $60,000 and $70,000 for those with a bachelor's degree and between five to 10 years of experience teaching.

Being willing to say yes to everything helped me adapt to China

After everything I'd seen in the media about Asian cities, I imagined Guangzhou was going be like the claustrophobic grandeur of Hong Kong where you could look up and see only a square of the sky.

But Guangzhou was made on a different scale, like a city made for giants. You could have 15 people walking abreast. I didn't expect how lush it was, like a city growing out of a jungle.

On that first day in Guangzhou, another foreign teacher and I ventured out to a Chinese hotpot restaurant despite knowing zero Chinese. We didn't have a VPN, so we couldn't connect to anything. And there weren't image translators like Google Translate at the time, so we had to gesture and point for the waiters.

Everyone around us was giggling as things were being brought out, and we went back to that same restaurant every week after that. It was fantastic.

What struck me about expats who don't like living in China is that many have this idea that they can impose their pre-existing norms on life here. And they couldn't get past how people didn't do things the same way as in their home countries.

Take food, for example. I've fallen in love with chicken feet, and I've traded in my typical Sunday roast for dim sum.

Of course, there were stumbling blocks. There's the uncertain quality of food in some places. It took some time to get used to doing so much digitally, and to the prevalence of online scams. I didn't use Taobao, an eCommerce site, for years because I just didn't understand which buttons to press.

Now, I feel reverse culture shock when I'm back home

The schools I've worked for pay for return flights back to teachers' home countries, which means I get to go back to England every summer.

Every time I go back, so much of England feels archaic to me. From how unclean and inefficient London's tube is compared to the metro systems in China; to how ridiculous it is to have your trousers weighed down by pockets full of change when we mostly go cashless in China.

After a decade in China, I feel like part of the furniture here — whereas back home, I now feel out of place.

When I first moved away, I had to say goodbye to a lot of friends. And despite promising them that I would definitely be back before I turned 30, so I could be there for their kids and weddings, I can't quite see myself giving up my life here anytime soon.