Getting married was the last thing I was thinking about when I came out to China in September 2007. I had been teaching English at a high school in Scotland, but had an itch to write a novel, and the job left no time to get it written. I had previously thought about teaching in China, and one day I had a look through job adverts on a website. The jobs teaching university students were offering terms that sounded ideal for me – providing accommodation, only working for about 15 hours a week, and being far from anyone I knew so that I could get on and write that book.
I emailed out several CVs and accepted an offer from a university in Huai’an, Jiangsu province, which looked good for what I was after, and was only a few hours from Shanghai. So when I arrived, I knew no one, spoke no Chinese and lived on a different campus from my students. Glorious solitude! I was able to crack on with my novel, managing to write over one thousand words every day, which is a good total considering that I was still teaching on top of that. By December I had finished it, much to my delight (though it’s still available for a publisher, if anyone’s interested).
But no matter how much you try to ignore life to concentrate on one thing in particular, it has a way of butting in and making you do things. As a foreigner in a small city I was inevitably the object of some curiosity, as I particularly stood out with my red hair. Sometimes an English-speaking lecturer or student would engage me in conversation while at the dining room or on the bus to the other campus, and gradually I got to know a few people. One teacher called Shelley, in fact, offered to take me to a gym when I enquired about the sports facilities. This was very kind of her, and it was even more so when she offered to teach me some Chinese.
So we quickly became friends, going out for meals or visiting places in and around Huai’an, and soon fell in love. We got engaged in April 2008 and planned to have our wedding on May 1st 2009, a date Shelley told me was very popular for weddings in China. Meanwhile, I was offered and accepted a job in Tianjin, which would begin in September 2008. I was pleased to be able to go to a city as big as Tianjin, which had much more to offer. But as we both had a long summer vacation, I wanted to be able to introduce Shelley to my family before we got married, so she applied for a British tourist visa.
We were appalled to find that the application was rejected. We had gone to great lengths to provide ample documentation – obtaining an invitation and proof of house ownership from my parents, personal references from people in positions of responsibility, and a guarantee of responsibility on my part; all to no avail. She was rejected on the grounds that I personally had no proof of returning to China afterwards, which made the embassy suspect that I was trying to smuggle her into Britain. It was intensely frustrating but there was no appeal mechanism; there was nothing we could do. I could not stay in China during the summer, as I had to return home for my oldest friend’s wedding, so we endured two painful months apart.