Cross-cultural, Daily Living, & Adjustment Issues

I am an older woman teaching in a smaller Chinese city and to date have not seen any other older foreign women either in the bigger cities I have visited, let alone in the city I am in. Can you tell me if it is rare for women 55+ to be teaching in China. The foreign men I have encountered are always accompanied by Chinese girls half their age. Would be glad of your advice.

We cannot find any publicly available sociodemographic government statistics on foreign teachers in China. All we have to go on is our own cumulative data derived from both the reader feedback and teacher satisfaction surveys.

Based on those data, women of all ages constitute less than 25 percent of foreign teachers in China and most of them are under 35 and attached, i.e., here with their boyfriend or husband. Single female Western teachers comprise less than 5 percent of our survey respondents and most of them are under the age of 35 and either plan to leave or have left China at the end of their one-year contract (perhaps for the very reason you suggest). If our data are indeed representative of the overall population of foreign teachers in China, then I would expect to find no more than about 1 to 2 percent who are single females over the age of 55.

I wish I had some good advice to offer you in regard to possible social opportunities for single, middle-aged Westerners working in second- and third-tier cities who lack the Chinese language skills necessary to communicate freely with the locals, but I don't. Despite the fact I am a man and that a significant difference in age is not a dating or marriage barrier in Asia (as you noted), I had the same problem when I lived in Haikou as I wasn't willing to try and build a relationship based on communication that was limited to a pocket dictionary and pantomime.