My favorite books about teaching abroad

This book presents China in 1996. Hessler, a Peace Corps volunteer, settles into teaching in the picturesque, remote city of Fuling. There, he describes the struggles of making meaningful connections as an outsider.

At the end of the book, he muses that he didn’t build anything or make great changes. Instead, he tried to learn as much as he could about his students, the city and its people. But of course, that is what talented teachers do. They build relationships rather than monuments. They create goodwill rather than make empty political speeches.

A sad coda: in 2020, the U.S. Senate stopped funding the Peace Corps in China. Unrelated, Hessler’s contract with Sichuan University was discontinued due to a political misunderstanding. Both are stark examples of how political relationships, despite the work of teachers, are fragile.

Whereas Hessler’s book is about a country gradually opening up to the west, Suki Kim’s book is about a country completely isolated.

Kim works for six months in North Korea at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a school for the boys of the ruling elite. While living there, rather than connecting with her students, she is unsettled by how deep the country’s deceptions are.

The university, although claiming to be a school for science and industry, has neither labs nor modern technology. Her travel is circumscribed and carefully scripted. The students lie effortlessly about things of little consequence. The entire country seems to be built on holograms and shadows. She travels as teacher, but in the end serves as journalist, seeking the truth behind a country that the world barely understands. 

This memoir by an Iranian-American professor describes teaching for decades in Iran: first, as instructor at the University of Tehran; later, as facilitator for an all-female book group.

At the university, she advocates for meaningful acts of civil disobedience. Through the book group, she introduces a small group of women, shut out of the country’s educational system, to Western literature. In both, we see her turn an oppressive environment into a space where her students become human, sentient, and creative.

The tenderness with which she treats both her students and the novels that they’re reading makes this memoir a lovely example of how teaching can transcend political ideology.

Perhaps the most famous teacher abroad is Anna Leonowens, who was immortalized in the musical The King and I. A lowly Victorian woman single-handedly reshapes the history of Thailand. If you want to read that story you can read Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam.

Far more interesting is Anna’s true story: a con artist, who lies about everything that happened to her. Habegger’s biography Masked sorts through the lies and fiction. He offers a complicated narrative of a biracial woman who told exaggerated tales of enslavement, romance, and her imagined role in democratizing Thailand. Her life becomes one of fancy and self-invention. Both sadly are traps too often seen in myths crafted by self-absorbed travelers living abroad.

This book reverses the pattern set so far. Rather than a Western teacher traveling to foreign lands, in this memoir, an Irishman travels to teach in New York City.

There, he becomes the teacher you always wanted: compassionate, funny, lyrical, a raconteur. He describes the range of his experiences, from vocational institute to highly competitive high school. In one assignment, he challenges his students to write a creative excuse for being absent. In another he asks the students to turn family recipes into poetry.

His book reminds us, through wit and sharp observation, why teachers, abroad or at home, are diplomats, magicians, myth-makers, and superheroes. In the end, he shows us how talented teachers take us on journeys and help us understand our place in the world.