Though Mr Du and his wife had each other’s support, starting life in a new country was a big challenge. “We didn’t have friends and relatives here and had to find accommodation ourselves. I still remember our first home, which was just a room. The bed was so small that we sometimes fell off the bed!” he laughs.

However, the most challenging part came from teaching. To begin with, he had only had a short teaching stint in China and the students in Singapore are very different. “At that time in China, the students in secondary schools were quite disciplined and teachers had a lot of authority. So there weren’t that many discipline and classroom management problems.”

Mr Du helping his colleagues with the decoration for the opening ceremony of the Mother Tongue Learning Cove at Riverside Secondary School, which was just named a Centre of Excellence for Chinese.

Singapore students were different. “During my very first lesson, one boy came right up to me, tapped my shoulder and said, ‘Hi, teacher. You are a new teacher?’ He spoke to me like I was a friend! And some of the other boys were as tall as I am. So I took some time to adjust and learn how to get along well with these students.”

Being in an English-speaking environment also posed challenges for Mr Du. “My spoken English was actually improved through my CCA experience. In the NPCC, there are students from different races. Once, I had to discipline them and I lectured them for two hours in English. I didn’t care about the grammar and just spoke my mind,” he recalls. “Before that, I had rarely spoken to them in English.” Since that two-hour ‘practice’, he has gained confidence in speaking English and has become so fluent that he spoke only in English throughout this interview.

Considering the differences between Singapore and China, Mr Du points out that in China, guan xi, or connections, permeates almost every aspect of life. The working culture in Singapore is much more straightforward, which he prefers. “Here, you just have to put in the effort and you can get the results or rewards, and you don’t have to worry much about other things.” In fact, Mr Du is full of pride about his work and shares that Riverside Secondary School has just been named a Centre of Excellence in Chinese.

Riverside Secondary’s Principal Mrs Sng Siew Hong affirmed Mr Du’s efforts. “Mr Du is outstanding in Chinese pedagogy, and as a senior teacher, he mentors new Chinese teachers,” she says. “He is very well-liked by students as he can easily establish good rapport with them. In class, he is able to engage students well by involving them actively in pupil-centred activities and learning.”

Singapore has become not only a stimulating work environment for Mr Du, but his home too. He remembers, “When we first arrived, we were thinking that if after one, two years we did not find it suitable here, we could go back to China.” Instead, he felt comfortable enough here to become a Singapore citizen, and he and his wife now call Singapore home.

Look out on Friday for the second article in this series of interviews with foreign teachers in Singapore.