Anshan, China

You come here for steel money or you come here to teach English. There isn't a third door. Ansteel dominates the economy so completely that even the restaurant you eat at and the shop you buy toothpaste from are downstream of whether the plant had a good quarter. Foreign engineers and manufacturing specialists can land real packages here, the kind that include housing allowances and drivers, but those jobs aren't advertised on Indeed — you get placed through your company's China expansion. For everyone else, it's teaching. Salaries run $1,200 to $1,800 a month, which stretches further than you'd think when a city-center apartment costs $400. Remote work is technically possible given the 125 Mbps internet, but impractical. The timezone makes North American hours miserable. And honestly, if you're earning USD and can live anywhere, picking Anshan over a city with actual cafes and English-speaking doctors raises some questions you should ask yourself.

Mandarin isn't helpful here. It's mandatory. English signage is effectively nonexistent, and the shopkeeper at the corner store has never needed to learn your language because you're one of maybe forty foreigners in a city of 3.3 million. You'll figure out groceries through pointing and phone translation apps, but a hospital visit will humble you fast. Public hospitals exist and the care is technically adequate for routine issues, but without a Chinese-speaking friend or a fixer, you're scrolling through a translation app while a nurse loses patience. The train to Shenyang takes 40 minutes and costs almost nothing, which becomes your pressure valve — better hospitals, a few international restaurants, and the strange comfort of seeing other foreigners in the wild. Winters are the other friction point. Temperatures hit -15°C and the city doesn't shut down, so you're walking to work on ice-slicked sidewalks while wind off the Liaoning plain cuts through every layer you own. Summers are sticky and humid. Spring and fall last about three weeks each. The food is honest, though. Dumplings, grilled lamb skewers, braised pork belly. You'll eat well for cheap and you'll be tired of explaining where you're from by month two.

Move here if you're an engineer on assignment who will be insulated by a company apparatus and compensated accordingly. Move here if you're a teacher who wants to save aggressively, doesn't mind solitude, and has realistic expectations about what $400 rent buys you in a northeastern Chinese industrial city. You'll know every foreign face in town within a month because there simply aren't more than that. Weekends mean the jade Buddha at Yufo Temple, a walk through one of the city parks, or that train to Shenyang when you need to remember what it feels like to be anonymous. Do not move here if you need an expat social scene, if you work remotely for a Western company and want to actually overlap with your team, or if the thought of being functionally illiterate for the first six months makes you anxious. Anshan doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is. That's its best quality and the reason most people should visit Shenyang instead.