A true story of wonder, romance, cultural adaptation, heartache, a potential new career path and family abroad: Cinnabar Fields is Garrett Bradway's personal record of his seven-year long stay in a small Chinese city.
He arrived in the urban center of Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, in the fall of 2012 with a one-year contract to teach English at the largest high school in town. Not to mention, he was fresh out of grad school and an eight-year relationship at the ripe age of twenty-nine. From there, he quickly made both foreign and Chinese friends through being a foreign teacher, drinking at bars, skateboarding, exploring the city, and subsequently traveling around the province and beyond. He was basically living his 20s in his early 30s like a lot of other foreigners close to his age also seemed to be doing.
Garrett's background in studying Chinese history, philosophy, and the language for several years, as well as having visited big cities, like Shanghai and Hangzhou, a couple years prior prepared him for the journey, and helped him standout from other foreigners in China who usually had very little knowledge of Chinese culture before going there. He ended up falling in love with the city and culture of Lianyungang after that first year and became deeply immersed, not returning home until 2019; ominously before an unpredictable global pandemic, and with a Chinese wife and child in tow. The rest is history, and all part of his unique story.
