By Gou Fu Mao

Eating dry cornflakes with chopsticks. That's my strongest memory of Shenyang men. That was a view from a Home Inn hotel breakfast room on a wintry December morning in the capital of northeastern Liaoning Province in 2008.

It fits with the popular view of northerners like Liaoning folk as salt-of-the-earth types, which they largely are. I have a good friend who was posted to Shenyang for work. He went very reluctantly. Two years later he'd have to be pried out of there with pliers. My friend visits Beijing once every month or so but his visits have become less frequent.

He went north to run a new English-language program at Shenyang University, and later moved across town to Liaoning University to teach business graduates. Language skills are the top criteria for hires at local foreign-owned companies, which local officials are keen to entice into the city.

My 34-year-old pal's own language skills have improved dramatically in the colder north. In Shenyang it's possible to study Chinese and get a handle on the priorities in life.

How could a city with a fine tradition in mechanical engineering and scientific research offer an expat a life, he'd asked. Now he's better spoken and travelled, after figuring out Shenyang's interesting location, linked by rail to Russia, Mongolia and North Korea. He's since visited all three, by train.

A colorful and gritty place, only in Shenyang can one find products from North Korea and the United States competing side by side. Local shops stock ginseng, and price North Korean products higher. Shenyang doesn't have the sun, sea and services of a richer southeastern city. No, it's more geared for agribusiness. So my friend took up biking, pedaling through the undulating miles of farmland that surrounds the city. The local Suishan dairy company showed him around, then gave him an unexpected weekend gig, teaching agriculturally relevant English to its management. The company is looking for a joint venture partner.

That gig convinced my friend to work for himself, teaching English privately to local businesses that so clearly needed the coaching.

In his time there life has gotten comfortable with the opening of Western conveniences like Wal-Mart and Starbucks. It's not that Shenyang, which hosted the World Horticultural Expo in 2006, is a backwater. Residents of several upper-end residential strips can navigate the city via a new bridge over the Hanhe River. There's a string of new roads, but better, a new subway line running through town. Good for my friend to get to his teaching gigs. A "Golden Corridor" running past the iconic TV tower up to the hotel has been modeled on the Champs Elysee.

The local Kempinski hotel has joined a scheme run by the mayor's office, to play nighttime light displays on the glass of city skyscrapers. Even better, the lake outside the hotel doesn't smell anymore, says another friend of mine, Alvaro Rottenberg, the hotel's General Manager. He compares Shenyang to his hometown of Dortmund. "They really try," said Rottenberg of the proactiveness of town hall.

My friend is thriving, having amicably left the university campus for a freelance teaching life. He teaches English to the local employees of firms like BASF, LG and Tyco. Local corporations like Sanbao Computers and Yidong Software have become customers after he went door knocking. That's the thing about a smaller city, you have the guts to go ask people things that you wouldn't dare in a big cities like Shanghai or Beijing where people have way bigger egos.

He has a Russian-Chinese girlfriend and a good second-tier life in China. He earns well, and saves better. He speaks better Chinese. So my friend is proof there's life outside the expat apartment complexes and watering holes of Beijing and Shanghai. There are lots of boltholes in similar Chinese cities, I imagine. A place to go for a quieter, but equally fulfilling time.

The writer is Irish and lives in Beijing

(Beijing Review July 7, 2009)