Ghangzhou/rural, teacher appearance expectations, tattoos?

[Nutella]

Hi again,
Another question: my husband and I were just offered positions in a rural school outside of Guangzhou. It's a bilingual school with almost all Chinese students.
In our current district in California, many people have tattoos openly displayed and wear casual clothes like tee shirts and jeans to school. Hubby and I have tattoos on our arms.
Should I expect to cover these with long sleeves?
I will ask the school about dress expectations, but what's typical? Do teachers wear suits?
We would be living in a school community. Would we need to hide our tattoos all the time, even outside of work hours?
Thanks.

[Doctor]

It's surprising how many teachers have tattoos in China. Many younger Chinese have tattoos. Half a dozen teachers at my school have visible and multiple tattoos.

[gzmike]

I worked at three different schools in the Guangzhou area and all required tattoos to be covered, but that was only at school. Regarding dress code, that varied quite a bit among schools and even from year to year at the same schools for me. Guangzhou is extremely hot and humid from late April until late October, and many teachers wanted to wear shorts, sandals, and t-shirts. Even though classrooms have AC most of the time, most schools are open air and therefore don't have AC in hallways, stairways, etc. Sometimes you could get away with this and sometimes you couldn't, depending on which department or grade level you were teaching in (in one school it was ok for Chinese teachers to wear shorts but not foreign teachers). However, none of the schools required formal dress except for a few times per year for parent days and other events.

[eion_padraig]

Very few colleagues of mine work jackets and relatively few wore ties in GZ. Yes, during parent teacher conferences we'd dress up a a bit more, and I tended to wear a tie if I knew I was going to have a parent meeting. I'd say most schools will expect you to wear slacks, a button shirt or polo shirt for men, and closed toe shoes. Most schools don't want you to wear jeans unless there's a special clothing day. The only folks who wore shorts were PE teachers.

Lots of my colleagues had tattoos and piercing, and folks I know at other schools had tattoos. I think you may want to ask a returning teacher about what people do if you don't want to ask admin. Suits are not common at all. Basically the only person who wore a suit was our principal and he had just come from the US.

@Doctor is right that younger Chinese people are getting tattoos and it seems to be more generally accepted.

I don't see that there would be any reason for you to need to hide your tattoos the rest of the time.

Eion

[PsyGuy]

I would first start out by going to the ISs website and looking at the photos on the site and seeing what ITs are wearing in classroom environments and assume thats an acceptable tolerable standard.

Beyond that you have two options:

1) Ask Leadership: Contact your senior leadership and ask what the dress code is. Understand though that once doing that you will be committed to whatever they reply with even if its more conservative than would would be acceptable or tolerated.

2) Plan for Everything: Pack a wardrobe that will allow for a varying level of professional dress. You might end up with a significant number of items you dont wear often, but your more likely to be able to wear more casual clothes as long as you dont wear anything forbidden.

Jeans and shorts or beach wear are probably the only items that are generally not acceptable. Beyond that the answer "depends".