Advice From a Former Huaihua Resident
First, I would like to congratulate your daughter on the job offer she has received.
I am happy to answer your question as best as I am able, but I think that you need know a bit about me and my experiences in the city before we get any further.
---My Experiences in Huaihua Medical College and My Qualifications---
I lived and worked in Huaihua for several years and only recently left. During my stay, I was a teacher of English. And while my primary employer was not Huaihua Medical College, I did teach a brief course to the third year students at that school, and I visited the institution on more than one occasion.
Additionally, I traveled a bit throughout China and visited Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chongqing, and a considerable number of minor communities throughout Hunan, so I am not completely ignorant as to the conditions throughout the rest of China.
Generally, I found the school to be in good condition and the faculty, staff, and students to be polite and helpful. In fact, I am reasonably confident in saying that the school was in the best condition of any institution of higher learning in the city or any of the surrounding communities. One should be aware, however, that Chinese standards are quite different from those in the West, so some parts of the campus may leave something to be desired to the eagle-eyed foreigner.
I was aware that Huaihua Medical College employed foreign teachers of English from time to time, but I was under the distinct impression that the school would only hire foreigners who were licensed nurses in their country of origin. If your daughter is a nurse, this job would be a most logical fit. If she is not a nurse, the school must have revised its employment policies since I was there.
---My Impression of Huaihua and the Surrounding Communities--
The city of Huaihua is not a major trading or commercial center, so one should not expect the level of development seen in Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong. The quality of the roads, transportation system, and buildings in Huaihua is far inferior to that of the major cities. Most buildings lack climate control, and your daughter's apartment would, most likely, only have climate control in the bedroom and (possibly) the living room. I do believe that the major teaching building—where I suspect that your daughter would work—was the only building on campus with central heat and air. Unfortunately, said central air is turned off during the hottest part of the year to avoid overloading the campus electrical system. If your daughter is a woman either physically or temperamentally ill-suited to extremes in temperature, I would urge her to avoid most of China's interior, Huaihua included.
The air in the summer is hot, humid and dusty. In the spring and fall, it is damp and cool, and in the winter, it is downright cold. Snow is infrequent and ice even more so, but properly layered clothing will prove most critical during these months.
--The People, Foreign and Domestic--
The Chinese in the interior of the country are far less accustomed to interacting with foreigners than are their urban counterparts. This has both its advantages and its disadvantages.
The advantages are many. For instance, your daughter will be subject to reasonably limited xenophobia. Many of the local will stare when your daughter passes, but they will do so out of curiosity rather than anger. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in the major urban areas, and the better one understands the Chinese language, the more obvious the urban Chinese bias against foreigners becomes. Personally, I encountered only a little such treatment in Huaihua, and when I did, it was almost always from taxi drivers, who seem to be an unpleasant lot even to their fellow countrymen.
The students at the medical college made a good impression on me. I don't know what your experiences with nurses have been, but I found the Chinese nursing students to be different creatures entirely from their far bolder Western counterparts. My students were quite timid, consistently pleasant, and very often bored. I suspect the last was due to the demanding nature of their training and the relative lack of vacation time. I strongly suspect that your daughter will be able to build friendships with some of these young women, but doing so will take patience and humor. My students could be quite warm to people they knew, but getting to know them would have taken time.
As for the local expatriate community, I have not as much good to report, and this brings me to the disadvantages of living in Huaihua.
The remoteness of the city means that it is relatively isolated from the rest of the world. This geographical remoteness is the same reason that the community was deemed to be a good location to build a military installation of some significance. And that military installation is an additional reason that the city keeps a close eye on the foreign population. I most certainly don't want to feed any nascent paranoia on the part of you or your daughter—I really do not think that a van with tinted windows will follow her around the city—but it does mean that she will need to carry a special residence permit with her in addition to her passport.
The number of foreign-oriented diversions in Huaihua was limited, and there was no real permanent expatriate community. The vast majority of the foreign population stayed no more than a year, and some didn't last as long as that. Almost all of the foreigners in Huaihua (excluding those seeking treatment at the Red Cross International Hospital some forty-five minutes away) were European or American men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. As much as I wish that I could have reported that these were men of the highest standards of conduct and behavior and that they were consistently doing their best to make a positive impression on the local people, I cannot. Many of them appeared to have only the most passing interest in their job performance, and I regret to note that the majority of them woke with flasks in their hands and held onto the damned things throughout the day as though they contained the elixir of life itself.
If your daughter isn't married, I would suggest that she not venture to Huaihua intent on setting her cap on anyone unless she wants her own little Leaving Las Vegas drama or is willing to consider a Chinese husband (some of whom seem most fascinated by blond hair and blue eyes).
(Perhaps I've offended you with the last bit of advice—it certainly wasn't my intent—but I am disinclined to beat around the bush, and I lived in China long enough to have become accustomed to Chinese thinking, and the Chinese are always thinking about marriage.)
There were some foreigners of quality in the community, but I found them to be a standoffish bunch. And I suspect that they picked the community so that they could be left the hell alone.
---The Type of Person Best Suited to Huaihua---
Working and living Huaihua may well be an opportunity most wonderfully suited to your daughter, but only if she meets some basic criteria. They are:
1. She should be patient and slow to anger.
If your daughter is unwilling to wait for a taxi, for a meal, for her papers, for her students, and for her coworkers, she simply should not plan to work in a community as small as Huaihua, and despite its population of nearly five million people, Huaihua is still very much a developing town filled with tǔbāozi (bumpkins). That isn't to say that the local population is unintelligent; sophistication has little, if anything, to do with brainpower, but it does mean that things in Huaihua get done when they get done and not a minute sooner.
2. She should independent and capable of amusing herself.
If your daughter is in constant need of company and is generally lacking hobbies, Huaihua may prove a hard post. Of course, I know nothing of your daughter, and I am certainly not (and do stress not) suggesting that she is such a type of person, but if she is, she, like many other foreigners who visited the city before her, may not finish her contact. This might well resulted in her being blacklisted by the government, meaning that she will not be able to find employment in China in the future.
The extent of her isolation (or the lack thereof) will largely depend on her desire and aptitude for learning language. I should stress that she needn't learn written Chinese (which can be quite a challenge), but a basic command of the oral language will be pretty much essential. If she learns the language well, she will find herself positively swimming in local friends. If she can't, I would suggest she learn needlepoint.