BEIJING — When the best job Mikala Reasbeck could find after college in Boston was counting pills part-time in a drugstore for $7 an hour, she took the drastic step of jumping on a plane to Beijing in February to look for work.

A week after she started looking, the 23-year-old from Wheeling, West Virginia, had a full-time job teaching English.

“I applied for jobs all over the U.S. There just weren’t any,” said Reasbeck, who speaks no Chinese but had volunteered at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In China, she said, “the jobs are so easy to find. And there are so many.”