Emotions are vital for one's thinking, acting, and experiencing of self and life. There has been substantial research undertaken on the role of emotions in teaching and learning in educational settings; however, the emotional dimension of English-medium instruction (EMI) has yet to be understood. Informed by a post-structuralist perspective, the present study seeks to address the dearth of scholarship in this area by investigating what emotions a group of mainland Chinese students experience and how they perceive and navigate such emotions in an EMI teacher education program at a Macau university. Data collected through narrative frames and follow-up interviews reveal complex and mixed emotions experienced by the participants in the EMI courses. Particularly, they were subject to high emotional labor caused by an unsystematic, ineffective approach to EMI implementation mediated by a corporatized discourse in higher education. The study ends with implications for EMI teachers and administrators in higher education.