bighairylaowai.com

Top o’ the morning. What a f*cking way to start a day. Just tried to put down a deposit at the internet cafe with a 50 kwai note, and the guy mimed to me, ignominiously shaking his head and holding the note at arms length, that it was fake. I’m fairly decent on spotting them normally, and upon finally escaping this nasty beijiu hangover, I recognise that its glossy, near fire-retardant surface and bright, blotchy colours are tell-tale signs. A standard Chinese 50 is inked with variagated greens that run the spectrum and occasionaly lapse into blushing pinks and aquamarines. This counterfeit one seems as if it has been set at by one of my students with leaky felt-tips. On one side of the standard fifty, an elderly, benevolent Mao is austerely simpering, gazing out into the far distance. On the other is the vast majesty of Lhasa’a Potala Palace, built into an immense escarpment. Its not for me to point out the irony of these two images sharing the same note, as I possess neither the inclination nor the political astuteness to do do. Everyone’s familiar with the T-I-B-E-T controversy already and there are a multitude of political blogs and Hollywood actors outh there pontificating upon the same issues by rote. The 50 kwai note is a nice symbol to consider though.

I was slipped the dodgy one late last night by a taxi driver after a few drinks. It must be the easiest way to ship fake notes out, drunken laowai getting out of a taxi at night. I’ve been ripped off five quid!

My erstwhile colleague is gone. But considering the last few e-mails, youd think I’d be delighted. But no, it was a very unfortunate situation. Things had thawed somewhat, I had received an apology and my document back importantly. But last Sunday she told me of a situation of which I only had a very small awareness. Her father has a dehibilitating illness, and her family had phoned her to request her to come home. Now Thursday was payday, and she needed the cash to book her flight home. Seeing as our company is run by flat-out money-grabbing crooks, I suggested that she wait until payday and then just bugger off without saying a word, what is termed in the english language teaching business as a midnight run. The contract you sign, and all the restrictive clauses they make you sign up to, is generally speaking a load of cr*p. It all depends on the time of the month. The nearer you get to payday, the more you are walking on eggshells, need to get paid… the moment you receive your pay, you’re in the strongest position, not owed anything, able to leave. She felt they would be sympathetic towars her situation, as you would expect of basic human decency. I suspected they wouldn’t be. I was right. The first meeting was fairly harsh. Our sleazy boss, always smiling and producing little assuring splutters of laughter, changed his demeanour, and in reply to my colleague presenting the situation, said well the lessons are very important too. Ultimately, she had to phone her mother to speak to the crook to convince him of the situation. Insensitive? Anyway, he seemed to mellow, and said he would allow her to leave, but politely asked could she teach the remaining lessons on Tuesday before she left on the Wednesday? Following this she could come to the office for her pay on Tuesday, money she needed for her flight back. So she taught the lessons on Tuesday and went to the office. Having taught around 97% of the month, she expected perhaps that proportion of her pay. Not so. Shylock greeted her, took her to a meeting room, sat her down, introduced her to his lawyer, THEN LEFT THE BUILDING, leaving the meeting in the hands of the lawyer and subordinate employees in the organisation to conduct. Cowardly for sure. The agreement she had to sign was roughly as follows.

1. Employee will be paid for the month minus the lessons she has missed and electricity etc. Around 3200 kwai
2. Employee must pay for breaching the contract. 4000 kwai. The company has been very generous in only imposing minimum breach penalty.
3. The breach penalty will only be dropped if documentation is provided as evidence of the situation.
4. The company will report this errant, disloyal behavior to the Chinese employment bureau.

So, unless my colleague, in the 18 or so hours before she is due to leave, during which time she must pack and tie up a hundred loose ends, provides official documentation confirming that her father is going to die very soon, then she will ultimately have to pay 800 kwai to the company, for the pleasure of having taught an almost complete month for them. Of course, the money grabbing, crass insensitivity of the situation drove her to bring out all the swear words she could, and then she started crying, and during this time, apparently the lawyer had a smirk fixed on his face. Unreal. Now I’m not going to be hypocrticial and pretend I was her best friend. But it had become cordial. I had received an apology for her earlier actions, and I could place these actions in the context of an emotional situation of which I had no idea of the severity. This was a disgusting episode from a company that is making an absolute mint from its employees, imposes the longest hours in terms of commuting and lesson time that I have yet heard of in Chengdu laowai circles, a missionary level of pay, a complete lack of teaching ideas and materials, all backed up with their general crippling ineptness. I don’t want people to read this and presume this behaviour to be stereotypically Chinese. It is a pleasure living here. I live in a mainly Chinese neighbourhood, and aside from the occasional trip downtown to a laowai bar, I generally stay here and feel comfortable doing so. Even though there is a language barrier, which is hard to overcome considering the workload, I enjoy pleasurable banter with a lot of the street sellers, the cigarette store man who says hello as I walk past, to which I reply ni-hao (like something out of a bad 70s sitcom, possibly starring Alf Garnett) the potato man, the apartment sentries, hotpot parking attendants etc etc. In such an embryonic, lucrative business like ESL (teaching English as a Second Language) which is experiencing unprecedented growth, there are invariably numerous grey areas and few standard practices, accounting for the existence and rude health of my current employer, a shifty entrepeneur looking for the next quick buck.

Luckily my colleague was able to borrow the money to get home.

Funny thing is, this situation has coincided with a decent spell of teaching, as I seem to have navigated through that nasty interim patch that lies in between the dissipation of the Big Hairy Laowai novelty effect, and actually realising how to teach. Although the saving face principle means that a Chinese teacher will bite their tongue off rather than address you with direct criticism, always telling you good lesson!, I’ve also been given some welcome objective, ego-boosting criticism too, comparing me favourably with other teachers, and was even asked to coach or provide ideas for my now-departed flatmate. I never brought this humiliating fact to her attention for fear of being castrated. Enough smugness. Indeed, these recent appraisals have made my earlier fight to receive an equal pay footing with my colleagues even more sickening. I’m pretty sure I would have been the 3rd person to have walked the plank by now had it not been for these nuggets of job satisfaction. If I wasn’t enjoying the teaching, then there is no way I would grit my teeth, last out the contract merely to boost my CV merely to say that I now had life experience in a later cynical attempt to pick up some lucrative job. I’ve been told by a colleague, a friendly theatrical walrus straight out of a Nick Park animation, to pack up and see China once the job loses the appeal, and not to feel like I’m tied to the contract or have to complete it for the sake of completion. He recognises that the contract’s cr*p, and is only with the company cos he married a local and had to pick this up last minute. Its good advice, and I feel when the semester ends, I’ll pick up my pay, and travel from village to village, rescuing maidens and expelling demons, bit like Monkey, and then perhaps pack up and come back. The majority of contracts will give you the summer off to travel anyway, but this one demands we stay and teach summer school, which sounds fairly sterile to be honest. And it was said to me recently that because of my teaching qualification, I would be involved in the training of visiting American teachers as well as my current lessons. Of course, this is not in my contract, invalidating it yet further as garbage, and again showing the pound of flesh mentality. I’m in China, so I am going to use the opportunity and see it.

On a rare day off, I climbed up a sacred Daoist mountain called Qingcheng Shan with Evan, a fellow teacher from my company. I’ve also explored Chengdu further. Vibrant, diverse activities lie round every corner, and they largely involve senior folk being active, dancing to ballroom music over a crackly PA right in the middle of a pavement, or old men doing strange backward squatting running or stretching. They like to keep active, and half the people in a kids playground are OAPs. Countless temples and bars and markets and parks. The choice bar at this point is a Chinese one (as opposed to specifically laowai ones) on Renmin Nanliu boulevard, quiet and shielded from the road by pine trees, with an outside seating area, karaoke and a big blue neon windmill. When invited to sing, I have dutifuly complied, but upon seeing the Chinese characters scroll across the bottom of the screen I am lost… so I tunefully fit in the basic Chinese I have picked up to the rhythm, I want a kilo of bananas / do you have bottled water / bring me another 2 beers / Dog Fart / Bull Sh*t / You are crazy like the wind / Old woman / Play table-tennis / I’m English / I love monkeys. Gets a mixed reception.

I’ve been invited to play rugby for a scratch team at the Irish bar against a visiting province. We’ll get smashed, lots of tubby ex-pats facing off against a side organised and motivated enough to travel. The fact that Chinese beer is cheaper than bottled water doesn’t help your fitness either.

Recently, I travelled to Leshan, a 2 hour bus ride south. Its a sleepy riverside town that boasts the worlds largest Buddha statue, carved out of a cliff face and overlooking the confluence of 3 rivers. Its official 71 metre height is always qualified as its sitting height, presumably because it may decide to stand up one day. His hair is tightly coiled in countless sharp buns, prompting our collective nipple-head comparisons. His eyes are half-shut in otherworldly apprehension, and his mouth a little pursed and contemplative. His robe tails off to expose his chest Saturday Night Fever style. His hands rest on his knees, and as the Leshan tourist maxim goes, you could have a large picnic gathering on any of his exposed toenails. To appreciate him, you must jostle with the hordes of local tourists aggressively filtering down steep flights of stairs cut into the rock by his right side, pass his feet at the base, then ascend through interlocking caves.

The haughty project began in the 8th century, at the behest of a Buddhist monk concerned with boats sinking in the turbulent waters where the rivers clash. Though its progenitor desired that the structure would act as a metaphysical lighthouse, warding off malevolent spirits and sub-aqua monsters, the logistical act of construction itself would aid mariners to a far greater extent. The vast, surplus chunks of rock cut out of the cliff edifice and dumped into the river filled the deep hollows that catalysed these turbulent currents. This has also benefited Leshan’s current crop of sea-goers, tourist ferries that linger for a few snaps at the patch of river before the Buddha’s feet.

Leshan’s biggest trinket has recently been restored by a big-money UNESCO restoration project. Only a few years ago he was considerably hirsute, flowers were said to sprout from his hands, foliage straggled across his chest, weeds protuded from his ear drums and fungi pocked his skin like teenage acne. A water-drainage system has since been introduced, and the Buddha is now svelte, the only obvious blemishes being the dark speckles on his face and a blotchy black nose. Its largely untarnished, glossy tan skin detracts significantly from its 1300 year history though. It could have been made yesterday.

Buddha isn’t the only attraction in the Leshan Scenic Area. Lots of other caves, temples, pagodas, shrines, manmade waterfalls and so forth, quickly becoming standard Chinese tourist scenery in my experience. However, the highlight was indubitably getting a photograph of myself with 10 other behemoths, a touring Chinese basketball team. I am the smallest person in the photo, at 6 foot 2. Thats one to confound stereotypes. We (Evan and Olen, an American ESL teacher) had a few nips of baijio (awesome, cheap and really just adds a bright tint to the day) as we left, and slightly under the influence, hijacked one of those canopied 3 wheel bike-taxi things, and in a good natured Benny Hill style chase, rode it 10 minutes down the road, and left the owner, laughing as he was chasing us, a nice big fare. I think every western visitor probably ticks that box. In the midst of this rucus a now infamous wedgie occured. Olen started off pedalling. Evan switched in. Out of good-natured humour I clutched a section of underwear fabric sticking invitiingly out of his shorts, and gave it a tug. I was quickly restrained by Olen, who was intent on a smooth getaway. My tug was nothing more than that, a little joke, yessasuh nuttin mo dan dat. What followed was heinous. I took the pedals. Then, with vigorous effort, Evan wedgied with all his heart (made a conjoined wedgie by Olen Iscariot’s assistance), they ripped, and through sheer trauma I lost control of the vehicle, veered across a lane of traffic and dumped us into an embankment. A black day for ESL teachers.

Unfortunately, the Leshan hi-jacking led me to believe it was now my thing and so I tried it again a week later. This was my one truly disrespectful ugly foreigner moment, and for that I am sorry. Outside a club, I was messing around with few backpackers from Blighty that I had met earlier. I again hi-jacked a bike and cart ensemble, rode it 50 metres down the street, saw a gap between 2 expensive looking white cars, went for it… made it through. No alcohol impairment there. But when I did a U turn and came back, PRANG. The alarm just hammered through the air, we stood for a moment or two in a moment of sudden sobre shock, and decided to RUN!. But as we were starting out, around 20 bouncers came out of the woodwork and surrounded us. They encircled us in garbling fury and a couple latched onto my arm. They walked me back to the car, and using the flame of a lighter, showed me the damage, one of them affrontedly exclaiming money! The damage was a spot no bigger than a match head. I shouted yi kwai! (about 5 pence) to show how ridiculous their demands were, and also in part to try and excavate myself from the situation, as I considered that through impressing them with my immense linguistic skills they’d realise that I wasn’t just a Krusty Backpacker they could rip off at whim. So they got a bilingualist out of the club to resove the issue. Turns out it was the podium dancer , no lie, replete with hotpants and cut off top. I had to apologise to someone she translated. The owner of the expensive car? No. The bike and cart owner, a scruffy looking Joe-China. I apologised in Chinese and bowed, and with incredulous chuckles, he said mishie mish, no matter. No harm done, but I felt genuinely repentant.

I like teaching grades 1 and 2, 5 and 6 year olds, I must say. A lot of energy required, but you can have fun lessons, before the cynicism kicks in with the older kids. Fellow laowai teachers who deal with older kids judge a succesful lesson by how quiet and obedient the class was. With younger children, if they get enthusiastic about the game you’ve initiated, then they’re certainly not going to be quiet, but all that energy, if somewhat overwhelming occasionaly, is fairly joyous it has to be said. Its getting to be intensely humid here, so I went into school with shorts - cue at least one kid in every class calling me hodzi (monkey). The young kids, and this is kinda creepy, run up to you and start stroking your hairy legs. The ankle-biters should not be at boarding school anyway, doing 12 hours a day, and you see a lot of miserable kids walking around, so its nice when you walk in a class and they start yelling your name and hello hello hello running up to give you all the pictures they’d drawn. I do need a chinese supervising teacher with that age though, as its too much to expect me for me to control 40 of them, particularly with no common language to speak to them with. I could communicate by shouting at them, but the one time I was forced to do this, cos a boy thumped a girl, he started sobbing for the rest of the class. Its strange to say, but its easier for the typical primary teacher, prim outwardly pleasant female to lose it at a kid, but another thing altogether for a big hairy gorilla man to do it - you feel much more guilty. So generally I play mr nice guy, with games and stickers and stuff, and leave the discipline to the Chinese teacher. So imagine my complete fear when I was told that I would have to teach a grade 1 without supervision. I walked in, and normally a few run up, arms outsretched, to be lifted superman style up in the air. With supervision, I will chuck a couple nonchalantly and then the teacher will command them to sit down. Didn’t have that safety net this time, and I felt like I had thrown each kid at least once in the air. I was knackered. Then I set up the DVD I had brought in, cos I decided that this was my only course of action in this class. These kids are strictly controlled, so they didnt think they could move their chairs to the TV. So I made racing car noises and shifted them on their chairs to the TV area. Unwittingly I had set a racing car game in motion for the rest of the lesson. Then I was still messing around, showing them pictures of animals and giving them stickers, and they just all mobbed me again, with their 5 year old If i dont get that sticker my life is incomplete whine. Again, normally this will be halted by the Chinese teacher. So i took another teachers advice, and sat down (which i never do in a lesson) and didn’t say a word with a big grumpy frown on my face to show displeasure. This will have a powerful effect on older kids, cos if word of this gets back to their main teacher, they are in trouble. It did not have the desired effect at this age level. At this point they ran up and jumped on me en-masse saying sorry sorry sorry and patting me, clinging and hanging on me until I started smiling and saying ok ok ok. They started getting a little restless again, so, and this got me a few stern looks later on from their class teacher, I started drawing smiley faces all over their hands and cats whiskers on their faces with the board marker. All the while, one girl, the class monitor (real army mentality) was standing on a chair at the front, barking at them in Chinese and writing naughty kids names on the board. I’m glad she was there, a little 5 year old with a big grumpy face trying to control everyone else. But I felt really guilty that she had cared a lot more about discipline than I had, and did not watch the DVD, so I gave her the 2 biggest shiniest stickers, shook her hand and said you very good! to which she was suddenly beaming and happy. A nice sugary moment in a mawkish sounding anecdote. But stuff like that was genuinely good fun, and the best groups of learners I reckon are the real motivated old ones, like the Polish students who came to class between their morning and evening shifts when I was teacher-training in jersey, and the real young enthusiastic goldfish. Of course, you’ll always be saddled with naughty classes, and I’ve got a few, but you must try to isolate that lesson as a nasty 40 minutes during the couse of a whole week.

For my week holiday, I’m off to the quiet mountain town of Songpan with some teaching friends, where I will go horse riding and trekking, bathe in hot springs, visit Tibetan villages, camp under the stars - sounds too good. Almost soothing enough to forget that fake 50 kwai note.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 30th, 2005 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Chengdu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.