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Lessons 7 & 8 : Pat and the role of the round-eyed laoshi (teacher)

The first 2 periods were not quite as smooth this morning, a consequence of the DVD remote playing up. Though still possible to play DVDs, you need it to activate the Chinese subtitles, and although this is an English lesson, there’s no way they can follow the audio. Cue lots of fiddling with batteries, points of contact and swapping batteries from student’s MP3s. Awkward.

Maybe I could have sent this as a single e-mail but I was very conscious of the overall running time. Sweet Jesus let it end.

I played Dojitsu with Eva and Dave of Dave’s Oasis last night. Predictably, he tanned us, which makes Si-jiao (the Ibizan) claim that the cards are everything even more ridiculous. Dave, from an initial 1 yuan bet, stripped a laowai of a grand! Foolishly Dave wheeled out this anecdote prior to insinuating that we could play for money if we liked? ting bu dong! ting bu dong! [lit. hear but don’t understand] which is what you say whenever you choose to be ignorant of something over here, and is I suppose our equivalent of me no speak eenglish.

To Pat. The first time I met him was on our weekly drive to Wenjiang (a school on the outskirts of Chengdu), when our driver pulled by a local hostel to pick him up. All by the schedule, pick up Richard at 7.30, me at 7.40, and then on to this new guy. But our company, in one of their daily shows of ineptitude, told him to wait at 7.40 as well. OK, so 15 minutes late, but we didn’t know this, and it couldn’t have prepared us for the stocky Kiwi that flung his bag into the car, the tight curls of his pimp mullet reverberating with feral anger.

was f-ing bout to go f-ing home this f-ing c-t Richard f-cker can’t f-ing answer his f-ing phone f-ing rung the f-cker 5 f-ing times f-ing waiting for 20 f-ing minutes and G- [our boss] gives me this f-ckers phone number and The c-t won’t even pick up his f-ing phone was bout to go f-ing home first day on the f-ing job!

Richard graciously and perhaps unnecessarily apologized. He doesn’t have the best hearing in the world, and his phone ring is not the loudest. All sorted. Pat’s imbalance became even more evident though. Although he had accepted Richard’s apology, he continued in the same vein with the same gripe, as if no apology had been offered or accepted, indeed if the last 2 minutes had not actually happened… what was disturbing was that he kept referring to Richard for not having his phone on, neglecting the standard use of pronouns like You or him as if the man he had just received an apology from, shook hands with and introduced himself to was not in the car and still an unknown. Yikes. I was struggling to suppress the inevitable laughter that always comes when a nutter approaches a friend you are with and starts jabbering earnestly and incomprehensibly at them, and your friend shifts and squirms and mutters uncomfortably in agreement to anything said to him. Within the third minute of Pat’s diatribe, Richard had demanded the car be stopped and that Pat fight him like a man outside! Slightly pointless, as our driver can’t speak English, but to so quickly offend a man with a slow burning temper like Richard, very impressive, and a measure of the man. Of course, not being a morning person, I was halfway caught between complete amusement and stomach churning nausea.

Lessons 9 & 10 - Further Pat -ter

A child came running out of the second class of the day and gave me a 2-page getting-to-know-you letter. It deserves a blog entry of its own, and should have one by the time you read this.

I know in Oz he’d be called an Occa, but is there a Kiwi equivalent? Revealingly, he had actually spent time in far north Queensland, where even from my limited time there I would say that he’d fit right in. I didn’t meet a single guy nearly like that in New Zealand last year, and bear in mind I went to a Rodeo in a tiny country town. Broad, dense accent, confrontational in conversation to students, staff and laowai, painfully loud and exclamatory over the smallest trifle, and protruding eyeballs that push further and further against the aperture of his sockets as he talks, and seem like they’d just pop out. Nuts. In the communal lunch hall, he stripped off to his wife-beater singlet (natch) and strutted around staring at vaguely attractive teachers, Saturday Night Fever style.

When teaching a foreign language, your speech slows, you enunciate each syllable clearly and you make yourself comprehensible with pantomime style gestures. I realized that when Pat was talking to me at lunchtime, he didn’t have a mode B; he was talking to me, and for that matter any laowai, as though I were an average 10 year old Chinese kid in his class. This was his job number 4 in as many months, and all seemed to end as a result of some inscrutable closed-doors Chinese business practice that discriminated against his maverick, energetic teaching style. But the kids loved me and it was so hard to leave! Its just those teachers who sit at the back of your class making f-ing notes about you, but its never about the teaching! I was having doubts about this particular conspiracy theory. Considering the massive shortage of teachers over here, and the resultant lack of quality control, it really is difficult to lose a teaching job. In fact, as I found out, the greater difficulty is when you actually want to lose it, but you can’t. To be sacked from 3? Come our smaller Sunday morning classes, students complained of his rambling incoherence, and a Chinese teacher was drafted in to translate. And he’s on the same pay scale as me.

So on a sticky hot ride back, he stripped off his shirt and then his singlet on the car ride back; bear in mind he was sitting in the middle of the backseat between 2 other laowai on leather seats. Couldn’t but think of the David Brent Simply The Best! motivational speech where he strips off after his performance.

Despite the above, it was a guilty pleasure to be spending time with Pat on one working day a week. It was like being in a Warner Brothers cartoon. But then, watching a provincial Lions game on a Saturday afternoon, who wanders in but Pat, strides up to me, and breaking the quite atmosphere, his occa tone tearing through the lazy summer tranquility:

So Jon! This is the place that you come to pick up the Chinese chicks!?

I think the you was a general you, applying to the laowai in general, that this was a bit of a cattle joint. But the misconception must have arisen that he meant me specifically. A table of Chinese women turned around to stare at the filthy pervert implicit in Pat’s opening address. Me. Jack de Ripper, he sleep on da bed!

Pat - Hey Jon! You’lll never guess what I did last night!Jon - Hmm. Dunno. [eyes fixed on television. Please leave me alone.]
Pat - Knocked off a hooker for a hundred kwai!!
Jon - Uh-huh. [wince as the entire pub turns around.]
Pat - Went in to this place for a massage, and this chick’s hand starts going down my towel [God let this end] and she starts giving me this h*ndjob [eyes bulge to the brink of expulsion] and she teases me a bit but then says 500 kwai so I says f*ck too expensive! or what is it in Chinese oh yeah tai guila so she says ok 200 kwai and I says 100 kwai she says ok! 100 f-ing kwai eh! [awaits praise for bargaining a back alley masseuse for sex for around eight pounds]
Jon - Hmm. Cheap. Oh, really need a p*ss. Sorry Pat. [scurries off.]

But Smokey Robinson was right about the tears of a clown. He found me again, and in slightly muted (less deafening) tones, started telling me about the two-faced Chinese, and how they’ll lie to your face, and that although he had two books full of phone numbers and addresses, he didn’t truly have one that he could contact or call a friend. This one moment of true pathos was, in true Pat style, totally lost when he brought up another of his bugbears about a race he had been living among for over 3 years (which begs the obvious question), about their hawking and spitting of phlegm. Strongly and repeatedly using the term animals he mimed, and supplied graphic audio for, this action. 2 minutes later though, he sidled away to a corner and quietly did the exact thing he had just been vilifying. I argued with Eva about this; Eva thought that his enthusiastic mime had actually dislodged and brought up some of his own phlegm, and embarrassingly he had to get rid of it, whereas I assumed that in the Super-size Lego brick play-pen of his brain, that he had suddenly drawn a blank as to where he was and what he was doing, and perhaps who he was, so his brain unconsciously tracked back to the last thing he had been in the process of doing, he resumed the same pattern, unbeknownst to him that it was something he had been disparaging. Phew.

Lessons 11 & 12 - An Epilogue

Pat told me he’d been knocking off one of the teachers from this middle school for a few weeks, before she abruptly broke it up. According to Pat, the only explanation for this behaviour was the unfathomable social attitude of the Chinese and their persistent recourse to lies. At this point in my portrait of the feral Kiwi, you should be able to decide for yourself if this is valid or not. A middle-aged female teacher tacictly probed me on the previous foreign teacher and where and why he had gone. Her gait was both curious and anxious, a little like a murderer strolling nonchalantly past the crime-scene. And sorry love, it certainly was a crime, as I’m guessing you were the one being knocked off.

As an epilogue to Pat’s story (I’m picturing the text that pops up just before the credits in a movie when you’re told what the individual characters went on to do, or not do), he was recently sacked for giving a junior student a few taps and in a primary class for physically ejecting the supervising Chinese teacher, slamming the desks with a thick wooden metre rule and shouting at the students. Again, on the same pay scale as me. And also the reason I’m here. I’m covering his lessons. The laowai teacher is in a precarious position in the Chinese education system, and has little sway in terms of actual discipline. But the Rambo approach is not viable, however attractive.

The laowai teacher is caught between the 2 poles of either being a disciplinarian, or an indulgent babysitter. Neither extreme is realistic, but the best approach it would seem to me, would be to veer towards indulgence, disguise and encourage English learning in the form of games and rewards, and should discipline be required shock them with the infrequency and outrage of your flare-up. Pat is a major example of the failure of being too strict, as is my ex-colleague. Her passion as she termed it was linguistics. This agenda of grammar, sentence patterns and written work was dogmatically enforced every lesson. I strolled by her class one time, and she was sitting, barking explanatory and disciplinary sentences in Chinese, and the object of the written exercises in English. Any laowai teacher worth his salt will only ever sit down as a means of conveying displeasure with their class, if they are messing you around in a game you have given them to play, sit down and look stern. The use of Chinese, the student’s native language, as a medium through which to teach, is also a cheat, and begs the question, why have a laowai teacher at all when a Chinese teacher can conduct an English lesson via Chinese far better anyway?

Laowai lessons should always be conducted in the target language, English, they should be orally based (Chinese teachers have excellent understanding of grammar, not-so-good pronunciation, play to the laowai strengths) and the gap in understanding between student and teacher should be bridged not only by the clarity and gesture of the teacher but the students desire to play a game, to participate for his team, to win a reward, to interact with the big white monkey lumbering around at the front. While C-’s proficieny in Chinese allowed her to control her classes for the initial weeks, the students soon realized that the laowai is in fact powerless in terms of true disciplinary measures, and though threats could be made in Chinese they were full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Good line to insult people with that, as well as the classic from my recent past you and I are 2 very different people. Hoggle would shout and shout, made herself ill with the uproar that was going on in the class, precisely because she would not let them off the leash. And guess who copped all this angst and frustration? Discipline is important as an infrequent shock to the system, but the key principle is to make lessons interesting, fun and a welcome respite from the exam loaded rote-learning dirge of their day-to-day schooling. Although it is in our interest to teach more like an older brother than a stern parent, it is also genuinely funny and challenging, how to motivate a class of 50 five year olds.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 8:48 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.