Slick’s Flat, Ningbo, People’s Republic of China, Monday the 27th of August 11:19
Ni Hao everybody! Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated; rather I have been on a censorship/business/laziness induced sabbatical from my sacred task of injecting bloggy goodness directly into your central nervous systems.
So, here I am, a teacher of English in China. I’m going to avoid venting too much about the many minor frustrations of life here, because i’m naturally positive and because I don’t want to be labelled a dissident, and focus instead on the minor frustrations and surprising rewards of being a teacher.
So, first the basics- the teacher lifestyle here is excellent, comparable perhaps to university but with a bigger spread of people and more work to do- but more on that later. I live in a nice flat, I eat out most of the time and go out drinking a couple of times a week, and even paying inflated foreigner prices i’m saving money. Ningbo is small enough that you can get to know it, but large enough that there are plenty of other lao wei (foreigners) to befriend- and yet we’re still enough of a rarity that i can drink for free in any chinese nightclub purely on the basis of being foreign! It’s like what I imagine being a hot girl is like…
Now, teaching. First things first- i’ve almost totally lost my distaste/discomfort regarding small children! Some of my students are legitimately adorable, and regularly give me hugs or small gifts of disgusting chinese snack food. That being said, some of them are entitled little shits… but you take the rough with the smooth I guess. I think i’m mastering the art of being a teacher pretty well- i need to work on my handwriting, but i’ve cut my lesson planning time down from an hour or so to 10 minutes, which means the workload is pretty nice, and i get to lie in 5 days out of 7.
The great thing about being a teacher in China is that, like I said, a child can hug a teacher- it’s encouraged in fact. I taught one class, and at the end we took a class photo and the kids were virtually using me as a climbing frame- and no-one batted an eyelid at the fact we were photoing the kids without parental consent forms signed in triplicate. The kids loved it, the parents loved it- even I felt warm and fuzzy about the whole thing- and it absolutely would not happen in the UK because we’re all too scared to trust one another and we’re ridiculously overprotective of our children. Yes, sometimes bad things happen, but that doesn’t mean we should lock the children away and teach any stranger as guilty until proven innocent.
That being said, I’ve seen Chinese parents loading two or three kids onto a goddamn scooter and just tearing off into the sunset- so maybe there’s a middle ground to be struck between the two styles!
There’s a chinese saying that actually sums this place up pretty nicely. Loosely translated it goes “Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away”. In other words, moral and secular authority are distant figures- so who gives a shit if your kid doesn’t wear a helmet, or your dog poos in the street and you don’t pick it up? If you mess up, on your head be it, but there’s no use worrying about the dictates of petty local tyrants and arbitrary laws which don’t help anyone. It’s both a gloriously liberating and kind of stupid and dangerous attitude, but right now I find it kind of suits me…
Hmm, I guess I did talk a lot about China. I hope no-one takes it amiss…
stay tuned,
Slick
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