School Days

Like most “foreign experts” working in Hangzhou, after several years of budgeting my RMB, I found that the salary my university provides comfortably subsides my daily costs (and even affords some savings for domestic airline tickets). But when it comes to paying off my student loans buying an international ticket, or even going out to dinner with my friends when I am home, my flashy-pink 100 RMB bills don’t go very far.

Recently, in order to counteract the mounting bills waiting on the counter in America, I’ve turned to “part-time jobs.” It wasn’t until I began this practice that I realized how religiously it is practiced by most foreigner teachers in Hangzhou. At first I balked at losing my relaxed and leisurely schedule, but as I gradually dabbled in private tutoring or worked with “VIP” students at language schools I began to find this frequent exchange of time for money exhilarating. While soon tempted to make every night a festival of shopping, bars, clubs and pirated DVD shopping sprees with my extra cash, a little restraint insured that when I went home for the summer my pockets were padded with cash to pay off those devilish bills and provide me some much-needed time reuniting with old friends, eating too much American food and topping of my gas tank.

But, as my months in China turn to years and the American economy gets increasingly worse the thrill of hand-picking plush part-time jobs and throwing out glib excuses—“that one has too many children,” “this one doesn’t pay enough,” “but my taxi fare should be included”—has turned to desperation. Continued life in China now comes with a cost. Though I have considered selling my soul to the highest bidder, or staking out a corner on Nanshan Lu, I haven’t submitted my employment application to the “pink light” district yet.

Instead, I picked up a job at a local vocational school. Before I started this job, the blessing of working with university students and private tutoring brought me to the conclusion that there is a whole generation of junior and senior middle-school students whose sole purpose in life is to study for and pass the College Entrance Exam held every June for graduating senior-high school students. I thought I had seen it all, from parents starting their 3-year old in expensive private English schools, to junior high school students lugging around huge school bags as they rush off to extra “cram-schools” after a whole day of regular education. I have seen students disappear behind mounds of books months before the exam, emerging only occasionally for food and water. I have seen the hordes of parents pressed in desperation against school gates waiting anxiously for their child to finish the test of his or her lifetime. I have rejoiced with students exuberant to have reached their goal in a chosen university, as well as mourned with those who surrender to a slot in a third or fourth tier university, sadly accepting their fate and counting themselves lucky to be enrolled in university at all. And I have seen the students, despite all their effort and a decade of studious dedication, fail to enter a university, taking a job that they tell me they eventually surrender to. I assumed those were the categories into which urban Chinese 17-19 year-olds fell.

My first day at the vocational school blew my paradigm to pieces. Here I found the black hole of the Chinese education system. The school population consisted not only of students who had failed the high-school entrance exam but some who…gasp….had not even bothered to take it. Where did that fall in my understanding of Chinese culture? Could there be students and parents that were unconcerned with education in China? Of course these types exist in many forms in the U.S., but China, the country of Confucius and Lao Tzu, a place ruled by the heavy hand of exams? The gap in my former naïve understanding left me speechless, not to mention lesson-plan-less.

My pampered up-bringing as a university teacher in China left me stranded, with few tools to teach a second language to students who, according to the staff, had no interest in learning because they were considered “bad students” or their parents simply had enough money to supply them a future career in China or abroad. I learned quickly that there was a whole piece of the Chinese demography I had been unaware of for years.

The first day was tough. If not for the alluring pay, I would have retired immediately. The next week I resolved to be a better teacher to these “poor, deprived students”—children who may have been told their whole lives they were “bad students” or who had never felt the thrill of accomplishing a task or learning something new. I naively ecstatically imagined this as the ultimate challenge, one which would turn me into the next Ron Clark, Erin Gruwell or LouAnne Johnson.

The following week I returned armed with ample supplies to woo them into loving me, English, and learning as a whole: candy, pictures, music and games. Much to my surprise and horror, my pictures were ripped, my candy ignored or tossed nonchalantly at unsuspecting classmates, and my musical and gaming attempts only turned the classroom into further uncontrolled chaos. In the midst of these events insults in both Chinese and English were flung frequently in my direction. With the inability to communicate clearly in their native language, I over-exaggerated my body language and actions. As the father in Nanny Diaries advises, I was purely “Glinda the Good Witch of the North” while the students were behaving, all beaming smiles, dramatic applause for the odd English word and lavish praise for any glimmer of effort, but I turned into the “Wicked Witch of the West” in less than a second if a student was abusing my material, mocking me or another student or shouting obscenities. Once the matter was resolved I returned to “Glinda” just as quickly. I hoped my strategy would encourage the students to see the logical cause and effect of their behavior and desire “Glinda”, enabling me to actually teach the class instead of just providing crowd control.

After the second week the Wicked Witch had taken up permanent residence in my classroom. I constantly forced myself to swallow the threat “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too”. I raised the matter with a Chinese co-worker at the school one morning, inquiring how she managed to descend from full time university instruction to full-time hell. She explained the transition was tough for the first year until she finally forced herself to lower her expectations and focus on the necessary financial benefits. I tried to persuade myself to focus on money, but the “teacher” in me tapped on the door again; if all these students ever experienced were teachers motivated solely by finances, shouldn’t I hang in there and offer them a bit of faith? This was no Ron Clark Story, but at least I could fill the role of Wei Minzhi the Chinese film by Zhang Yimou “Not One Less” the ambivalent teenage teacher who is charged with controlling a primary class for several months until the teacher returns. She is threatened that if even one student is missing from class at the end of the term, brought back home to farm or to go to work, she will not get one jiao of her salary. After ignoring the class for some time, making mistake after mistake and being the laughing stock of the children, eventually she leads them to become a cohesive group of students working together and builds an interest in learning through real-life situations. She creates an atmosphere ideal for educating.

I continued to return to the school, week after week. With my Ron Clark bubble burst, my Wei Minzhi dream was barely holding together. My Chinese colleagues were such wonderful people, happy, patient, educated teachers; I was surprised as one after the other told me the story of their dream to be an inspiration to the students had turned into mere survival. With no ability to punish a student who is only in school until he or she is old enough to work, or because their family does not want the responsibility, and with no reward for student success (as their fates are already set), the teachers had no choice but to endure. They advised me to do the same.

With a “full-time” job already in place, the cons of continuing my work definitely out-weighed the pros. But as I walked back to my apartment, ignoring the alluring honks from vacant taxis in order to save money, I saw a worker struggling to pull a large cart piled with bricks up a hill. The tight rope was like a banner across his chest as he labored to put one foot in front of the other, pausing only to wipe the dripping sweat from his face. Ashamed, I turned away. Why was I looking for glory? How could I complain with a buffet of job opportunities, tedious and frustrating as they might be, that don’t require hauling bricks up a hill on a hot day (and pay several times more), just for being a “foreign expert” with the luxury of a white face and a native English tongue?