School
This quarter has been ripe with vacation, miscommunication and canceled courses so my focus is going to be on life outside of Nanda Fuzhong. I will say that I have enjoyed teaching the girls after the anxiety I had built up for myself. Though just as prone to sleeping, talking, and apathy I found the girls easier to manage. When they chat it is more discreet and collectively they are not as loud as the boys. After a semester the students have opened up a bit, making the classroom more comfortable and conducive to learning, even if it means feeling less like a teacher and more like an older sibling.
The Land of Lies These stories should be taken with a few grains of salt. I chose to tell about these experiences for their humor more than anything. I put myself in these bad situations and I have only myself to blame. Margaret was able to find good side jobs teaching English.
It is dangerous to live in a cash economy where food and services cost a fraction of the American equivalent and treating your friends to dinner and drinks is a quid pro quo. Unless one maintains a careful budget and a clear mind on the value of RMB one is prone to overspending their means. After my winter travels, I finally built up the courage to check my bank account and this phenomenon become shockingly clear to me. In response, I begged my boss for money. When that failed I did what most English-speaking foreigners do in China for extra cash-looked for more work teaching English.
That is not true. Actually the first thing I tried to do was to start a business with a few College classmates. A college friend of mine had a few years of experience doing "Educational Consulting" (read writing college application essays) called me up on a Wednesday evening and asked me if I wanted to do business with her. It seemed like an easy way to make extra money and I needed the experience, so I was not in the position to refuse the offer. Two days later I find myself in Beijing meeting with the CEO of a company that performs this service. The first round of meetings went well. I could not understand everything being discussed but I trusted the guy and he seemed excited about our prospects. Later on he takes us to dinner and suddenly he asks me if he wants me to be the vice principle of his school working 6 months in Beijing, 6 months in America. A thousand things go off in my head at once and I find myself A) unable to respond B) unable to believe him C) wondering if I understood him correctly. He then asks me again and tells me it would be very easy. Since I would be in Beijing half of the year we could have better communication between our companies. All I could think about is having a lot of money and wearing a suit to work ever y day.
The meeting the next morning also went well. At least for the few hours I attended. We talked concrete numbers and strategies. The CEO asked me if I had thought about his offer and I asked him to write up a contract for me. He told me to email him a resume and a list of demands and he would have a contract ready for me next week in Shanghai. He then gave me a large bottle of Greek olive oil and I jumped on the plane grinning like a sophomore schoolboy who just scored a homecoming date with a varsity cheerleader.
I soon found out the rest of the meeting did not go very well. It turns out their company is a middle man and does not perform any concrete educational consulting services. Their customers are all provided by other companies that would take the lion's share of the profit. Our slice would have been too small to make it economically feasible thus the meeting in Shanghai never took place. I also never received a response to the email I sent him. Here is the line where I say the olive oil tastes like ash, but that would be a lie. After eating the cheapest salad oil every day, the olive oil is very nice with caramelized onions, white button mushrooms and home-style fries.
After this misadventure I turned to teaching English. I got a job teaching elementary students once every two weeks. I negotiated my salary to 200 RMB per hour (it took me half an hour to commute and it was only once every other week) and everything was gravy. Cute little youngsters. I spent roughly half the time pulling them apart and the other half of the time playing the hokie-pokie or duck-duck goose, singing "are you sleeping" and reading children's books. Then they started criticizing my teaching style and asked me to play different games with them every time and read vocabulary words like a machine. I tried playing a version of musical chairs and some other simple games but it was difficult for the kids to learn the rules when I saw them twice a month so I went back to what the kids knew and enjoyed. Then they renegotiated my salary to 150. Then my boss came on to me very aggressively at a bar (the same night she lowered my salary I think) in front of her boyfriend, who is consequently a friend of a good friend, and that is when I gave my notice.
I did try to get another job teaching from a lady that is associated with Nanda that knew a friend of mine. It was going to be two hours every Saturday afternoon playing English games with middle school kids. Cake. We met a week before the first class, and exchanged phone numbers (she gave me both of her cell phone numbers and a landline). The next Saturday morning I call her and she does not answer. I send her a text message and head to class. When I get to class the door is locked. I call her again. This time she answers, sounds a bit flustered, and tells me to come downstairs to talk to her. She erupts in a mountain range of excuses (repeating them over and over again, maybe for emphasis, maybe because she did not think I understood, but most likely because she had short term memory problems) the primary one being that she told my friend that class was canceled and she thought we lived together. We very clearly stated that we did not live together in our first meet. At this point I am a bit upset so I explain to her that I am broke at the moment and she is wasting my time and that I could have been making money during this time. She apologized a few more times, told me she lost my phone number, and offered me a pock-marked tangerine. After asking her why I would want a tangerine I left. She came running after me and had the gall to ask me about the other class I was teaching. She then pointed to Danny and the Dinosaur (I had been planning on reading this to her class) and asked if that was the book the students were using.
While walking home I call my friend to tell him the story and he cannot stop laughing about the tangerine (we have a running joke about her smoker's voice and my friend does perfect imitations). Five minutes later he calls me back to tell me that she called him on his cell phone and landline simultaneously to admit she never told him about cancelling class and she had simply forgot. Needless to say that ended my desire to look for part time work teaching English.
...and Opportunity:
I started an apprenticeship at a German bar and restaurant called Secco. I chose Secco because the part-owner and bartender makes excellent cocktails, I agree with his business philosophy and the chef knows how to prepare food. It is a perfect setup. The first question when I get to the bar is always: "So, what do we drink" and thus I have learned as much about drinking cocktails as mixing them. Consequently my weekend expenses have been slashed.
I am also starting to train with the chef. He is an old school chef that got into the business as a dishwasher and clawed his way up the ladder. "Ven I was your age, 40 beers, no problem. Now, one bottle gin, once a week, my head, ohhhhhh." He used to work 15 hours a day, drink until 5am and get up four hours later for work. He practically eats experience for breakfast and loves to give advice. If only I could understand everything he tells me. I know there will be few pastimes for me that can rival sitting at the bar-late in the evening when the guests are leaving-with an old fashion to cool my nerves, a rump steak, potato medallions, and sautйed mushrooms.
I am also observing in a small Chinese kitchen once a week. It is a small family joint run by my student's father. The kitchen is small and contains very few tools. There are three circular open-fire heating elements. The most powerful one looks and sounds like a jet engine. It is hooked up to a massive, cylindrical propane tank that is approximately 8 feet tall and 3 feet wide. There are three woks that rest on top of the elements. Near the woks there is a sink and a stainless steel container to hold water. To stir fry the chef exclusively uses a large ladle. To clean he uses a rough bamboo brush. On the left side of the jet engine there are about 25 stainless steel containers that hold your standards: salt, sugar, msg, chicken stock, cornstarch paste, chili garlic sauce, vinegars, soy sauce, minced green onion, garlic, ginger and a few others. Against the other wall the sous chef does all the prep work. The only blade in the kitchen is a large, razor sharp cleaver. The only cutting board is a tree trunk slice maybe 2 feet in diameter and four inches thick.
The dishes they have me cook are very simple. Gong bao jiding: (kung pao chicken) deep fry the chicken in salad oil until cooked through-it always amazes me how fast the jet engine and a cast iron wok bring oil to deep-fry temperature- strain. Add two teaspoons salad oil to walk. Stir fry garlic and green onions for 30 seconds, add salted, roasted peanuts, add chili garlic, cornstarch paste, return chicken to wok. Voila. Certainly not the way my father or I would prepare it, but it is mind-bogglingly rapid and the chicken is guaranteed not to dry out. And it does not taste that bad. The rest of the stir-fry dishes follow a similar pattern. Even soups can be done in this fashion, simply add stock and hot water at the end. The jet engine will boil it in less than two minutes time.
One day the guests ordered eel. The boss got on his scooter and returned five minutes later with four disemboweled eels. When the sous chef started washing them they came back to life. One slithered through the drain into a trash receptacle. After its head was removed it still writhed, and even after half of its body has been diced into bite size chunks they the tail still needed to be held steady. I have yet to have well prepared eel and I doubt I will be able to stomach it again anytime soon. I was thankful they didn't ask me to do it. (After writing this report I did try some eel at a restaurant in my Grandma's village in Guangdong province. It was simply prepared and tasted like a fatty white fish.)
There is a regular at Secco who once described China as the last frontier, the new America, the land of opportunity. He is one of the many older expats that quit his job, came to China to teach English and now has a well-paying job doing marketing and web design. In some sense I agree. If you look hard enough you can find something that you like in China. There are certainly ways to make a lot of money. Right now I am very happy with my situation. I am not making money in either of my jobs but my food and housing are taken care of and I can eat and drink like a medieval king (think huge plate of Goulash and a pint) anytime I please. I am developing skills that I will employ in the very near future, and that is what is important. In a sense this program is similar to Grinnell minus the many hours of homework; there are great learning opportunities if you seek them out.
