Warning! Teaching Can Be Hazardous. Roadmap, Anyone?

(Note: another example of a submission to www.borgger.com. This one uses the Creative Commons Non-Commercial copyright, the idea being that if someone saw this and wanted to use my idea in a non-commercial way to benefit all English teachers abroad, they should just give credit to me, but if they wanted to profit--web-advertisement from pageviews on such an application as the one I mention--they would have to pay to buy the commercial rights. I guess we shall see if this is how things work in practice, but the system Borgger has at least encourages people to write down and share their "in-the-shower" epiphanies, hopefully with a result of added-value to society as a whole.)

A trend, of which I am a part, is for native English speakers to teach their language abroad. Demand for these services have increased dramatically in the past few years, particularly in regard to the recent, massive expansion of China's economy. This type of job opportunity is only likely to become more popular as economies in the West shrink and China's economy pulls along with (relatively) good prospects for growth, leaving college graduates with a choice between dead job markets at home and a large demand abroad--particularly in view of the fact that many English training schools in Asia have incredibly low (actual) requirements for the qualifications of the presumptive teachers.

One problem this creates--particularly with schools with "lowered expectations" of their teachers--is that many of these places are hell holes. Many a TESL/TEFL forum is crammed with teachers complaining that they were subjected to: nasty, dilapidated living quarters; racist treatment; fights with the managers/owners over salary or contractual obligations not being met; lack of teaching support; being lied to about any manner of expected conditions at the work location; Triads/toughs their boss hires; and the list goes on. Now as much as I would like to say that lecherous, 50-yr-old paedophiles lacking a college degree who end up in teaching in China (or other places) because they're running away from (a) creditors, (b) alimony payments or (d) the feds deserve what is coming to them. Of course at least half of all the ESL teachers in Asia hopefully don't fit the aforementioned mold, myself included.

That said, what would be most useful to this increasingly relevant band of didactic economic refugees that doesn't seem to have been provided in any of the major ESL websites? A map that corresponds with the addresses of schools that have gained a bad reputation among teachers, and correspondingly should be blacklisted. This map could be cross-referenced with details about major locations that teachers find themselves living/working in and separate reviews pertaining to life in those places. I think this would be exceedingly useful, especially for the first-timers who often, out of no fault of their own, end up in crappy schools in crappy locations.

Example: me. My first six months in China was spent in a town I often described as a pock mark on the ass end of nowhere, yet the city was also too large to be considered nice for purposes of 'quaintness' or 'fresh air' of which it had neither. I also spent a goodly portion of the six months fighting with a boss/owner about the specifics of my contract. All this because when I was choosing where to go, the best that my google search could come up with was the company's own description of [said hell hole] as a seaside city with fresh air, mountains, beaches, and waterfalls.

Now wouldn't a cross-listed map of recommendations and blackmarks have been useful! Now there are surely fresh-eyed teachers still being snookered into going to that place in dire need of a WARNING sign. On the other hand, hoboes newly-minted by the global downturn and looking for a good place in the middle of nowhere to hole up and avoid their creditors could consider a 'reversed' strategy when looking for schools with low expectations for teaching ability and low interest from other foreign teachers with better credentials (hence greater demand for the services of said bum).

Surely this wouldn't be too difficult to put together, especially with the tools Googlemaps provides, no?

Thoughts on Reform and Reunification of China

(note: these are an example from my recent problem/solution collaborations listed on www.borgger.com; the original material for these thoughts is culled from my discussions in the Facebook forum: "Students for a Peaceful, Unified, and Democratic China")

As a teacher living and working in China (PRC), there are three T's that are considered verboten subject matter when teaching the children: Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square (i.e. democratic reform). Although these are certainly not the only areas of sensitivity to the Chinese people of the mainland, these are matters of primary concern to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Taiwan is also a dicey geopolitical problem for the entire region, as well as the US due to its obligations. Here are my own thoughts regarding how this issue may eventually be resolved. Feel free to add to/debate their efficacy!

(1) No politician--except Cincinnatus--in the history of politics has entirely willingly given up his acquired power. It cannot be expected that either the democratically-elected politicians of the RoC (Republic of China) in Taiwan or the authoritarian oligarchs of the PRC (People's Republic of China) would be willing to give up their political domains or share those domains without a pretty major upset of the status quo, most likely one of catastrophic proportions.

(2) The status quo is a foreign policy fiction which states the existence of a single nation called China, despite the foreign policy reality that there are two governments sharing that nation and even giving slightly differing names for that nation--the two governments being the democratic government of the RoC which controls 'Taiwan province' as well as some islands off the coast of/belonging to Fujian province, and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) which controls all of mainland China, several autonomous ethnic regions, the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

3) Current thought in the CCP/PRC favors the extension of the SAR (Special Administration Region) status to Taiwan and its RoC. It already maintains this as a sort of polite fiction that can often be seen in the setup of its special airport concourses lumping flights into the SARs and Taiwan together. This form of SAR would allow for 'one country, two systems' of government, as seen with Macau and Hong Kong, the latter more than the former defending a quasi-democratic form of colonial government that (supposedly) allows for only limited interference in its internal governance by Beijing amd (supposedly) allows for ultimate transition to full democracy--although this transition has already been postponed several times by Beijing in order to preserve a status quo where pro-Beijing representatives in the legislative council enjoy advantage. Given the degree of actual interference by Beijing in Hong Kong's internal matters, and given that the RoC government (with its pretences to be the legitimate government of all China) cannot be equated with the colonial governments of the two SAR city-states,I find it unlikely that the people or politicians of the RoC/Taiwan would find SAR status an acceptable compromise.

3) This brings us back to the apparent necessity of a catastrophe within the overall territory of China in order to change the status quo between the two governments of China/two Chinas.

A lot could be debated about where/how/what potential catastrophe could upset the current status quo in a way that would aid a peaceable transition from two governments occupying that nation to some manner of unity. Various prognosticators envision natural disaster, man-made disaster, or revolution stemming from CCP mismanagement of China.

While no one can really know the future, I don't see these as events to be hoped for, not least because of the damage to China itself and danger to the lives of the Chinese people. I also don't find the last option all that likely, especially as long as the army is firmly loyal to CCP policy. For one thing, the current generation of Chinese youth is notable for its self-indulgent (xiao huang di, or 'little emperor syndrome') behavior, and thus it is unlikely to see much growth in attitudes for change among the middle class--at least enough so to truly endanger the CCP's privileged position in mainland Chinese society. Of course the CCP itself seems to be playing with fire when it encourages Chinese youth in recent displays of hyper-nationalistic attitudes; it cannot be certain how long such passionately patriotic youth will put up with leadership from aging CCP dinosaurs with whom they have little in common.

Other posible vectors for internal societal change could come from the increasing discontent of the country's rural majority, or its increasing numbers of urban migrant workers who are not fairly too well in the current global economic downturn. It remains to be seen whether any effective leadership or capability to strike at the country's leadership could emerge from such a quarter. Historically, China has often managed to do just this.

In any case, as said previously, such violent ends to the current status quo are probably not anyone's first preference.

4)The needed change, therefore, seems most likely to come from within the CCP itself. The current arrangement of the Party, after all, has almost nothing to do with Communist ideology, and everything to do with the powerful maintaining their position at the center of a vastly self-enriching web of guanxi (personal favors; corruption). So what argument could possibly persuade such people to put their position and access to personal wealth in the hands of popular mandate? The only situation would be one where political insiders are contesting rival factions for access to China's official and unofficial taxes.

It is apparent now that there are at least two main factions, possibly more, and certainly several minor factions as well, all contesting for power within the insular CCP (note, recent reprisals against Jiang Zemin's 'Shanghai faction'). It is possible that the contest could eventually spill outside the bounds of the party, and one or both factions would need to resort to having their power claim validated by popular or military mandate.

IF such happened, it might also be possible to see an alliance between one or more former CCP factions with RoC (and HK) political parties. Taiwanese politicians are unlikely to rejoin the mainland unless they can both retain benefits of their current position, and acquire a piece of the national pie. As for the mainlander party, whoever can successfully negotiate the reunification of Mainland and Taiwan would have won a great prize indeed, enough to fuel a popular (democratic) mandate. The mainland military might not appreciate being bipassed to achieve that goal, however, and it is hard to determine exactly what role they might play in all of this.

Finally, I don't imagine that this will come to pass in the immediate future. It could take fifty years or more, quite easily, for the opportune moment to arrive. Even in the current economic crisis, China does not seem to be one of the worst hit, and the current regime can probably manage to squeak past, even if discontent among the migrant workers recently unemployed increases.

Patience is the key ingredient. Democracy in substance rather than words is still pretty new even in Taiwan, after all.

Borgger.com

A friend of mine has started up his own web company. The basic idea seems to be of an online collaborative think tank. The format allows for easy collaboration between users as well as easy copyright using a variety of options of rights reserved (non-commercial, open, free use, and full copyrights reserved). For myself I've generally been posting my thoughts on problems/solutions to various foreign policy problems I'm interested in, as well as issues I've encountered in my life as a teacher in China.

Feel free to give it a look-see! My username is "llothe" as it usually is.

www.borgger.com

Bones Buried Beneath My Blackboard

Today I finished showing my students James Wan's very frightening film, 'Dead Silence'. After a short lecture on basics of the supernatural, I had them practice writing and telling ghost stories. Most of the students regurgitated various plot lines from Japanese and Hollywood horror films.

A few students gave me something more interesting... more substantive, if that word can apply to ghosts.

--Apparently the university where I teach (and the whole 'university city' that the city government has had built from what was recently rice fields) is built on one of the many mass graves scattered around Nanjing, where the Japanese buried their victims during World War II (and the famed 'Rape of Nanking' which left aproximately 300,000 citizens of the city dead). As a result, several buildings intended as lecture halls or dormitories have repeatedly collapsed. The Feng Shui masters claim that the spirits of the restless dead in the soil beneath are the culprits. Also, there are supposedly elevators that open and close for ghosts, but I think I'll believe that when I see it.

As if I didn't have enough reasons to disparage the relocation of this university, the place is haunted too!

--One girl told me a story about her family. Apparently her grandmother had three sons, but the last one was not wanted by the family (something must have been wrong with the child, because normally Chinese families are ecstatic to have sons). Her grandparents took the baby boy to a river and drowned it there.

Some years later, they had a baby girl, my student's mother. Now, recently the grandmother had died, and the family contracted the services of a man who could 'call back the dead from paradise' because they wanted to talk to the ghost of the grandmother. But instead of the grandmother, the psychic was contacted by the ghost of the little boy that they had drowned so many years ago. The little boy shouted at them, and particularly at my student's mother, "because she took his place, and lived the life that should have been his". Then the ghost of the boy told them that he had killed his mother (the grandmother), had cursed her in some fashion, and this is why the old lady had recently died.

--One last grisly story, not about ghosts: ten years ago in Nanjing, there was a female student who left her university one night and three days later hadn't returned. The morning of the third day, her fellow students saw a picture of her head (decapitated, apparently) in the newspaper. The police were soliciting information as to whom she was. The students went to the police and learned that only the head and arm had been found. The arm was found in a pile of trash, cut up cleanly into precise little pieces, as only a butcher or doctor could have done; the arm was found by a poor woman who didn't recognize the white little pieces of meat as human, and thanking her luck for discovering such good, unspoiled meat, took the remains home to eat. To her horror, as she washed the meat, she discovered the tip of a human finger among the pieces. The police questioned the butchers of Nanjing, but no clear suspect was ever found.

The story has the sounds of urban legend to me, although my students (Nanjing locals, both of them) assured me that this indeed happened ten years ago. I wonder, though, if a newspaper here in China would really publish a picture of a decapitated head in order to ID a body.

From a Soggy Notebook (Philippines Trip '09)

I've been sinking back into the grind of teaching several rather remedial bunches of Chinese college students, and duly forgetting all promises to self that a new year would merit a return to regular postings. So here I turn to the daily log I kept whilst sailing the blue waters and trekking the dread jungles of the Philippines. The log is rather soggy because I took it up into a cloud forest that was perpetually rainy and sodden. I will now attempt to decipher these heiroglyphs scrawled within its ink-stained pages. Can I discover anything legible therein?

January 15th

Day One

My flight left Shanghai at half past midnight, the peril of using a budget airline (Cebu Pacific). Taiwan and the restive Pacific ocean passed below us. I never have much luck sleeping on flights, and this time was no different. I only achieved oblivion for about half an hour out of the four hours in flight. Coming down over the Philippines' largest island, Luzon, just before dawn, we were greeted with rampaging lines of fire burning semi-circles from the darkness. Were these lava flows descending from volcanic heights, or merely farmers burning their fallow rice fields? I couldn't determine which. It seems unlikely that our flight path would descend over active volcanoes, however.

The first shock of arrival in Manila, was a generalized feeling of freedom. There must be some hidden tension involved when a citizen of the democratic world lives in an authoritarian country for some time, witnessing in his daily life some acts of repression, censorship, and various small intrusions of the state into the private lives of even its more privileged citizens and guests. In the Philippines, whatever flaws it has (government corruption and interference from the Catholic church should be mentioned), at least I could be free to make use of wikipedia, the BBC, various blogs, and other websites that I find to be routinely blocked in China; I would also find myself able to see the law-enforcement in a more benign light.

The second shock was the degree to which English permeates this country whose national language is not English but Filipino (Tagalog). Advertisements are usually printed in English, with maybe a few words of Filipino added mainly for emphasis; daily conversation, news reports even are sprinkled with English words, particularly technical words, words referring to artifacts of modernity, and catchphrases. In fact, most Filipinos are remarkably fluent in English, even those who can't express themselves well (but can at least understand what they hear). Coming from a country where even serious students of English have great difficulties understanding what they hear or expressing themselves in rudimentary terms, this was a vast difference. Several things account for this difference: (1) The Philippines were essentially a US territory for many years, between the Spanish-American War and the end of World War II; (2) English is an official language of the Philippines, and continues to be (supposed to be) the main language used for teaching students of all ages; (3) the Philippines has been a remarkably open country for quite some time, so welcoming tourists and travelers and catering to them is one of the most important industries.

The third shock was the number of foreign food restaurants, even in poor neighborhoods and remote towns. Perhaps the tourists or Spanish/American colonization account for this, but it seems that the Filipinos aren't in the habit of turning up their noses at any potentially delicious cuisine (unlike, say, the French or the Chongqingers), and thus happily incorporate many different culinary traditions into their country.

The last shock I will mention is naturally the vast difference between leaving the Siberian chill in Shanghai for the tropical heat of Manila and my final destination of the day, Cebu. The Filipinos, however, were all bundled up that day. This winter had been unseasonably cool, with quite a few rainstorms sweeping across the islands. For me, however, this unseasonable cold felt a bit like the middle of May... utter temperature perfection!

* * *

In Cebu city, on the island of the same name, I arrived exhausted. I had been awake since about 1pm of the previous day... the time was now about 11AM. But unfortunately for me, my day was not yet done. After checking into an overly expensive hotel (still confused about the conversion rate), I decided to take a quick trip down to the local visa bureau to get my visa extended. That couldn't take very long, right?

Wrong, of course. I waited there for about four or five hours, in total. I waited in a room stuffed with nuns and what seemed to be an AARP convention. Hordes of balding, fat, ancient, white men shuffled about the room with bronzed Filipina beauties on their arms. Each time I thought the travesty could not be topped, in would walk a yet older, balder, fatter man with an even more teenaged-looking girl. I felt a strong urge to hie myself to the jungles, and escape from this beastly scene. Of course as I've said before, such relationships do have the benefit of being, probably, a more equitable and sustainable form of wealth transference than making the national government of the Philippines apply to the IMF for loans.

I finished my day with a trip to the Ayala Mall (where the affluent locals, and myself, were able to buy cans of A&W Rootbeer) in order to exchange my Chinese RMB for Philipine Pesos, and then booking a cheaper place to stay (literally the custodial storeroom of a pension) for the next few days during the famous Sinulog Festival.

More on the festival, Cebu, and sacred dolls in my next post. I end here with the peaceful image of myself slumbering at last in an air-conditioned 'double' room, vastly surplus to my usual needs.

Dusk on the Philippines

Another two days left in my vacation here in the Philippines leaves me with feelings of both satisfaction and sadness. The country is much larger than could possibly be seen in just one month, so I certainly feel dissatisfied that I didn't have a chance to explore the islands of Palawan, Luzon, Mindoro, Bohol, or the Eastern Visayas. Mindanao and Sulu I'm happy to have left alone, considering the recent kidnapping of Red Cross workers, and my fellow teacher's stories of having seen the dead bodies of soldiers and rebels in the streets of a city he visited there.

I'm also quite sad to have missed a multitude of chances for snorkeling and scuba... but my attempt at snorkeling in Mocambique some years ago proved beyond doubt that I'll need either contacts or eye surgery before I can make a real and satisfying go at that. The "Blue Hole" dive, wherein one descends into the open maw of an underwater volcano, as well as the numerous WWII wrecks, and an unmatched diversity of corals makes this one of the great regrets I'll leave behind me here.

I will miss the calamansi (a kind of lime) drink, as well as the delicious local cuisine that I've had a chance to try at numerous family-run 'toro-toro' (point-point) establishments. And in the grim Chinese winter, with the soot of a thousand factories clogging my throat each morning and the small racist indignities that go along with life there, I shall most particularly miss the fresh, clean sea breezes and the correspondingly light-hearted and breezy Filipino ethos. The tension of haggling and forcing one's way past hawkers is severely depleted when they all seem to be smiling and drunk on the eternal sun of the tropics.

Today I've been racking up a few expenses in the resort locale (I'm staying in quite humble and cheap accomodations, however) of Tagaytay, just an hour or so south of Metro Manila's incalculable chaos. The city is one long strip mall that runs along a crater ridge... the outermost crater of a vast, flooded volcano, actually. The restaurants here are stilted out over the edge of the crater's jungle-clad wall so as best to view Lake Taal (the flooded volcano) with its islands, including an island volcano that has another small lake nestled within its crater. Lake within volcano, within lake, within crater... a beautiful location, too well touristed for my tastes, but a suitable place to enjoy grilled lapu-lapu (grouper) and a cold calamansi juice as I simultaneously bemoan and rejoice my return to China.

Dusk is coming, but there is a full, silvery moon coming with it.

The Filipina and the Lecher

On the beaches, in the malls, scooting along the pot-holed streets, one sight is ubiquitous in the Philippines: The aging, white male and his bronzed, young Filipina beauty. And that certain degree of disgust sets in every time I see this sight. When a pockmarked, wrinkly white face that would do a naked mole rat proud pops up at the checkout line in the supermarket, I crane around to see where this mister's mistress could be. After all, it just would not do--could not possibly be!--that the man has come here to brave the hot beaches and the frigid waters of a calamansi-lime juice (and gin) on his own! In fact everyone I meet here is surprised that I travel alone, and am positively uninterested in the marriageable young things that surround me. So sad for these girls, I suppose, when at least I'm a young guy--even if I don't look so young--compared to the aged predators that limp in pursuit across the sands.

Some of those young Filipinas have aged as well, of course. It's not unlikely to meet a 40 yr-old Filipina lady with a 75 yr-old German. I suppose it does say something for her managerial abilities that she has managed to hold on to him for the past 20 years!

And then I came to the realization that one must give the Filipina her due. It is not so much that she is prey for the lecherous old Westerners, but that they are her prey. The average girl here has two options for bettering her life: (1) finding a job abroad, or (2) finding a hubby abroad. She takes this responsibility seriously, and every tourist is her potential fillet mignon. Amongst the legions of gold-diggers in this world, at least the union of lecher and young Asian has the potential to take the wealth of the west and transfer it directly among poor families as the elderly fellows move out here and allow their wives to start businesses that will in turn help pay for retirement. Net-cafes, small beach resorts, and shops selling local delicacies are the result. As recent history has shown, a shop selling buko pies is probably a more worthy place to put money than Wall Street is.