I found the best job ever

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Last week I got a new tutoring job in addition to the two eight year olds I teach once a week for an hour. I'm currently tutoring a CEO of a major chinese company. The ad on the listserve said "looking for female tutor" and was about this 40 year old ceo who wanted to meet frequently. SHE wanted someone to practice conversational English before SHE moved to Vancouver for business.

I was like, oh cool, a female business woman I could talk to about the economy in Shenzhen-- sweet. I applied for the job, got it, and received a call from this guy saying he was my student. He had very poor English, so a woman called back who said she was "my student's friend." I asked, "So he's a man?" She was like, yes...

Being pretty sketched out about a 40 year old man seeking a female tutor and masquerading around as a woman, I decided to take my friend Sarah with me to the meeting. She speaks really good Chinese and we could decide together what kind of vibe this guy was giving out. His DRIVER picked us up and we went to Starbucks. Dude is chill. His English name is Steven. He looks young for 40, very even keel, calm, intense about learning English, and very professional. Somehow not sceezy at all. He's married with two kids. He wanted to pay me 350 kuai an hour ($50). He wanted to meet ten hours a week. I said ok.

The she/he thing in the the ad was simply a pronoun mistake (Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns so they always call girls he and boys she). On Wednesday, he was like "I want to do activities that will make lessons more relaxed and will help you get to know Shenzhen. We can go to dinners with people who speak English, you can bring your friends to my beach house, and we'll do cultural activities where they speak English." Of course that took about a half hour for him to communicate with the help of his touch screen translator, but I was like...ok. Tutoring is common and very established in China, and he doesn't make me uncomfortable at all. However, I did insist that we always meet in public places. Sweet gig, yeah?

Moral of the story: I'm tripling my salary and getting to see the ritzy side of Shenzhen. Yesterday we got a two hour foot massage while we talked in English and I taught him new words/fixed his grammar. And then he paid me $700 kuai ($100). Best. Job. EVER.

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Comments

[NYCKid]

yandÖ
Chinese ppl do have different words for girls and boys; girls/she=y boys/he=Ö But yes, they have the same pronunciation.