Advertisement
Published: February 2nd 2010
It has been a long time since I wrote an entry here. Much has changed.
For starters, I just saw
Blindness (like I just-turned-off-the-DVD-player just saw it), this movie I'm sure most of you have heard of about a city whose inhabitants all suddenly become mysteriously blind, and then devolve into a Lord of the Flies-type scenario. I have found that I am very impressionable when it comes to movies, books, and music, and after watching 90 minutes of this depressingly realistic display of human fortitude and decrepitude, I was feeling a bit of resentment towards our species. Then I got a phone call from one of my Chinese coworkers, whose new policy as a whole is to take me out to eat Ma La Tang every chance they get for the next week. The reason for this directive is that I am moving to Shanghai in a week.
Anyways, I met up with this coworker of mine and she pretty much cheered me up again. This is one of the more honest and straight-forward of my coworkers, and we commiserated over the general working conditions here, sharing a bowl of spicy noodle soup. She, like all the Chinese staff, has it much harder than I do, but she still managed to report on all of these unfair and illogical impediments to a happy job with a smile on her face. Maybe it was nervous laughter, but I think she was genuinely unfazed. She said she was annoyed at times, but none of it was really a big deal. And these are things that people quit their jobs over back in the States. Take me for example. But she says, "I am young, and still have time to do other things in my life. And my parents are always there to help me and encourage me. So I need to have a hard life, for a little while. And there is a roof over my head," although underneath the roof there lies a broken television, broken water heater, broken faucet, broken light fixtures, etc. etc., all of which have gone unsympathetically ignored by her supervisor. When she brought the general disarray of her apartment to her boss' attention, who happens to be the landlord, they scolded her for complaining and told her these were things that she was expected to fix herself. While in the meantime, all the Chinese staff are expected to fix the things in the Westerners' apartments, too.
But it was her general good cheer about the whole incident (the above being just one of many), which was not sadly naive or overly hopeful but just plain accepting and peaceful, that brightened my mood again. I am leaving to Shanghai in a week because I couldn't handle even the most minor examples of these things that she and her coworkers have to suffer everyday. Mainly, I couldn't handle working overtime without pay, and being expected to do so for the sake of the team that happens to consist solely of people who have an ownership stake in the business. But so I am moving, which is another big change, to a gigantic and expensive city, without a job and not very much money. I am taking care of my visa problems for the time being by enrolling in a part-time Mandarin course at a university there. But all the other problems still exist. I think this next move of mine is probably the least-thought-out thing I have done in my life, which is making me a little nervous and excited at the same time. But talking to my coworker makes me realize just how easy I really have it, and how little I am actually risking. Which makes me ashamed to say that I am nervous about it.
So I am going to Shanghai, but beforehand I am going to spend what little savings I have on a trip to Thailand and around central China. Figured I might as well take the chance to do something stupid while I still have it. I still haven't fully planned out my trip, but I know that at the very least I'm going to be on a beach in 7 days, which is making the last three weeks of this job a little easier and a lot harder at the same time. We are in a double-session semester now, when we offer twice the number of usual classes because all the students are on vacation from their public schools. So I am working twice the hours, which teaching wise adds up to 19.6, just below my contract-specified maximum of twenty. None of that includes the hours I spend preparing for class, though, so now I am working every day, more or less, usually 8 hours a day. Part of this I am bringing upon myself, mainly because I am trying to take advantage of the break from the usual curriculum (we are supposed to be teaching book review) to try and teach something genuinely useful to the students (as opposed to the book curriculum, whose key vocab words include "saw a platypus" and "taken a helicopter ride", among others), so I am spending a lot more time than strictly necessary writing lesson plans and preparing materials. And I also kind of wanted to go out with a bang, seeing as for some sick reason I am taking a little bit of pride in my job, which is the dangerous emotion that got me into this no-overtime-bind in the first place. Pride and sacrifice are not rewarded, at least not monetarily.
I am worrying now about how to say goodbye to my students, who even though I only get to see once a week I have kind of taken a liking to, and who I believe (probably erroneously) have taken a liking to me. I am also a little sad to leave all the good Chinese staff behind, and my roommate who is a decent and honest person. But mainly I am just waiting for these days to tick by so I can get on a plane and get the hell out of here. I'm ready to dive head-first into some stupidity and madness. Hopefully I will find some way to land right-side-up.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.079s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 11; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0408s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
lisa
non-member comment
you're nuts, you will find success no matter where you go because you're brilliant/nuts, and no matter where you are in the world, at least you're somewhere. sending tons and tons of luck vibes across a few continents (and an email) to you! lisa