A teacher reports from Ningbo
I had just finished working a long shift at BNZ and walked in the door. Seven Days was blaring on the TV, and my folks were on their second bottle of Sav. Mum dragged her gaze away from Dai Henwood’s impish grin.
"Darling, are you sure you want to move to China?"
I had been planning it for years, but nobody believed I was actually going to follow through. Then to everyone’s surprise, I’d attained a cheap teaching certificate off the internet, cobbled together some meagre savings and was about 90 per cent there. I had also secured a job teaching English at one of the many after-school training centres in China.
"One-point-four billion people seem to live there happily enough," Dad stated matter-of-factly, but with doubt behind the eyes.
"I was reading on the internet that they take people’s organs. Your friends went to Germany. Why can’t you go there? I’d feel much happier if you went there." This was partly wine, partly understandable motherly concern.
"They aren’t going to take my organs, Mum," I thought to myself for a moment.
"I’ll be fine, I think," I said out loud.
It turned out that the biggest threat to my organs in China was the Ningbo expat community and a few young men from Shandong, who, looking to impart some cultural knowledge, taught me how to open a beer bottle with a pair of chopsticks. The only other New Zealander I met in Ningbo was repulsive and tried to goad me into smashing a guy’s head against a bar, just because he was passed-out and easy prey. I pretended to go to the bathroom and quietly slipped out the door.
*
There have been a few times I’ve looked around laowai (foreigner) bars in China and thought of Donald Trump’s infamous comment about Mexicans moving to the US: "They’re not sending their best." Some are very impressive people; but many do not even pick up basic Chinese, and the worst develop a deranged superiority complex to justify the relative privilege Western foreigners enjoy compared with the locals they work with. They do this unironically and in full knowledge that their higher salaries derive mostly from their skin colour. Quite a few won’t need to be embalmed when they die.
I am subject to some of the criticisms listed above, and, while I’ve done nothing criminal, I’ll admit I have not always acquitted myself in ways that make me proud. Nor am I highly fluent in Chinese, yet. What needs to be emphasised is that the bar is generally low for foreigners engaged in China’s teaching profession.
What is astonishing is how such an incredibly degenerate mishmash of foreigners is placed in charge of young children
Once, during a job interview for an English school, a middle manager remarked that he got promoted solely on the basis that he was observed taking notes during a meeting. It would seem this is proof enough that you take your job seriously. Another acquaintance saw her career advanced because after a happy school-night binge-fest she swerved up to work on her electric moped, went straight into a parked car and fortunately managed to break a leg. The school had no choice but to promote her straight away; her immediate competitors were impeded by their ability to actually teach children. Given the length of time it takes to get a visa and the fierce competition between schools for anyone remotely passable as a native English-speaker, making somebody else a manager would mean fewer classes and wring less money from terrified parents trying to get their tired children through national examinations. My friend would hobble into class with a spring in her crutches to assess other people doing work.
What is astonishing is how such an incredibly degenerate mishmash of foreigners is placed in charge of young children in a sprawling system of international schools, somewhat international schools, kindergartens, public schools and, of course, the brightly-coloured and poorly named private training centres looking to cash in on China’s educational arms race of parent against parent. Altogether, we educate millions of children. For those fresh out of university looking to explore China from the 1990s onwards, these training centres were often our ticket in.
*
When I first arrived in Ningbo in late 2016, it honestly failed to register that being a teacher was what I was mostly going to do. I thought I’d be a Sinified version of Lawrence of Arabia with a New Zealand accent (I had not yet read about Rewi Alley), or a protagonist from one of my favourite dystopian novels, despite how thoroughly ridiculous both notions are. Teaching young children was only a pretence to get in. A side gig. My friends were going to be boring bureaucrats in Wellington; I had escaped my predestined middle-class path. Naturally, I was an atrocious teacher in the beginning.
I still remember being thrown in front of 12 seven-year-olds, in a fluorescent green room with blue chairs, white tiles, nausea-inducing office lights, a whiteboard and peeling decals of zoo animals all over the walls. It was my first class. There was no sound. I had no idea what to say or what to teach, so decided to go with mumbling a series of unclear commands. The students sat there understandably confused. A very small boy, with an incredibly round head, let his face fall, and slapped it with his tiny palm, somehow making a noise loud enough to reverberate around the awful room. My Chinese teacher aide kindly found another teacher to relieve me and them.
Nothing can accurately capture the sheer misery of being hauled out in front of primary-school children for 25 to 30 hours a week with minimal training, if any, and the BBC’s mandate to ‘inform and entertain’, with entertain being by far the more important of the two. Essentially, every foreign teacher needs to adopt the persona of a Disney talk-show host, and roll out speaking game after speaking game. Without exaggeration, I have about four different games to amuse a child and get them to speak English using only a paper cup. If this was all a secret Chinese plot to get revenge on the English-speaking world for the sins of the Opium Wars, it does something to balance the ledger. Just ask any ex-training schoolteacher (few are stupid enough to stay more than a year) when they’re a couple of mojitos deep. To this day, anything resembling the image of a lazy, fat cartoon dragon called Leo (a recurring character in our textbooks) makes my stomach feel empty.
*
The training centre I started at is called Shane English, and is part of a large chain. Training centres are places that teach children after school and on the weekends. The industry had seen a big boom since the 1990s as parents sought to gain an advantage in China’s highly competitive university entrance exam, the gaokao. Many of these training schools try to inject fun into their courses, mainly to give parents the impression that their children are getting some semblance of a childhood. Usually, the schools can be found in glittering colossal shopping malls or scattered around office blocks. Mine was in a tall, black tower on the sixth floor. Parents would line the narrow hallways looking to score a nap where they could. It is common for middle- to upper-class students to attend around four or five extracurricular classes a week and get swamped with homework from all their respective institutions.
By about 12, they all slump in their chairs, any childish energy scoured from their bodies after years of over-schooling
From the perspective of any child, anywhere, it’s a raw deal and they know it. A lot of these training-centre children are brilliant, but it comes at a heavy cost. By about 12, they all universally slump in their chairs, any childish energy scoured from their bodies after years of over-schooling.
Angela (I have changed all the names mentioned here) was one of the brightest children I have ever taught, and, being about 10 years old, had not yet reached this point of lethargy. At my 193 centimetres, she was roughly the same height as my legs. She had short hair, a narrow face, and large, bright eyes. She moved with slow, clumsy, sloth-like movements and had strangely long limbs for her stature. A genuine pleasure to talk with, she would often join me and the other foreigners in the teachers’ office after class.
"So, Angela, what do you want for Christmas?" asked Jeremy, a balding teacher from California, about 30 years old.
"Hmmmmm . . . I don’t know."
Jeremy, another teacher from South Africa, John, and I smiled at her, as adults confident in their superior knowledge of the world always do.
"It’s normal to not know what you want for Christmas."
Angela’s eyes lit up and she started to smile.
"Actually, I know what I want for Christmas." She paused for effect.
"I want Taiwan for Christmas!"
We all laughed. Apparently, ‘Taiwan’ was one of the words we were never supposed to mention here at risk of being turfed out. Isn’t everyone in China supposed to be brainwashed?
"What do you think the Taiwanese children want for Christmas?" asked John.
"Maybe some of them want to be with China."
We nodded our heads cautiously in agreement.
"Yes, maybe some."
Her eyes lit up again and her smile became sly.
"Of course, if Santa Claus gives all of the Chinese children Taiwan for Christmas this year, next year they might ask for America."
Now we really laughed. I doubted that she needed me as a teacher.
"Angela, you’re too brilliant," I said.
*
In every school in China that I have worked at to date, I have met children this impressive — as well as a fair number of doorknobs. Although I had studied China a little before coming, my perception of it as a place inhabited by people waving around little red books was rooted deep. I didn’t expect jokes.
Training centres are filled with overworked children and alcoholic performers
I often see this belief in people who have never been to modern China. There are certainly a good number of nationalistic Chinese ideologues, and they are scary, but how representative they are is anyone’s guess. For some of us who come here, we do observe what should be a striking and obvious fact: there is no amorphic blob known as ‘the Chinese people’, no matter how often 1.4 billion people allegedly get outraged at star alignments on flags used in the Olympics or the latest tactless comment made by a Western politician.
In a way that better fits perceptions on the outside, China’s training centres have recently been targeted by a government ‘rectification’ campaign. I have heard reports from friends all over the country that stringent regulations have forced many centres to close. Part of me thinks this is for the best, as I seriously query whether many of my foreign compatriots should be teaching. I genuinely hope that children here catch a break. My organs weathered my first year much better than my dignity. Training centres are filled with overworked children and alcoholic performers; their owners drive new Teslas bought with fear money. There is a case for change.
Yet for all their faults, and there are many, private training centres are often the first impression that many young foreign travellers have of China in the twenty-first century. So with the closing of these centres, I can’t help but feel sad to see what seems to be the end of an era; although people here are incredible at finding a workaround, I doubt it will be the same. No matter the future of the sector, it was a direct contact point for millions of China’s youngest generations and an eclectic group of outsiders. In this period of estrangement, that may be something sorely missed. My first experience of China will forever be defined by a tasteless fluorescent green room, tired children, and a wall covered in peeling images of zoo animals. Taken with kind permission from the newly published Encountering China: New Zealanders and the People’s Republic edited by Brian Moloughney and Duncan Campbell (Massey University Press, $39.99), an anthology by diplomats, poets (including Hone Tuwhare), businesspeople, politicians (including Meng Foon) and others who reflect on their personal experiences of China over the last half century.
