A try at being serious.

Usually in this blog I'm flippant and irreverent, at least when I'm not angry. Since I've been challenged, however, to write something that's difficult and thoughtful I thought I'd first try my hand at being serious.

I'd like to introduce an old woman to you. She's nobody special. I mean obviously she was someone special to her family and friends, but on a scale beyond that she was nobody anybody knew about or would care to know about.

I saw this woman almost every time I walked between my home and the nearest supermarket or the nearby bus station. Say I saw her about three times a week. She was a shrivelled-up little thing. Short. Wrinkled. Every (visible) piece of flesh sagged under the weight of years. I would guess she was in her late seventies or possibly even older.

How can I guess her age? Whenever I saw her, she was sitting outside of the little house—shack, really—that served as her family home as well as a teeny cigarette and booze shop. The shack had four generations of people in it ranging from a child not much older than Lucas to this woman. A bit of math and I've got her in her late seventies and possibly even her early eighties.

This woman was in the deep throes of dementia. It was clear every time I saw her that she did not have much time left in this world. She would sit in a crudely-made bamboo chair under a piece of fibreglass sheeting propped up by a stick acting as a crude sunscreen and rain shelter in front of the family home, stare down at the ground and mumble to herself constantly. She didn't interact with anybody; her family would address her with respect and kindness, would take care of her, but she never really directly acknowledged them.

This was the normal state of affairs. Sometimes, however, she would, fleetingly, show glimpses of awareness of her surroundings. She might smile at what was probably her great-grandson, for example, and reach out to him. Or (and this is where I come in) she might actually look up at the world, see a stranger—a foreigner—and smile with almost childlike wonder. These moments were rare as far as I could tell. I maybe saw them once a month or less. It was their rarity and their unexpectedness that made them inexplicably valuable.

The more perceptive readers will have noted by now that I persist in using the past tense to speak of this woman. About two weeks ago, you see, something changed in that home and tiny shop. A large wreath suddenly occupied that primitive shelter in front of the shop that the woman sat in. Too, the house was alive with visitors: people smoking, people playing 麻将 (Mahjong) – people, in short, having a good time at all hours of the day and night for two days straight. I caught this at roughly 6PM and then again much later in the day. It was clear that the family was awake and active around the clock.

Why is this significant? That's how the Chinese mark a death. Think something along the lines of an Irish wake and you've got it about right. To help ease the spirit of the dead person into the afterlife you celebrate. You don't go to sleep (or, rather, more accurately, there's always somebody awake and active). In this way you drive off the evil spirits and calm the recently dead. Everybody in the family and in the circle of friends participates in this ritual to ensure that there's no time without the noise of a happy family.

Why else is this significant? That old lady I never knew anything about, but who would on infrequent occasions make eye contact with and reward me with a smile of purest wonder and joy, I've never seen since. When the wreath disappeared, so did she. I've never seen her sitting outside the little shop that was her home since.

This leaves me unaccountably sad.

OK, before Mom kills me...

...I should probably keep my promise, albeit two days delayed.

This is another Lucas entry people, so if you're not interested in a parent's obviously unbiased view as to his spawn being the cutest thing in the world, move along. I understand there's a blog featuring paint drying that's probably more interesting than this one will be.

So, I keep getting asked what Lucas is like. I keep getting stymied in trying to explain it. How, exactly, do you describe a whole personality in a few, short sentences? Lucas is a human being (if only just barely at times). And despite being under 18 months old he's still a complex creature. For example he's got "exhuberant, laughing bundle of joy" and he's got "cranky, whiny little thing". Talk about range! Jack Nicholson Heath Ledger's got nothing on him!

OK, snarky levity aside, I guess it's time to try and explain what Lucas is like. I'll supplement this with a few pictures.

From Lucas

In general Lucas is a joy. He's happy and mirthful and interested in everything around him. Even the things I don't want him to be interested in. Perhaps especially the things I don't want him to be interested in. You've all seen his happy, interested face in previous entries so I won't bother showing those. Direct your eyes to the picture on the left instead for what his face looks like when he doesn't get what he wants. What's happening there? He wants something and Daddy isn't giving it to him. So he's grabbing Daddy's leg and looking really cranky.

Now usually Lucas isn't cranky. He's cranky a little bit when he's tired but doesn't want to sleep. He's cranky a little bit when interested in something that we won't share with him. Otherwise, however, he's fine. Except when he's sick. Like he was this week, with a cold. See that cranky face above? Imagine a week of this. (This isn't to say that he's always cranky when he's ill. He's just cranky a whole lot more often and switches from giggling to cranky faster than Sichuan Opera singers switch masks.)

From Lucas

One of the other things you don't get to see much of in photos is Lucas sleeping. This is a tragedy, really, because it's one of the things that he's really, really good at. He sleeps with gusto (as you can tell from the photo gracing the right). A bed that's big enough to hold two adults (one of whom is known for being a restless sleeper no less) isn't big enough to hold Lucas without having a tent around him to prevent him from splitting his head when he rolls off. Like he did last night. The rolling off thing, I mean, not the splitting head. The tent on the bed (which, again, you can see in past pictures) saved him from everything except the fright of his life. His screeching howls brought three people to his room in about two heartbeats only to have him suffer the indignity of having those same three people laugh at his terror as we found him trapped at the foot of the bed by the tent. (I know this makes us awful human beings, but it was damned funny!)

From Lucas

Of course he doesn't always sleep in a bed. When Joan and her mother go shopping they bring Lucas along and Lucas often gets worn out from pointing at things and grabbing at things and in general getting overstimulated and overexcited by things. A lot of times when they return, the picture you see to the left is what I'm greeted with.

We generally just leave him in the stroller until he wakes up by himself. This could be hours later.

From Lucas

The walking thing that had us so scared earlier in the year has gone swimmingly. Lucas now trundles around under his own steam and turns our hair white one at a time as he does bone-headed things like walking into corners and door or stumbling over deceptively level floors. Luckily we have a harness rigged up on him that usually permits us to catch him before he hurts himself. The main problem here is that he just gets so excited with whatever has his attention that he forgets about small things like "balance" or "not being in the same place as hard objects". We don't always keep him in a harness, though, as you can see by the picture to the right. (The indistinct thing in the bowl, incidentally, is Lucas' very short-lived pet shrimp. No, I will not be explaining that any further.) Mostly we have him in the harness when outdoors (because falling there can be really bad) or when he's tired and his balance hits levels that in Canada would make a breathalyzer test mandatory.

So there's a thumbnail sketch of my son. The extrovert toddler inflicted upon to introvert parents. (I'm sure that I'm being paid back for something in a past life. Saṃsāra can be a real bitch.) I hope this has given enough of a taste that I stop getting hounded by a frustrated grandmother who has yet to meet her grandson. (In a similar vein I hope that peace breaks out in the Middle East and that I get a hunk of that green cheese from the Moon.)

A shift in direction...

For years Jeff has been my little hole in the Great Firewall that allowed me to download pornography access the web unhindered while living in China. Basically the Great Firewall is a joke that only stops lazy people and stupid people (neither of whom you really want on the Internet anyway, so you could view it as a public service). Jeff, very kindly, kept a server in his basement hooked up that allowed me to redirect all requests for web pages that were deemed a danger to the state here through a Canadian server that allowed such things.

About a month ago this server's connection went flaky and died. Jeff, being newly married and kind of in a complex part of life, didn't have the time to check it out. I didn't mind, though, because very few sites I really cared about got blocked. That changed this week as Blogger turned out to be a threat to the Chinese government. It became imperative that the problem get solved and, for some reason, Jeff was incommunicado.

I decided that it was really unfair to have Jeff be responsible for my free (as in freedom, not beer) Internet access and embarked on a project to change this. So as of today I have my own tiny, cheap VPS in the USA that runs my little backdoor to the rest of the Internet; the stuff the Chinese government thinks is too dangerous to be seen. Like my blog here. The one I'm posting. Telling you what a bunch of utter shitheads the Chinese government is for being afraid of my little key-clickings telling you harmless, inoffensive things about China (for the most part). Apparently I am a danger to the state. Funny, I don't feel any different from last week this time....

Mr. Hu Jintao? I want the six hours I spent debugging this setup back. Please mail it to me you frightened little child.

Ever have one of those days?

So...

I'm not sure how to begin this, to be honest. It's just too damned surreal a day. It started off normally enough. I woke up a half-hour before my alarm went off and stared at the ceiling because, for a change, I'd actually had had enough sleep. I had a nice leisurely shower and breakfast and then ambled off to work. I came home, did the job search thing, planned my week's lessons for Wuhuan Engineering and generally relaxed or played with Lucas or both.

3:15 rolls around and I hit the road. I got to Wuhuan way early and wound up playing a video wargame on my N800 for almost an hour before my classroom was opened. (They're way off out in the boondocks, you see, and bus service there can be very, very fast like today or I can wind up with scant minutes to spare because of snarling traffic. Yes, I said "snarling" there. It's called a pun. Look it up.)

Anyway, my teaching goes exceedingly well (I have a really good class in Wuhuan and love teaching there), but the first bit of surrealism invades at about that point. Joan calls about an hour in at 6PM. She'd forgotten I was off teaching you see and was on her way home from work when the batteries in her scooter ran out. She had called to see if I could come out and pick her up, taking the scooter home. Since I was about a three hour walk (more, even?) away that wasn't really feasible so the poor little girl wound up having to push her heavy scooter home a distance that's a good 20 minute walk for me at full speed without a load. And push the scooter up the hill. It's a pretty damned tall hill.

Anyway, I finish my teaching, catch the shuttle bus that takes me about half-way home and then the public bus that drops me off about a 25-minute walk from home. (About 5 minutes, yes, away from where Joan ran out of battery power.) As I get off the bus, I call Joan to make sure she got home OK. Had she left the scooter somewhere, you see, I'd have picked it up on the way seeing as I carry the keys with me for just such a possibility.

Joan made it home alright, but she wasn't in the apartment. Nor was her mother. Nor was Lucas. They were all stuck out in the hallway because Joan's mother had broken the key off in the lock at about 5PM after returning from some shopping. They were stuck outside and had already tried one locksmith and were on their second in getting the door opened. Needless to say I rushed home as quickly as I could, finding my family sitting in the stairwell while a locksmith hammered and picked and hammered and picked and hammered and picked and ...

Well, I got it in my head that perhaps food would be needed for the spud (and the rest of the family, but mostly the spud). It was 9PM by that time, however, and any of the places we'd have wanted to get appropriate foods from were closed. I was sent off on a mission to get some things and managed to find none of them. I instead had to get more expensive alternatives that were sorta-kinda the things we'd sent me out to get in the first place.

This emptied my wallet, incidentally, of all my spending money for the month.

This trip itself was a half-hour round trip so I got back shortly after 9:30 and, just as I pressed the elevator call button, I got the message that the door was opened and I didn't need to go get the food after all.

Lovely.

So how was your day?

Annoying aspects of life in China.

I went, at Joan's behest, to give a sample lesson at a language training school. I had misgivings about things even before we went and, to my intense depression, found that my misgivings were, if anything, optimistic.

First off, they wanted a 40-minute sample lesson. For a class of students ranging in age from 3 (!) to 9 (!!). This is, flatly, on the face of it, ludicrous. "Oh, they all have the same English level" is not a defence. A three-year old has the attention span of an average gnat while a nine-year old has the attention span of at least three gnats. Teaching to one will bore the other, no matter what.

Oh, and of course, I had about 15 minutes to prepare for this lesson. And nobody could tell me clearly what the students had or had not yet learned. "They've almost finished the first book." "How many units remaining?" "We've started on the second book." "So you've finished the first?" "We've almost finished." Ad nauseum.

So I assembled a lesson from nothing for an age group I have no experience with and an age range which is clearly ludicrous. Only to find out that the main teacher of the class was basically incapable of communicating in English. Joan had to do interpretation on those rare occasions where I needed instructions translated because the class teacher was utterly useless. And, of course, I had three-year olds mixed with nine-year olds.

To call the resulting lesson a travesty would be too unkind to real travesties.

Did I mention that it was incredibly hot as well? That we went an hour there and back for this? I didn't? Consider it mentioned now.

Yeah, so, well, I missed a day. Sue me.

Yesterday, courtesy of a week of insufficient sleep followed by a night with at most four hours of sleep I was a zombie come update time. I'd like to say that I decided not to write my blog but that's not what happened. Instead I sat at my keyboard and drooled lightly. No decision was involved at all.

I had my first Saturday session teaching at Wuhuan Engineering today. It went well. As is usual for adult students I had a class of motivated people willing to do what I told them even if sometimes they weren't quite sure why. (I always wind up explaining why, but I like to leave a bit of a sense of curiosity in my students at times to keep them interested.) The theme of this week's set of lessons was "learning how to learn" so I closed off the week with a semi-unregulated discussion consisting of them discussing (in English, this being the whole point) things like what they wanted from the course and how they viewed the relationship of teacher to student.

I got some surprisingly good thoughts from them. I really love teaching adult students.

In other news, it's hot now. Yesterday cracked 34C and today I think peaked at 35 or even 36. Even now, at 7PM, it's 31C. Thankfully we haven't hit the high humidity yet. It's only 55% which makes the current "feels like" temperature something like 35. Given that it's only early May, I think this summer is going to be a real scorcher to make up for last summer's mild summer.

Good news and bad news.

These always seem to come in pairs. (This is actually an improvement over how it used to work, so I'm not really complaining. Much.)

On the good news front, I started my 100-hour session with Wuhuan Engineering today. It was a delicious experience (as adult teaching in China always is because the students are highly motivated) and, at the end of the class, several students, independently, approached me to say how much they enjoyed the class. "I loved it!" as one young lady exclaimed.

On the bad news front it appears that I am not continuing to teach at ISSWHU next term. You may have noticed me referring to them as lacking communication skills (and competence, among other things) in my last post. This incident is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. On April 8th I got this in my email (all errors from original):

Secondly, could you let me what's your project about next semester, if you want still teaching in ISS ,please let me know as soon as possible. thanks!
If you want re-sign the contract ,and the Teaching office and students also approve your work, I will prepare the contracts as soon as possible, also , if you intend to leave, I will prepare your Lecommendation Letter for you.

I've highlighted the important part in bold text. This is typical of the way this school communicates. It commits to absolutely nothing until the last seconds. Every second word out of anybody's mouth is "maybe" or some functional equivalent thereof.

I'm not a moron, though. I replied with "sure", but also started my usual low-intensity job search because until I have a contract I consider myself as available. Indeed yesterday I gave a sample lesson/job interview at another school (which if I get the job could mean I won't even have to change apartments) because there was deafening silence from the ISS. Two weeks after they sent that message, in fact, I sent another email saying, basically, "I replied before but haven't heard anything so just in case it didn't make it through..." and again got deafening silence. Then, today, I got this email:

Firstly, many thanks for your hard work in our school these three years. You are a excellent English teacher.
But I am sorry to say that we have enough English teachers for next semester, so I am afraid we can not sign the contract with you. If you find a new school I will prepare the recommendation letter for you.

So what happened? Well this being China any number of things could have happened and nobody will ever bother to tell the truth. Maybe I stepped on some toes and someone behind the scene decided to get revenge. I consider this unlikely, however, since I've been here for three years and my behaviour hasn't really changed in that time. Had I been stepping on toes there would have been two previous opportunities to get rid of me.

The possibility I think likeliest is that the school is in financial trouble. The hints of this I already saw in my second year, second semester. The East Lake ("Sweathogs") campus has always been this school's cash cow. The main campus gives them a sort of legitimacy in that they give out real, recognized degrees there (they're real Wuhan University degrees with the Wuhan University stamp) while the East Lake campus is where the (very wealthy) dregs of China's educational system wind up. The gallows joke doing the rounds among the foreign teachers was that the school had a skill-testing question as its entrance requirement: "Are you willing to pay double the going legitimate rate to get a degree that is worthless? (The correct answer is 'yes'.)"

What happened, however, in year two, semester two of my time here was that half the students vanished. Vanished because the ISSWHU had its accreditation threatened, specifically because of the complete and utter lack of academic standards at the East Lake campus. The school had to divest itself of half (or even more than half) of its students at East Lake or face closure. That had to hurt income!

More clues arise over year three. Suddenly East Lake campus has an Italian guy and a Spanish guy teaching English, something that sounds an awful lot like cost-cutting to me. Also they reneged on a promise to me that I wouldn't have to teach out at East Lake. This sounds like it was a case of mollifying the administrator at that campus (who bizarrely seems to have more power than the Dean) who was probably upset at the difficulty in selling English lessons by non-native speakers. (The irony is that the two guys in question, despite being non-native speakers, are better English teachers than several of the previous native speakers were! Remember, appearances are what counts in any kind of business, not actual performance.) In addition my teaching hours got reduced from the first term (14 hours raised to 16 when one of the foreign teachers went back home to die) to the second (12 hours).

The big clue, however, is that even at the main campus they're losing students. I'm teaching the same four classes this term that I taught last term, but what I've noted is that all of my classes have shrunk. They all had 29 except for one at 36 last term, but this term my largest class has 29 and my smallest 21. Discussing it with other foreign teachers I'm also seeing that my shrinkage is on the lower end of the scale. One teacher reported a drop from 36 to 16 students. (I note here that this isn't students just not showing up to class. This is students who've moved on to another school!) Talking this over with some of my better-informed students I find out that the students in general are very disgruntled with the poor quality of education they perceive the school as providing. The better students stopped studying for their ISS classes and instead studied for a placement exam that would allow them to move to a better school. The rest are increasingly despondent and bitter. Only a few have done the "given lemons, make lemonade thing".

So why was I singled out for not being continued? Well, I'm the most expensive of the foreign teachers. A combination of better credentials, experience and a raise for year three probably made me the one to cut as the accounting death spiral begins.

Thankfully I'm a cynic and didn't put all my eggs in one basket, eh?

Film at 11.

I'll just let my son speak for himself again.

Mounting income.

So, the first request from the string of "I'll talk about that in the future" things in my last entry was for details about money. This came from Melissa Barna, the wife of the son of one of my mother's best friends. ("Confused? You will be on the next episode of Soap!") So, Melissa, this one is for you!

The school I currently work for is not especially generous (nor communicative, nor competent, nor...). Actually none of the government-run schools in Wuhan is especially generous unless they're off in the "suburbs" (the locals' term for the farmland surrounding the city) and desperate for people willing to live away from anything resembling civilization. The practical upshot of this is that at 4700元 per month, I'm not exactly rolling in cash. A single person can live very comfortably off of this, but with three more people (one a toddler with all the expenses this entails) it becomes, well, not a strain but more bland a lifestyle. And it's definitely not conducive to building up a good savings account. This is why, of course, I ignore my contract and do extra work outside of the school. (Everybody does it and contracts are basically wallpaper here anyway, so it's not as if I'm doing anything risky.)

One job I've had lined up since October of last year is a three-hour weekly stint at a local middle school. My weekly salary at 12-16 hours (currently 12) with my main school is 1085元. Adding an extra three hours of teaching boosts that by 450元 because I'm being paid 150元／hour in the sideline job. (By way of comparison my main job's hourly rate ranges from 68 to 90元/hour depending on how many hours I've been assigned.) So basically it's a nice almost 50% boost to my pay (from 1085 to 1535元/week) that does the family good and it's not a whole lot of extra work.

There is, however, another job I do. It's an infrequent one, but it's incredibly lucrative. A local engineering firm does a lot of international business. They take the ability of their employees to communicate with foreign business partners and customers very seriously and, as a result, have embarked upon a very ambitious project of upgrading all of their employees' English language skills.

A former colleague of mine worked contract for them for a couple of years. Last summer he was told that the company wanted to run two courses and asked him to recommend another English-speaking language instructor. Now for a variety of reasons (this is China, after all) the original plan fell through, but I guess they were impressed by me in the interview, so when the usual fall course opened they had me split hours with Peter. (I originally felt a little uncomfortable with this because it felt like I was being used to replace Peter, but Peter had by then gotten an even more lucrative, full-time position so he didn't mind.)

The courses they run are 100 hours in length, 10 hours per week. And they pay a whopping 280元/hour. That's more than three times my hourly rate even this term where I'm teaching only 12 hours a week in my main school. And it's almost double the rate I'm paid by the middle school. This means that my weekly income is now 4335元. So by taking two extra jobs I'm almost quadrupling my base weekly income for the next ten weeks and I'm almost tripling my previous total income with just that one job!

I worked it out. Last year I only got 7 hours out of the 10 per week (with Peter getting the remaining 3) so I earned from that company 19,600元 for that one session. That's 4 months of my base salary, by way of comparison. This time around my total income from that company is going to be 28,000元; about six months of my salary at my main school. Thus for a lot fewer total hours of teaching (albeit more preparation work being required since each 10-week course is about 3 terms of English teaching hours!) I'm getting about the same amount of money. (The school only pays me ten months out of the year, you see.)

On top of that, the school still has the added problem that I hate half the students! I'm still teaching the Sweathogs, though at least now it's fewer hours than teaching my real students. By comparison even the worst of the engineering company's students are well-motivated and hard-working. So I'm getting less money, more work and students I hate. What's keeping me teaching here?

Well, this is where China's systems work against me. To stay in China I need a job with an employer sanctioned by the state to hire foreigners. And to be fair to my school I get a few benefits from them to go along with the headaches of incompetent administration, poor facilities and, in many cases, terrible students. One of those benefits is a rent-free apartment; another, subsidized utilities.

Still, for two 10-week sessions I make as much money as my main "real" job. If I could get a third one guaranteed that would more than cover my costs of having a business visa, renting my own apartment (or paying for a mortgage on one) and would leave me with a whole lotta hours to fill with other possible ventures (or a whole lot more hours to spend with my boy watching him grow while driving his mother and grandmother insane).

Yeah, I'm still working the angles.

Back in the saddle.

From Lucas

So, it's been almost a month since my last update and I've had several people (Roger, Karim, Barb, Mom) nagging at me to update finally. And you know what? They're right. Yes, I've been a busy little sleep-deprived beaver, but that's not a good enough reason to ignore the blog completely.

From Lucas

So, to make up for this, I'm (tentatively) committing myself to updating this blog every day from today (Tuesday) until Saturday. Then I've put my blogging commitments every Sunday in my Google Calendar (which I am also tentatively committing to keep up to date) so that you know without having to nag what's up.

From Lucas

OK. So this is going to be another Lucas post. After a partial application of the treatment (we pulled him early because of a bad respiratory illness contracted while in the hospital), Lucas has had a near-miraculous improvement. He's now walking, verging on running, like a champ (presuming, of course, that champions routinely stumble and wind up just this side of falling flat on their faces only because their parents or grandmother has cat-like reflexes combined with a sixth sense for baby stupidity). When I squint right, I still see hints of the problem that he has, but he's adapted really well once shown the way and, so far, we've seen no strong need to return him for a second round. (We may still do that, however, especially with the recent two-month-and-a-bit tripling of my salary which I'll get into in a later post.) On top of everything, Lucas has, since his treatment, been in general a whole lot more cheerful (and cheerfully destructive, which again will be highlighted in a later post).

From Lucas

And he's car-obsessed. Which again, you guessed it, will be highlighted upon in a later post.

So what will I be talking about in this post? Well, frankly, not much of anything. I thought I'd let my son talk for himself in the medium of being too damned cute for the camera.