Today we received our teaching assignments, and as it turns out, I'm going to Jiangxi. It's really hard for me to properly describe how disappointed and worried this news makes me, so instead of describing how I feel, I think it would be best for me to explain why I'm feeling this way, and hopefully you'll get some sense of how I feel. Jiangxi was one of the places that CSETC has summer camps, and it was the one place that I did no go to. However, other members of our group did, and one of them who was supposed to go to Jiangxi returned from Jiangxi and said that they wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with Jiangxi. It's a town about as big as the ones we have been visiting in these summer camps, and that is super worrisome.
Everywhere we've gone has been little podunk towns that have nothing to do, or any major features of note, and the thought of spending a year of my life in one is one that's difficult for me to face. I enjoy going out, and I enjoy having people to talk to, and it certainly looks like Miles, Vang, and I will be the only ones that will be capable of any sort of English fluency for miles and miles, and I'm afraid that I'm going to lose part of myself that I really like because of it. I like being able to talk the way that I do, and very little in the world is worth losing it, especially a job where I'm making $9.50 an hour.
It's also frustrating that I was placed in Jiangxi because it was the place that I wanted to be the least. I was alright when they canceled my first choice, but now that I have been assigned my lowest choice as my assignment, I can't help but feel that CSETC isn't listening to me, and doesn't really give a damn about me. They try to put on like they do, but I've heard enough stories from the teachers that I know that there's a significant amount of other things going on. Which brings me to another thing I've realized through this news.
I've had some pretty bad experiences here through the summer camp program, and I've tried my hardest to stay optimistic about everything that's happened to me because I thought things were going to get better, that I would eventually leave these small towns with nothing to do in them, these places where everyone gawks at me and seems to see me as something other than human, and get to a city where I can try to blend in and keep a low profile, but that certainly isn't going to happen anymore, and I'm not really sure if I can take all of this for the next year of my life.
Actually, this completely throws off all of my plans for my stay here in China. I was going to get another job to compliment my part time hours as a teacher and to give me something to do, but I doubt that the services of a non-Chinese speaker are going to be in high demand in a place other than a city. I was also going to further my research on China and multinationals, since I'm here, and it would be easier to get primary research her than anywhere else in the world. Because I'm not near any manufacturing centers, or any major industrial centers in general, that's also no longer a possibility.
People that have been to Jiangxi have tired to cheer me up by telling me that the students there are really good, and it illustrates a major difference between me and most people in the program, in that I'm not really here to be a teacher, and to set myself up for a future of teaching students in any fashion. I'm here to gain experience interacting with other cultures, and to see if I'm capable of living in a different country for an extended period of time, and teaching is simply a job that allows me to do that. To say to me that the kids are really good even if everything else isn't is like saying “Yeah, the job sucks, but they've got a really nice copy machine, so you've got that around.” It doesn't really do much to improve my mood. And to be completely honest, I don't really enjoy teaching.
As you can see, this is going to be a very hard time for me, and I'm going to do whatever it is that I can to try to change this, or to fix it in some way, but I don't really have any kind of hope that I can change anything, and I think that I might have to prepare myself for a really shitty year in my life. I really wish that I wouldn't have signed on without knowing where I was going. Hell, I really wish I wouldn't have come here at all. I'm very afraid that all of this is going to change me for the worse instead of the better.
-Cooper
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