I was planning on writing a
retrospective on my experience here in China, and until yesterday, I
was planning on doing it closer to my departure from the middle
kingdom. However, the other day Melissa Hartz published her excellent
post on the same subject (You can read it here:
http://www.migrationology.net/1/post/2011/11/like-a-bad-meal.html),
and it has prompted me to take a shot at writing mine as well, or at
least a portion of it.
Time and time again I have asked
myself the same question that Melissa did: “If I could go back in
time with all of my experiences, would I do this again?”, and much
like her, I would honestly have to reply no*. I've had far more
miserable experiences here that I've ever had anywhere else in my
life, and I would have to say that they heavily outweigh the positive
experiences that this strange journey has brought to me. But there's
also that asterisk, and I've included that because what I'm really
saying no to is the experience of being here through the program that
I'm with. If I could do it with a better (Ok, probably much better)
program or no program at all, and if I could live in a city, I think
that I would be perfectly happy here, and that I would be thinking
about sticking around for longer than the year that I had originally
signed up for.
Because the thing is, I like teaching
here. On a bad day, I'm there to entertain kids, to get them to go,
“Hey, look at the white guy speakin' his white guy talk. He's
silly.”, and those days can get to be discouraging really quickly.
However, there are days when students actually get engaged and show
real creativity and interest, and those are the really fun days, and
they're the days where I feel like a real teacher, and not just a
clown. Those days feel really good.
I also, with the exception of Beijing,
like the cities here. Both Shanghai and Guangzhou seemed like very
liveable cities when I was a visitor there, and a lot of that had to
do with having things to do. In a city, there is night life, there
are places to go and people to meet, and here in China, a city means
you can meet people that speak your language. Both of those things
are hugely important to me, and they are both things that I didn't
have here until we met the other ex-pats in Fuzhou a month ago.
Before we met the ex-pats, the four of us here would sometimes hang
out in my room on weekends, and sometimes we'd go a weekend without
really seeing each other, and we'd just spend it in our rooms. It was
a claustrophobic and lonely way of life, and it sometimes still is.
It's also what makes life here so difficult. These last three months
have just felt like a long holding pattern in my life, like I'm just
here chewing my tongue off while I wait to get in motion again.
I know that I've talked a lot about
CSETC in the past five months, and I know that very little of it has
been positive, but that's because they're almost entirely to blame
for my situation right now, and they're the ones to blame for the
awful times I've had in this country. I said almost entirely for the
first part of that situation because I was the one that chose this
program. I can remember sitting in the orientation meeting at CSB and
saying “I picked this program because I've heard of sketchy
programs that will say that you're going to a city in China, and then
send you to some other place entirely when you get there. Because
this is through CSB/SJU, I think this is a program I can trust.”
Welp, guess I fucked that one up. I'll be going to fix that when I
get back home.
However, CSETC is the organization
responsible for all of the terrible experiences that I've had here.
They're the ones that decided that the hell camp in Quzhou was a
great idea, and a great place to send people who had been in China
for five days. They're the ones that couldn't coordinate with Guyuan
and left all of us to deal with the problems. They're the ones that
thought that a school in the middle of nowhere was a great place to
send four 22-year old teachers. They're also the ones that didn't
listen when I said sending us here was a good idea. They're also the
ones that deceived us into coming here with them in the first place,
and the ones that continue to lie to prospective teachers to get them
to come here. If it's something terrible that has happened to me
here, I can trace it directly to them. They have no business being in
the business they are in.
I'd like to provide some examples. Up
until my arrival in Beijing on July 4th, I had no idea
where I was going in China, as CSETC refused to tell me, deciding
instead to push things back “until my arrival”. Upon my arrival,
things didn't get much better. We got a list of places we were going
(except for the incredibly vague second camp 'Inner Mongolia'), and
we still did not know where we would be teaching fro the school year.
When we asked about that, all we got was “soon”. This should have
been enough for me not to want to go any further, but I'm apparently
real dumb. Then there were the summer camps. They could have prepared
us for the summer camps, but they chose instead to spend 6 hours
training us on how to run activities. They did not, and it created a
number of problems down the line.
Now, I'm not exactly sure how the
whole summer camp mess happened. Take Quzhou as an example. I would
say that it's probable that CSETC knew that the conditions in Quzhou
were going to be as bonkers as they were. If this is the case, CSETC
decided that they should withhold information from us because they
knew it was going to upset us. If this is the case, they're a bad
organization. There's a second option, though. It's possible that
CSETC blindly signed an agreement with the school in Quzhou, and had
no idea things were going to be like this. This theory is backed up
by Bonnie's surprise at our arrival. If this is the case, CSETC is an
incompetent organization. This bad/incompetent question runs through
the summer camps, all the way to Guyuan. CSETC had run a summer camp
in Guyuan before, they knew what the situation was like, but they
failed to tell us that we wouldn't have proper TAs, or that we
wouldn't have a place to do the activities they spent so much time
training us on how to properly perform. Now, it's possible that they
didn't tell us to keep us from doing anything before it was too late.
Bad. Or it's possible that they didn't realize that we'd need proper
equipment and facilities, despite knowing those things did not exist
at this location. Incompetent. It comes up in almost all of their
business practices. It's possible that their application isn't
intentionally deceptive, and that they just never updated it after
half the cities listed were no longer options. But that would just
make them incompetent.
There is one clear situation wherein
they were clearly not incompetent, and it was just before I was
shipped off to here. I was in the head of the program's office with
Miles, and I openly questioned if sending me here wasn't a good idea,
after all, I applied for Chengdu. Irene promptly swept the comment
under the rug, mentioning things about the rich history of Jiangxi
and the high level of the students here. “But Chengdu is a city,
and Lichuan is so awful people specifically requested not to be
placed there!” I finally blurted. I did not get a real response.
Now, don't get me wrong, I know there
are cultural differences here. For example, the senior staff at CSETC
can't understand why I'm not happy here. “The school is great!”
they say. The school is not the issue. What CSETC fails to realize is
that we're not in this to teach, we're in this for other things, like
the ability to have adventure, experience new things, and to be able
to enjoy ourselves outside of work, and those other things don't
happen here. But that's not how they think about it. For them, if
you're happy at work, everything's dandy.
If the point of CSETC was something
other than the placement of Western teachers in Chinese schools, I'd
be pretty lenient with them on all of this, but it's not. They want
to make money off the fact that they can deliver real, live
Americans, and if they want to do that, they have to be able to
understand why there's people in the organization that are not happy.
But they don't, and that makes them an organization completely
unsuitable for the business they're in, regardless of if they're bad
or simply incompetent.
But that's enough about them, let's
talk about me. If you haven't noticed, I haven't really written much
since my arrival at Lichuan #1 Middle School, and that's because not
much happens to me here. I feel as though I'm stuck in a state of
suspended animation. I'm not growing as a person, I just show up,
teach for a bit, and then piddle away my time until I have to teach
again. It's a low growth, low change environment, and I know it's a
product of this location because every time I get away from here I
feel more alive, even if it's just the standard ex-pat Friday night.
Before I had that... man were things ever bleak.
But like most good trips away from
home, it's taught me where I want to be, and who I want to be with,
and I suppose that makes it worth it in some twisted way. That having
been said, this is something that I never want to do again in the way
that I have done it. Is it possible I might come back to China in a
few years? Possible. Would I consider teaching again? Yes,
absolutely.
-Cooper
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