The Land of China, Part 3

After we were fired, on our first and only night in the Compound, my three fellow volunteers and I had a powwow to plan our next move. We had a decision to make: we could a.) call Scott, our American liaison, and ask to be transferred to another school that wasn't surrounded by barbed wire and wouldn't fire us, or b.) cut our losses and travel around the country, having tried and failed to secure a volunteer teaching job for more than twenty-four hours. Truthfully, I was already losing interest in the idea of teaching English for the summer, and was prepared to move in a different direction. I had been traveling around China for a week and a half by now, and was growing accustomed to the freedom. Teaching English had seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but now that I was actually in China, I had no desire to be restricted by a class schedule and, God forbid, the time required to plan classes and grade assignments. It quickly became clear that I was in the minority, however. The other volunteers still wanted to try their hand at teaching, and since I was terrified of being left alone, I went along with them.

Not to be lost in this story: although China can be chaotic and at time downright ugly, it also has some unbelievably beautiful spots. Slender West Lake, with its wooden bridges and traditional pleasure boats, was like the China of my imagination. 

We called Scott, explained the situation to him, and asked if there were any other teaching vacancies. It took him a while to work something out - like two full days. During this time, we holed up in a hotel in Yangzhou, fortunately on the teaching company's dime. We were stuck in a kind of limbo, in which we weren't sure whether or not we would be staying in Yangzhou, or whether or not we would be allowed to teach at all. In 48 hours, Scott called to tell us he had secured another gig for us in the city of Nanjing (where Krista and I had already been), a few hours away. So we hopped a bus to Nanjing, where Scott met us and accompanied us to another hotel. It was his job to travel around from city to city and school to school putting out fires like this one. His superior communication and problem-solving skills made him highly qualified to be the C.E.O. of cheapchinavolunteering.com (or whatever his shady program was called).That night, Scott snapped into action: he took us out to a club, got roaring drunk, danced the Running Man on a stage and passed out in our hotel room some time after 4 in the morning. Truly, it was an impressive display of professionalism.

Having done his job, he left us the next day, with the assurance that the directors of the new school would contact us in a few days with the details about our teaching appointment. Sure enough, two directors from the school arrived at our hotel that evening. We would begin teaching "soon," they told us, but we needed to be moved to a hotel closer to the school. We piled into a van with all of our things (including Craig's five duffel bags) and they drove us to a hotel on the other side of town, where we were to stay until further notice. The school's representatives lacked the ability to communicate clearly with us - or else they just didn't feel like it- and so we never learned the answers to some of our most basic questions: like, when did our classes begin? And where was the school? And why had we been shuttled to three different hotels in as many nights? And was it really the best use of a school's resources to house four volunteer teachers in a different cheap hotel every night? The following night, we were taken to yet another hotel on the outskirts of Nanjing - basically the Chinese equivalent of a Super 8. The building was hard to see from the main road, because it was behind a KFC.

These guys are everywhere in China. I must have stayed in at least eight of them.

By now, I was starting to wonder whether I would ever actually teach a class in China. But at 7 the next morning, I was awoken by a knock. Shaking off a mild hangover, I answered the door and was greeted by one of the school's representatives, nattily dressed and grinning politely. My class, he told me, started in an hour.


I threw on some clothes, gulped down a cup of instant coffee and was in the lobby in ten minutes. I was expecting to be driven to the school, but the representative was apparently not expecting to drive me. "How do I get to the school then?" I asked him. He looked puzzled, as though this question hadn't previously crossed his mind. "You call cab," he finally responded.


So I walked out of the hotel, to the road in front of the KFC, and hailed a cab. (They were everywhere in this city, and actually in every city I visited in China. And they were really cheap.) I pointed to the name of the school, which the representative had written on a note card for me. The cab driver shrugged - but without argument, he drove me three blocks to the school. What a waste of 70 cents.




I entered the building and signed my name at the front desk. Aside from a bored looking woman sitting behind the desk, no one was there to greet me - no principal, no other teachers, no volunteer coordinator. The receptionist pointed me in the direction of my classroom down the hall. I entered the room, where roughly thirty teenage students were already present, and I was on my way.

Truly, the actual teaching was the most conventional part of my experience in China. At this point, I had already taught a year at Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland. Class sizes were around thirty, and the population of the school was almost one third Asian. I had never been the only white guy in the room before, but in certain classes at Wootton, I wasn't too far from it. Besides, as I soon realized, most of these summer school students in Nanjing spoke average to above average English. They weren't too far behind most of my students back at Wootton.

Since I hadn't really been expecting to teach that day, I had to scramble a little bit to come up with three hours worth of lesson plans on the spot. It wasn't as hard as sounds. The idea was just to make them speak to each other in English, which they were more than happy to do. I remember that one of my activities involved having them give and receive compliments, which turned out to be pretty amusing. "I think you are very clever!" one of the boys told his partner. "Thank you for the compliment!" the partner responded.

Cabbage: Great as an ingredient in coleslaw, but not really an appropriate namesake.

Many of the students already had English names, some of which they had been assigned by another teacher at some point, and some of which they had chosen for themselves. Some of the boys named themselves after NBA players. There was Tracy (for Tracy McGrady), Allen (for Allen Iverson) and Kevin (for Kevin Garnett). Some others had given themselves names that were not names at all. Like "Cabbage" and "Seven" and "Qoo" (pronounced "Koo"). Others didn't have names at all, and wanted me to assign them. I was happy to oblige. I asked one boy what his Chinese name was and he responded with something I didn't understand. "Let's go with 'Howard'," I said after a moment's pause. He was pleased. "From now on I will be Howard," he proclaimed, as though I had just conferred a knighthood upon him.

Stay tuned for Part Four, in which my brief teaching stint comes to an end and I attempt to flee the Chinese government.