Where In The World Is Evan?

Sorry for the long delay in updates, however, life has been somewhat distracting these last few weeks (or should that be months?). I could offer many and varied excuses for this, but the legitimate ones alone would end up comprising the bulk of this post, so I’ll leave it at ’sorry’.

To give you all the highly abridged version of events: life is good, beer is cheap, and I have a well paying job and an apartment in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, People’s Republic of China.

To wind back in time a little, after stating my intention to remain in China I received a generous offer from a beautiful French woman (hello Anne!) to come and stay with her in the 5-star hotel where she worked and lived (in Chengdu). At the time we were in Xian, where we had meet at an Arab street market a couple of days before, along with Dave, a Canadian I had met in Beijing and had been traveling with for over a week, and Olen, an American that Anne had meet earlier that day. Nonetheless, and having no real plans for finding work to rejuvenate my now overdrawn bank account, I traveled 16 hours across China on a hardsleeper train to take up this hospitable offer (Anne told me later that the flight took about 2 hours). I suspect that if Anne had known how long I’d hang about she might not have been so quick with her generosity.

Despite my rather tenuous — and as I later discovered misguided — reasons for coming to Chengdu (a city of more than 11 million people, that I had never heard of before) it became immediately apparent that I’d stumbled into somewhere quite special. As I’ve been telling my students I think Chengdu is the nicest place to live in that I have been to in China. It is a huge place (think over half the population of Australia in one city), however, the inner city, in which I live, is quite small and easy to traverse on the complex system of busses that seemingly run down every street.

It also has the right mix of tourism, such that foreigners (and the western restaurants that they support) are easy enough to find if you are looking for like-minded company, but they are not ever-present in daily life (unlike much of Beijing and Shanghai). Chengdu is still removed enough from the western world that in some restaurants little children will clamor around to have their photo taken with the strange foreigner, or stop and gawk at me in the street

For a different perspective, and for those who want considerably more detail than I would have the casual reader subjected to, you can check out the resent entries (starting with ‘Xian, Part One’, and working up) in the blog of my American friend, Olen. He’s proven to be quite the unintentional biographer, as much that has been interesting and noteworthy in the last month has been shared with him - and by extension, has been extensively photographed and will eventually be documented in his blog.

Having arrived in Chengdu it was a simple matter or sprucing-up my resume and sending it off to about a dozen schools and universities that I found advertising for foreign English teachers on the internet. Many jobs never replied (a common practice I’m told) but several did. I went for an interview at a university on the outer fringe of Chengdu but declined the job offer based primarily on the location of the campus. The second place to call me back was far more centrally located, and offered a more lucrative pay package, so I took it on a six month contract.

The school I work for is called NA ESL. They provide me with a furnished apartment, visa support, and a monthly salary of 4,500 CYN (approx AU$700) which is far more than I need to live on. To cite but one example of the local economy the cost of a 528ml bottle of beer at a convenience store is
2.6 CYN, or as I like to think about it AU$0.40. I never though I would actually find a place where beer is cheaper than bottled water!

This surplus of income will send me to Tibet for a month in September and then around China for as long as it lasts, before I either find another job or return to Australia and my deferred honours thesis.

In return for this income I teach 24 classes per week (between 40 and 45 minutes each) at four different schools. To prevent an influx of foreigners working in China the government licenses who can and cannot hire foreign teachers. As such many licensed private schools (including mine) have set themselves up with their primary business being to pimp foreign teachers to schools that aren’t legally allowed to employ them. As such I teach ESL classes at my school’s offices on Sunday mornings, and teach oral English classes at 3 other schools in the Chengdu area, from Monday to Thursday.
Most of my students are between 12 and 16 years old which means that I have broken my longstanding promise to never teach at a High School.

Working for my Chinese employers is much like I imagine working for a group of 5 year-olds would be (and not just because they have a similar level of English competency). Whenever confronted with a problem they will simply tell you whatever they think you want to hear with absolutely no regard for the truth. If something will take two weeks then this is convieniently changed into two days, a claim that is repeated ever two days until the two weeks, or more, have expired. If you are then so rude as to point out that they have lied to you, and conclusively prove it during the argument in which they alternatingly feign innocence and ignorance, they will simply throw a tantrum that my baby sister, Cassie, would be proud of. After plentiful screaming in English and Chinese, lost of arm waving and table slapping, and a delightful refusal to ever speak to you again, the whole situation is capped off by them fleeing not just the meeting room but the entire office building, without any resolution to the situation you were attempting to discuss. When this happens successively with your boss, and then the director of the school, you start to wonder if perhaps you’re not taking the best approach with these people. However, the crowning glory is when you see them again and they pretend that absolutely nothing has transpired! From what I’ve read and been told, by other foreign teachers, this is pretty much par for the course.

Despite the above complications, and to wrap things up (as the internet cafe I am in is situated above a pay toilet, and the smell of stale urine is quite pervasive), almost everything is going well for me right now.