Not Another English Teacher

Just another English teacher in China perhaps taking his job too seriously? Judge kindly

[gzteacher]

Are you surprised that a culture that highly values white skin is racist towards black people? Its never been a secret that asians are insanely racist. You’re a fool to get a job in china.

Is this a trick question? Like, the implications would either be "Yes, I'm surprised. Woe is me; I've been bamboozled!" or "No, I'm not surprised at all. In fact I knew it well before sending my CV, decided meh that's not so terrible, and came on over anyway 🤷‍♂️"

Either way, my blog is just a reference point for those interested in a raw perspective, or are curious about the ugly sides of working/teaching abroad and might want to either reconsider or gauge the situations with their own experiences, measure their own abilities to cope and navigate and then see if the trouble is worth it.

Very few of any of the [non-white] expats out here are trying to hold hands and sing songs with mainland China, and many have support systems and communities out here to help navigate through most things, including me. At the end of the day, we're out here getting coin and making tracks once we've done what we came to do 💁‍♂️

[gzteacher]

I'm still here.

I work for a school directly now and we've finished a school year.

This was me at one point trying to find an apartment in China:

I was legit considering living in a hotel because of this. I posted on WeChat explaining the situation and the secondhand embarrassment my local acquaintances experienced moved two in particular to step in and help me find a place to stay.

I didn't want to talk to the school's HR because she was hounding me about why I didnt have a Chinese girlfriend. She asked with her whole chest during the interview if I was changing jobs because of a woman.

Even as a fluent Chinese speaker, going to those housing agencies and watching them call up landlords and explain to them that a foreigner wants to rent, only to overhear the landlord asking "white? or black?" was never not embarrassing.

Everyone was all "dial 123456 and report them!" Tried that. I was all automated prompts which then lead to an app I had to download but then couldn't use because I didn't have a Chinese ID. No surprise, honestly, but was worth the shot I guess? (A lot of institutions are designed on purpose to be exhausting. You can know this in a place like China because they'll tell you straight up: If you wanna complain about is, dial this number. Good luck lol)

It was only luck that the person who reached out to help me was the random gym trainer who added my WeChat after searching for a place to workout literally 2 days prior.

Fast forward to now. School's out. Typical shenanigans: students making accidentally racist microaggressions. One kid commented that "it doesn't look right having a teacher who should be a rapper or basketball player; I don't think you're professional and can't take you seriously." And after the whole apartment malarkey, I could only give him a look, shrug my shoulders, chuckle at his inbred ignorance and keep teaching. Too tired to give the you-probably-haven't-learned-this-about-yourself-yet-but-you're-racist talk. It's 2020something, I'm saving my energy.

I'm just here to save up to leave. That's all. I now have friends in a different country and I'm working to collaberate with their career endeavors more intensively.

I'll be out of here soon enough. Just need to get a few things in order.

[gzteacher]

Hope you're doing alright! ❤️

Doing my best!

[hilarioushumorfromouterspace]

[gzteacher]

the SSHHHRRRIIIIINNNEEE of the SILveR moNkeY... 😤

[gzteacher]

And update on leaving the school/company:

I've signed the forms for my visa cancellation, release letter and oath statement (basically, a document that declares all the information I've submitted is correct).

Still no new place to stay yet, but I don't think I'll be able to even search for that without a new residence permit in hand.

The next thing on my list of things to do get another health check apparently. Making an appointment for this went horribly because the travel health center in Guangzhou is booked pretty much year round. You'd have to had made an appointment months ago just to get a slot in time to switch jobs. So, I'm going to Foshan to do it... somewhere not as popular.

I figure I'll stick around Foshan until it's time to pick my health check results back up. Once everything is in hand, I turn it all in to the new school.

And then we pray that the new work permit will be processed in time for me to also get a new work visa....

This looks like a time crunch and it's making me anxious, but kudos to meeee? I made all the phone calls with the traveling center, the Visa office, and the Foreign Experts bureau and managed to have everything explained to me.

Quite the confidence boost, that.

Wish me luck?

[gzteacher]

Home stretch.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I've been in with the same company for years working for waaay less that what's apparently normal (I get lots of weird looks when I talk about my workload and salary?? like...) Now I'm getting ready to quit and go with a school directly.

I'm scared. I don't know who to trust really. I turned in my cv. The department head thought it was good. We did the interview. Tons of landmines there, but everything faired well.

(I've not signed anything yet, but they're asking for me work permit and residence permit? Is this normal?)

I'm getting a high school job. It all started when I sent a message to the company about extremely inconveniencing everything has been here. They offered to make adjustments. The adjustment was literally changing a literature course to academic writing... which meant even more work than what I was doing with the literature course, if no change at all.

The other option was to have me moved to a school where I'd teach 19 groups of students, 40 students per group... reading and writing...

One assignment would finish me.

I don't trust their judgement, and I'm not willing to turn a job that encompasses all my majors into glorified babysitting. Those local teachers suffer no foolishness when it comes to teaching language, and unfortunately the reality of too many foreign teachers is either deliberate foolishness or them being made fools of due to miscommunications and negligence from all sides.

I don't want to be a part of that.

I don't want to be like these other international teachers I've worked with who can just whistle gleefully up and down the halls, not a care in the world because they understand zero of the Chinese being spoken around them, about them, over them and near them.

They don't catch any of the nuances, the passive aggressive remarks, the pervasive mistrust, the draconian outlooks, the robotic sentiments, none of that. They get the filtered English. They get to "guess" the tone through missing words and misplaced expressions.

It's a clown show.

I know it seems like I always have a bunch of negative stuff to say... and that... is absolutely true 🤣. The most I've done about it in 8 years and this now: quit the company and sign up with a school directly.

We'll see how it all turns out.

The worst that could happen is the company could get all vindictive and bully me out of trying to get a release letter even if I follow the contract exactly. Despite all the positive comments they've given me before, they could already flip script and turn hostile. Or the new school could be lying about everything. They could be a nightmare of an arrangement a troupe of foreign faces with no presence at the school beyond being just faces.

But I'm going to focus only on what I know is true: the likes me, they're very much looking forward to working with me, they're eager to have me around....

(... trying desperately not to jinx anything 😭😭)

Rather this is fear or intuition telling me to just run to the hills [elsewhere] will be a matter of time, I suppose.

[dicapito2-deactivated20230424]

To anyone who’s thinking this way

[salty-red-mage]

[gzteacher]

I remember at the beginning of the outbreak when 🇨🇳 was literally naming and shaming people in public articles for catching it, and if you were foreign, it only kicked the ccp style xenophobic nationalism into high gear. It was more than enough to convince folk that it was a "bad person's" virus, to the point where people were legit embarrassed to even mention being sick at all.

[gzteacher]

Yeah, I need a new career because this teaching thing ain't it.

After about 12 years of this, nope nope nope nope.

This semester has been a spiral of burnout. I've had to cut classes 5 minutes, 10 minutes, some 20 minutes short because I legit had nothing left to teach.

Five curricula, only one of which has a textbook that's super difficult to teach out of unless I do 90% of the lesson in Chinese. The book was written for students from India, clearly, as all the articles and compositions reference people and places in India more than anywhere.

The rest of the classes, I'm still building from scratch. It takes me about 2hrs to do one PowerPoint/a set of lecture notes and that's not including any practice sheets or classroom activities. Those, by the way, I either have to think up on the fly or search for online. (And those that I find online, I have to tweak ad nauseam, otherwise the kids won't follow and the whole segment of the lesson is just pulling teeth).

I'm not enjoying this. I'm putting in waaaaaaay too much work, to the point where I'm walking into the classroom 3 minutes before class begins, my mind a total blank, as I have no idea what the hell could be taught for the day.

So I'm having to put in my best Oscar award winning performance, winging an entire lesson until.... nothing.

"Welp, that's all I got for today. Stay in this classroom please and stay seated. You can do other homework or whatever until the bell rings."

It never feels right. I can't plan AND research AND get activities together AND do homework/exams AND grade things for 5 courses.

It's embarrassing because as a teacher, if i can even call myself that, I expect students to be hard working. I can barely put a homework sheet together without them zooming through it. Online worksheets are never enough, as the ESL ones are either too easy, waaaay too difficult or are poorly put together.

If I could just have 2 or 3 courses.... like everyone else... not 8, not 5... I wouldn't have to worry about students complaining to their homeroom teachers behind my back about how we're not doing enough/anything.

I can't tell students that phones or laptops aren't allowed or that they aren't allowed to play games because I'm literally doing nothing.

I can't ask them not to chat with their friends idly during lessons when they're already expecting the lesson to "end early".

I can't explain or reveal to the students that the reason why they rarely if ever have homework and almost never have exams isn't because I'm a "laid back teacher who's just, like, blah-whatever chill lol" but because I'm exhausted and don't have the time because I spent all my energy and resources doing that for other classes.

Something tells me that the fact that I can't find a single person who can relate with this much detail leads me to believe there's something wrong with me.

[gzteacher]

It's 1:00am.

And I can't sleep.

Damn near every single traumatizing memory is having a reunion in my head; I can practically feel heat emanating from my skull, there's so much going on.

They're called panic attacks - and not panic fair-fights - for a reason. My mind is being ambushed by real memories that have tagged fake memories along to wreak havoc on my peace of mind. I was so ready to go to sleep.

But then I started thinking about the five classes in a row I have tomorrow. Five different lesson plans that I haven't done because I spent my weekend trying to grade papers.

Trying.

Barely got a quarter of everything done. I find it difficult to grade compositions for arguments, supporting information and conclusions when the grammar, logic and writing mechanics are so... unnatural... that I'm having to translate things in my head to make sense of anything.

I'm quite burned out and am only able to handle maybe 2 of the 5 courses at a time per week. And when I do focus on 1 or 2, the remaining courses suffer: the students don't have enough to do, they complain that they aren't learning anything, that the work is too difficult or the lesson objectives are vague.

And they're right.

They can tell that nothing makes sense; that I'm just throwing whatever at them. I hate that they're suffering. I hate that I don't have the stamina to meet all of their academic needs in a more professional manner, that I'm just throwing random workbook pages at them, that I'm burning through 50 minutes reading/translating/explaining a long passage that has nothing to do with anything and then providing zero skills to focus on or zero practice.

Just a few rounds of was-anyone-listening questions.

It's embarrassing.

What's even more disconcerting is that as much as I just want to go AWOL tomorrow, another teacher already pulled that stunt...

That bastard... beat me to it.

In the past twenty minutes, I've gone from angry to nervous to sad to numb to angry to scared to confused, repeat.

Shit like this is why people assume I'm waaay older than my actual age.

[brucefromfamilyguy]

[theprideful-deactivated20251201]

you have auditory processing disorder

[gzteacher]

"I'm going down down baby, Yoshi and a mango~" - Nelly, Country Grammar (2000)

(pic credit: @dabathhouse )

[gzteacher]

Last year was 8 courses. This year is 5.

Call me lazy but I still think that's too many.

2.

2 is an acceptable number of courses for a teacher to plan for. 3 is workable but 2 is ideal.

And it can be 2 courses being repeated over different groups/grades/levels, but 2.

Really starting to question all of my life decisions.

Yes, some of the courses were taught last year so you'd think that even though I'm teaching 5 courses, 2 of them would already be ready to go and I'd essentially be just working on 3, right?

Nope.

I was never able to make a fleshed out curriculum out of any of the courses I taught last year because ever lesson plan was literally just for survival. No extensive thinking went into it. Worksheets were either pulled from random websites in desperate need of edits or just thought up on the fly and written on the board for students to work on 🙃

(That work never got graded, by the way 🙃🙃)

Saving my coins to get out.

Seriously downsizing now, which for me means skipping a meal every now and then or eating the same thing for months at a time.

This isn't fulfilling anymore.

Teaching has gone from being a career to just another job for me at this point.

[gzteacher]

Not sorry.

This is what my life feels like teaching in China. The only "impact" I'm making is keeping a bunch of spoiled rich kids entertained.

"But the students really like you!" yeah, as opposed to wanting me to die? Like I'm supposed to feel "good" about students not throwing things at me or yelling obscenities at me? because of how close to reality that alternative is??

I want to be appreciated for being the teacher that breaks complicated things down into simple, digestible pieces; the teacher that always opens the floor for discussion; the teacher that makes students feel safe, knowing that if they have a question, they can always find me because other teachers are too busy; the teacher from whom students learn to appreciate classical and modern Western literary works.

But no.

I'm funny.

At first parents complained about their kids being in my class because "Black person, oh no! The infection! The lack of education! The statistics!!"

Now they complain about students not being in my class, and they're afraid their darling little angel will be bored.

Not fucking sorry. These schools are just training centers with front gates. I need to do some research about legit international schools round these parts. I'm sitting on an entire MSE being a stand up comedian to a bunch of kids who sign up for my classes for no other reason than them thinking I'm funny.

I'm ashamed to even call myself an educator at this point.

The embarrassment of talking to students I taught who then graduated, went to school in some Western country, and signed up for literature classes legitimately thinking they would be an easy A.

I jus-...

[gzteacher]

Shit like this

is but a reminder of how much my work in China is an exercise of patience until my contract is up.

I.

I didn't fight anyone. I didn't yell at anyone. For what? I don't have the patience to give a lecture on implicit biases or the psychodynamic development of Blackface (don't fight me on this one, plz, I'm tired).

So I pulled this number:

My way of cordially inviting this entire school to kiss the DARK side of MY ass.

Part of me is frustrated by the whole "Ohhhh, they just didnt know any better. I'm sure they didnt mean anything by it..."

Shiiiid.

[gzteacher]

So do any other teachers just stare at a wall an hour before class and think, Wow... I have no idea what I'm going to teach today 🙃

Or is it just me?

[gzteacher]

Furry... wombat... strawberry!? 🤣

[gzteacher]

@furrywombatstrawberry 与我无关吧？您找错人了。A random tumblr post is not the best place to pitch a professional or diplomatic offer? Plus you've been misinformed. I switched off right before the second comma.

[gzteacher]

So do any other teachers just stare at a wall an hour before class and think, Wow... I have no idea what I'm going to teach today 🙃

Or is it just me?

[gzteacher]

Furry... wombat... strawberry!? 🤣

[gzteacher]

School is staring soon, and I'm scared.

The anxiety is keeping me up.

Here I am, a grown ass man, freaking out at the idea that I, a tall fluent Chinese-speaking Black foreigner, am going to be in front of a grand total of 193 Chinese teenage students in a week.

Every year it's the same spiel. Every year I have to put up with the "Oh sorry, I didn't realize you understood me" followed by the awkward laugh because there's always at least one who will make a racist comment right in front of me.

Shamelessly. And will point and laugh without even flinching.

And I have to stand there, unable to unhear the "hey look, a BLACKIE! lol" or "wow, what an ugly h**g**! (the Mandarin equivalent of the N word)" or "holy shit, that BLACK guy scared the hell out of me!" comments.

Right. To. My. Face.

And I have gather myself, NOT get angry, and then find a way to address this AND THEN pretend it never happened... because that's how they do here.

The first lesson has always been me dodging the random innocent *cough cough* tokenizing, commoditizing, noveltizing questions: "Do you play basketball?", "Do you eat tacos?" (in reference to Kobe Bryant and Taco Tuesday) "Do you do drugs?", "What kind of rap do you listen to?", "Will you rap for us?" (I don't even care for rap... or any music for that matter...).

Every year. No matter the age group. This has been my experience. A fleet of spoiled rich kids who have been led to believe I'm there to entertain them with talks of Robert Frost and New Orleans when really we're just learning how to read and there's no textbook available to help with that. An administration that never understood was racism was until covid happened. Two other foreigners who are blissfully unaware of damn near EVERYTHING. Chinese teachers who witness this shit and runaway hoping I don't call them over.

I'm tired of being the school clap trap.

It's upsetting how I feel that I'm the only person in this big ass country who has no idea how to deal with this, as all the other foreigners like me (fluent in Chinese, of African descent single, in China and not courting or engaged to a local) have left.

I feel numb.

Whenever this is China thing is over, assuming it ends with me still alive, I'm going to need all the therapy because this is traumatizing as sin.

[jaesig]

"If it mattered to you, you would make time."

Honey, 90% of my time, the only things I can 'make' are messes and things complicated. K?

[gzteacher]

Chile...