But I'm gonna try not to let this new ailment spoil my plans. I got back to this:
That's Jishuitan, the subway station I have to fight my way through twice a day. The place is normally packed! Now it's like a ghost town.
Here's a street in Dongjimen that is usually jam packed with cars, buses, bikes, and all sorts of vehicles. Empty! It's like Seoul during Chuseok here! And that was the plan. I kinda want to see some of the sites in Beijing, but don't want the annoyance of sharing them with five billion other people. It wouldn't seem like a holiday that way. So now I have a chance to go to the wall, the secret palace, the zoo and maybe a temple or two IN PEACE. The only noise will be my sneezing and nose blowing. But I'll take it. It's better than the crowds.
And there you have it. China: the land of lowered expectations. When I can see to the end of the block, have a warm meal that isn't toast, when I get wifi for more than 30 seconds at a time, I don't hate living here so much. When I'm not fighting a cold, my room doesn't smell like sewage, when I'm able to have a glass of cold water - pure luxury. Some days I'd just settle for meeting someone who doesn't just see me as an easy mark. But I've only been in Beijing. It's a business and government city. Two hideous things that could ruin ANY city. I'm hopeful that a change of workplace will eventuate in a change of heart for me. But that's me: always the hopester. I'm writing this all offline because NONE of the countries on the old VPN are working. I am hoping that a bit later in the day after typing some more I will be able to find one country on the VPN that works so I can get a few seconds of internet and update this blog post. Otherwise, it's all going to be wasted effort. A bit of a microcosm I got goin' here...
I keep thinking someday I will find a school somewhere that will benefit from my years and years of experience and hard work and won't be run by a pack of leeching, soulless vipers to whom I am nothing more than a commodity. If I ever actually DO discover that Snuffleupagus, it'll be a Pyrrhic victory at best. You've heard the saying, "Those who can, do, and those who can't, teach." This no longer applies to our brave, new world. The more accurate axiom would be, "Those who can, have to teach and those who can't, buy schools." I've been looking at jobs in Korea. The pattern for them continues as it has since I started there: it just gets harder and harder to apply. I spend a long time putting together application packages for every job, but the good ones, you can spend a day or two. Maybe even longer. I applied for a job at a university there that would have been comparable to several of the jobs I had in the past in Korea. Here's what they wanted: ALL the usual stuff including resume, cover letter, (which includes date of birth), and a full body picture taken within the last six months, because, hey, it's Korea! You can't possibly do a job unless you look like you can do the job. And teachers need to be young and attractive or students won't respect them. This is why K-pop stars and actors have vastly more influence than anyone else. One of the knocks on the recently impeached president of Korea was that she was either getting plastic surgery or getting her hair done when the Seweol ferry tragically sunk. This, you can be sure, lead to loads of disapproval from the Korean electorate, but you can be double sure that if her hair wasn't so sensational, it would have lead to more.
Of course after you have submitted all the information that is relevant to the position applied for, they make you go to their website and download a VERY detailed application upon which you repeat the relevant information and also have to submit a lot of irrelevant material as well. Your entire work history, sometimes your resident history, your teaching philosophy, your Christian testimony, (oh yes, and this is MORE, not less common!), a self-introduction and, believe it or not, a sample curriculum. An entire curriculum! You may not get the job, but, hey, at least a couple of your better lesson plans and teaching ideas will be part of the curriculum. So you can find some solace in that...
Then there are still the standard time wasters like medical checks, criminal record checks, possible interviews and sample lessons you have to travel to the school, (usually at your expense), to deliver... I know you might think medical checks and criminal record checks are more than just time wasters but we have to get them every year even when we have spent the previous year in Korea so could not possibly have committed a crime in our own country, and even when we have worked an entire year with no sick days taken since the last medical check-up. They are just Trumpy protection against the STD spreading criminals a lot of Koreans, (this too is on the rise not the decline), think foreigners are.
Another popular time, and money, waster is the old stamped degree. If, like most teachers in Korea, you've had your degree verified once, it doesn't ever need to be verified again. I got this straight from Immigration. Why do they make us do it again and again? I just told you! Time wasting. And the sealed transcripts from the teachers' university. This, thankfully is on the decline, but still requested sometimes.
There are other old standby's like the letter of referral and the names, numbers and emails of three people who you have known for x number of years. And of course the necessary documentation like passport, degrees and certificates, visa status, alien card etc. But even with all this crap, that could easily keep you busy for days trying to get a job at a place you KNOW will rip you off, take advantage of you, treat you with disrespect and maybe even ask you to participate in the academic fraud they are undoubtedly purveying, the Korean ESL industry put their heads together and asked, "What NEW and even more diabolical ploy can we add to the application process to thin the herd here?" And somebody came up with the certificate of employment. These are now required by most employers as proof that you did indeed work at the schools you have listed on your resume. And, of course, there are no schools in Korea who gave these out until this new fad started, so if, like me, you worked in Korea more than a few years ago, you have to go to the school you left, probably on bad terms because they ripped you off or demanded you commit academic fraud or broke the contract in many ways, and ask them nicely if they could give you one of these certificates of employment. And they probably won't because they are petty like that. I worked at a couple of places that promised at contract time to allow me to teach kid's camps during semester breaks. When I refused to sign fraudulent grades that gave, (actual example), 70% to students who never attended a single class, they said to me, "Well then we won't allow you to teach at the children's camps."
Basically none of this matters anyway because if you go all the way back to the top and look at the picture and the date of birth, those two things are most important. There is a persistent belief in Korea that a person can be read by their appearance, particularly their face. Which is why EH-VEH-REH body gets plastic surgery in Korea. You know that saying about poor people doing crazy things and rich people doing the same things but then they are eccentric? Well since Korea has become a very rich country, all the crazy shit they do is now covered by the blanket term, "enduring traditional practice." At any rate, I can't pass the most important age and appearance tests any more in Korea.
So I'm in China. Where I'm seeing almost all of the old tactics Korean ESL businesses employed before they got REALLY good at scamming their teachers. I was stopped on the streets of Itaewon during my vacation by a guy doing an internet broadcast about ESL. He was interested that I had taught in Korea and China. He asked me what the basic differences were. I have seen things like this in which people are asked what they think about Korea and they always cave and do the well-behaved visitor thing and try their best to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. I hate that kind of head-in-the-sand self-delusion! And I have often exclaimed while watching one of these weaklings, "Come on! Be honest! Say something like, 'I am surprised to see how well Koreans can use forks!' Or, 'Just greet the person in Korean and laugh hysterically at any Korean response.'" But there I was, admittedly worn right out with the flu, but I was just too tired to get into the realities of the ESL industry so I just said something like China is about 10 years behind Korea. I even said it in a nicer way like, "I am seeing a lot of the things in the Chinese ESL industry that I witnessed 10 years ago in Korea. But China's demand for ESL is huge and they will quickly develop." ... into the highly efficient scam artists that control the industry here in Korea... is what I should have said. Oh well, off camera he asked about the pollution and I was honest about THAT.
The job I have now, we were brought over on business visas for full time jobs. Passe in Korea but still a good scam in Indonesia. It allows the employer to take full advantage of the employee's vulnerable legal status and pile on the work, rules and micromanagement. What can the worker do? He or she broke the law just by coming over. If the employer breaks the contract, or the law, it's just, "Hello, Kettle? This is Pot. Come in, Kettle!" Then there's the old testing scam. You test the students at the beginning of the term and give a brutally hard test. Then at the end of the term you give a ridiculously easy test and at least SOME of the credit for the apparent improvement is enjoyed by the school. They share the remarkable results with prospective saps, uh - I mean customers and the scam goes on. The school where I work now just created the bell curve of all bell curves so that if you get half the questions right, in some cases fewer than half, well that's just 100%. We were giving out 100% scores to kids who had trouble writing their names on their tests.
I recently applied for a job up in Harbin. It was an ad online that didn't include much information. Usually they tell you things like vacation time, class size, schedule, but these things were conspicuously absent. This is a sure sign that the worker is not going to like the information when, or if, he/she gets it. But I sent an application anyway just to see. It took quite a long time before I got a reply. It was, "We are interested in your application. When do you finish your current job?" The one good thing about being hired illegally is you don't need to worry about giving notice or breaking the contract. The contract is toilet paper. I told the guy, nicknamed Steven, that I am available for their February start date. I told him I'd get in touch when I got back to China. Which I did. I sent him a message telling him I was available the next day. He said, "Okay let's WeChat tonight at 10 PM." Another aged tactic. Don't let the worker think he/she is calling the shots. Make things inconvenient for him/her to show them who's boss. I agreed to the WeChat phone call. Well, of course we didn't have a good wifi connection so we struggled with that, but it was nothing compared to my struggle trying to get simple information out of this artful dodger. He got all the info he wanted from me and I managed to get some from him but he eventually just passed the buck to another worker and told me I could get all the information I needed from her. What I DID find out from Steven was that the salary would be about 1300 bucks a month. The lowest I have ever worked for has been 1700 and that was for 12 hour weeks and 5 months vacation. I asked about vacation and even though this was a university and I would be teaching full credit courses, (or at least that's what Steven told me), I would only get "about 3 weeks" vacation. He also said that it changes all the time. How, when the semester breaks are in excess of two months, pray tell, Steven, will I be teaching full credit courses the whole time? No, they have summer and winter camps. I wouldn't doubt they are KID'S camps either. Then he reluctantly answered another important question: class size. He said it would be about 70 but then quickly added that with my experience, teaching would be easy. I said, "Sure, but marking tests, homework and assignments certainly won't be easy with 70 students. Hell, remembering their names won't even be easy." And I didn't say that most of my preferred lessons are group interaction lessons and those are much harder to do in large classes. Even though Harbin is nice and cold, has a big yearly ice festival and is better than Beijing, I was all but ready to give up on this job. But I agreed to talk to another person about things like schedule, visa, accommodation, texts and other things Steven hadn't told me.
Almost immediately I get a WeChat friend request. It's in Chinese so I don't know who it is. She sends me a few messages saying that she would like to set up a Skype interview for the next day. I told her I just want answers to a few questions about missing details in the offer and ask if she could please email me. "When will you be available for a Skype interview. I prefer this because it is more direct." Here's what I did: NOTHING. I just put the phone down and didn't answer. She didn't send me any follow-up messages either. I guess they got the message. But even in China, the employer holds all the cards. They'll find some other schmuck, no doubt, who isn't quite as familiar with the tricks of the trade and who will sign up for the worst year of his/her teaching career.
HOWEVER... That's a big however. I have an offer from what all preliminary indications have shown to be a decent place of employment with some decent people working there. I have kind of been on hold here with the cold and the Spring Festival national shut down here, but I'm going to get busy looking into this opportunity as soon as I can. I don't want to jinx it so I'll wait till it's more solid to blog about it. But it might not be too long before I have an actual apartment, an actual work visa and an actual contract again. I have to renew my actual passport first. I have less than 10 months left on the one I have. But the embassy has been closed. And here's one for ya: You can't pay for a passport in cash any more. The government of Canada, no doubt under Harp-ass, has made it MANDATORY for every citizen who wants to be a proper citizen and/or maybe travel to another country, to have a credit card. SO I'm not Canadian if I don't sell my soul to the evil money changers at Visa or MasterCard. These are people even Jesus couldn't stand! They have to be our friends or we don't get a passport.
Okay, there are ways around this, but I am outraged. What possible reason could there be for not accepting cash for a passport? I don't know yet, but I may have to go back to Canada to get my proper work visa for this job. A Z visa it's called. And I have a few things I could do more conveniently in Canada like get some new cards to replace worn out ones. But smooth talking, easy on the eyes prime minister notwithstanding, I don't know if I want to go back to Canada. Anyways, I will have to send money home to Canada, and the banks are all closed, so that I will have enough in my account to cover the new passport purchase. Then I will have to hope that my debit card, that can sometimes act as a credit card, will be good enough for Passport Canada. Otherwise this'll be just another in a long list of fucking asinine manoeuvres necessary for me to continue my highly rewarding and lucrative career as an ESL teacher.
To be fair, I chose this career because teaching, planning lessons, even correcting writing and marking tests, involves little to no stress for me. I have always said it's the management and the political bullshit that are the cause of all my stress in this gig. It has gotten to the point where I'm at my stress threshold. If this job doesn't work out, I could see myself throwing up my hands and saying, "Fuck it," for like the fifth time, and giving up once again on ESL. Unfortunately, none of the alternatives have been better. So I guess it's crossroads time for me. I'm sure you are as anxious to read how it turns out as I am to type how it turns out.
Keep your blog dial tuned right here to find out.
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