10. Teaching in China
The school was trying very hard to please me and keep me here. (Not that I want to leave!) They bought me a DVD player and the TV it connects to was a really large digital thing with good speakers. The next week they reimbursed my fare in advance. Their usual practice is to give half after six months and half after twelve. I had to ask for the money to pay my bills in Australia or return to
Australia to find a job and pay them. Perhaps I was just bargaining, but I wanted to make sure I never got in that position.
I went to another restaurant. When I walked in everyone became really excited. The supervisor and another woman sent out an urgent calls on the mobile phone. A woman came rushing in first and joined in everybody’s attempts to find out what I wanted to eat. Then the first woman’s son came rushing in to help. He was in High School, sort of, and his English wasn’t bad at all. He wanted to keep up the acquaintance and is another person who has offered to help me any time. He was aiming to go to
Canada and was somehow studying outside of the school system. A clever fellow, he was lucky to have parents with the means to let him follow his own learning path. In the end he did get to Canada where he did a bridging course and gained entry to the
University of
British Columbia.
I played with ideas about making some extra money but never got them off the ground. One idea was to buy Chinese artworks and sell them through E-bay. Wycliffe, another Aussie, just had some luck in that area because the parents of one of his students own an art shop and gave him a painting by a recognized artist.
After my classes one day I went out shopping with a first-year teacher, Ruth. We first bought the simcard I have mentioned then went to the old city where I wanted to go back to the shop with the stone carvings to find out more about them. The shopkeeper, who is also the craftsman who made many of the goods in his shop, and Rose, were surprised at my ability to recognize Bhuddha and Kuan Yin figures (KY the goddess who hears people’s cries, or goddess of mercy) and that I knew at least a little about Zhuge Liang, an intellectual who was recruited by a ruler to be a General during the Three Kingdoms Period. There is a vast historical novel about this period in
China‘s history. In English it is called “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. I would like to read it one day.
We looked at other art and craft shops and returned to a market near the school where I bought a string of Christmas flags and two “Chinese Knot” good luck decorations which I will hang outside my room a day or two before Christmas. I’ll wear a Santa hat to class on Christmas Day for fun.
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