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After asking advice from a few friends about the best carrier to send my ‘Art Gallery’, my collection of gifts, souvenirs and other memorabilia home by it seemed the German company DHL was in the lead. There were two problems. The first was that the impressive web site seemed designed to communicate its information to big companies who could afford to employ someone to attend seminars on ‘Understanding how to ship things through DHL’. As a mere expat teacher who just wanted to send some nice things home to help me remember my time in China I felt snubbed. My friends in the Hangda company said they would have a DHL rep come round to give a quote at a not too horrendous rate and I felt relieved. Then they said I should go to the website, download an invoice form, print it and fill it in ready for the rep’s visit, and I began to hear the word ‘impossible’ chanting in my brain like a work by Philip Glass. Luckily another friend asked if I had tried the Post Office. 

That humble institution had been eliminated early in the search, for reasons such as, reputation for disappearance of items during transit, refusal to take DVDs, slow service, etc. BMW and I checked the website and found my things could be sent for less than half the cost of the German company. Though it was said that DVDs for private use could be delivered by DHL I had decided to leave my 283 disks behind, selling them to BMW who was happy to keep them. We had spent many happy hours watching them together. MONEY was also very important to me by now as I wondered how to re-establish my life again in the wonderful world of Oz where the yellow brick roads require cars that work without too much maintenance or too many repairs.

The Post office won the day after agonies of choices. We were helped by our friend the local shopkeeper to find a strong young woman with a handcart to help us and got boxes from the PO to pack things in. It was a last minute process and not all of my allocations of things to boxes were clever. On Tuesday morning BMW and I and the strong young woman went to the PO with four boxes and a bag of clothes to transfer to another box.

The first box was handed over for checking and when we answered ‘crockery’ to a question about one item the clerk told us it would be broken and tried to take it out. I laughed and told her to leave it in. it was unthinkable at that stage to consider changing anything to another box and giving it to DHL who guarantee there will be no breakages. I had such a struggle to organize things that far that I had no energy to rethink. The big snow in Wuhan was causing all sorts of difficulties including disrupting international postage services. Somehow international mail could not be sent if the PO was not online and the connection had failed every afternoon for a few days. This made me edgy when the box tying process took a very, very long time and other customers came thrusting their goods at the clerk, who would obligingly put our work aside and serve them. Then we were given forms in quintuplicate to fill out and we borrowed a pen and set to work. This branch was out of the largest box size and I thought I would need two, not one but the clerk and I pushed worthy of a wool presser and squeezed clothes and sleeping bag into one. We had to write the address for the sender in Chinese and the receiver in English in prescribed places on each box.

Then we paid a small fee to the box seller/packer/inspector and moved on to the counter marked ‘International’ where a leisurely young man did his job of checking that addresses were in the right place and accepting the boxes for transit to Australia. The clerk’s main job seemed to be to check the quintuplicate forms for legibility and they weren’t. BMW and I returned to the desk with the pens and stamps and glue and  drew over the writing on almost every page of these poor quality duplicating sheets before they were finally accepted. Finally the insouciant young fellow finished weighing the boxes and sticking some of the duplicate forms on them and gave me the bill. I paid and we left. The payment was the only part of the process I was happy with as it really didn’t cost much at all. Much less than DHL. I was told the boxes would not arrive for three months and when I took that in I wished I had been more practical in my packing scheme and realized I would have to buy more undies when I got to Australia. Then I just turned and reeled off out of there into the -7 degree cold and went to the tea shop for a warm drink before going home to do the last of the organizing of my suitcases and carry on backpack.

There is one type of tragedy in China that I have been hearing about constantly since I came here, but it has never come closer than now. I was chatting with a friend the other night and she told me that she had received bad news from two friends. The first was that the brother of a friend had been killed in a traffic accident. You have heard my opinions on Chinese driving, particularly in Wuhan so I won’t go further this time. The second was a tragedy that has been all too common in China and is as strong an indication as any of the ignorant, self-serving, and callously neglectful attitude to business that is so often found in this spiritually disoriented nation.

When in High School one of my friend’s schoolmates had an accident serious enough to require a blood transfusion. This girl grew up to be clever and attractive, completed a university degree, and left her home town to gain a good job in Beijing, where she met a handsome young man and fell in love. Their love grew, then they decided to marry. They chose to obey the government regulation that young couples must have a medical examination before marriage. That is when tragedy revealed its presence. The young woman is HIV positive.

I can only speculate on other aspects of this tragedy. The fiancee might also have HIV as they have been living together for some time. If he hasn’t it is likely that his family will make them separate, such is the outcome oriented and materialistic attitude to marriage among Chinese, and the power of parents over ‘children’. There are many Chinese who rise above this culture so let me not assume but hope that this young man has sufficient love to care for his beloved through the terrible future as HIV turns into AIDS and she gradually descends to death. Or will the course of her progression be slower than his, if he has it?

How could she have been given infected blood? Ten years ago, when she was given the transfusion, AIDS was well known, and infection prevention strategies were no longer news in the medical world. But teams of blood buyers were touring districts in China buying blood from anyone they could persuade, collecting it with unsterilized equipment. These people were interested in gaining quantity at the cheapest price possible and didn’t give a damn about the welfare of the donors. They would then take the ‘product’ to hospitals and sell it and the hospitals would buy it with scant regard to the integrity of the supply process.

I cried as the enormity of what my friend was telling me hit home. A young woman and young man’s lives ruined. One, and perhaps two people preparing for happiness given instead sentences to early death. The killer an institution that was founded to save lives. When will such crimes cease in this terrible world of ours?

I am pleased to say that my employment experience in China has ended on a good note. My contract was not clear about whether the university I have been working at had to pay me a one way airfare home after teaching for one semester, so I was prepared for the worst. I will name this institution because they chose to interpret the policy in my favour and also gave me my holiday bonus. So today I had the equivalent of a thousand Aussie dollars delivered to me, refunding my fare home and giving me the holiday bonus. Fine people. Thank you to the staff of Huazhong Keji Daxue, Wuchang Fenxiao (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuchang Branch). I wish you all well for the future.

I must say my experience at that University has been entirely satisfactory. Senior staff were cordial in their relations with me and whenever I asked for help they tried their best to accommodate my request, within the limitations of the system they must work within. I particularly thank Professor Gu, for hiring me, Professor Li for being such a helpful and friendly supervisor, Mrs. Liu whose generous approval of financial matters is noted above, Rocky and Amber for being the best foreign liaison officers I can imagine, as well as the staff responsible for classroom equipment who gave me so much help operating the computers for me and helping me change rooms when I needed to use special equipment. Thank you also to teacher Wang, Emil, Ann, and others for your friendship to me.

Goodbye to all of you and you can be sure it is with regret that I faced the realities of my health condition and asked leave to return home.

In Australia we have an old joke. What would happen if all the cars in Australia were lined up end to end? Answer? Some silly fool would try to pass them!

On Christmas Eve I finished my class and took my usual bus for home. Twenty minutes later I should have been stepping off onto my local street. Not so. The journey took two hours. Luckily I had as my companion a jocund economics teacher with a lovely command of English and perspectives well beyond the limitations of most of his countrymen. It is rare to find a Chinese citizen who can laugh and joke on par with a Celt but God gave me this gift to help me endure the traffic jam.

We twisted and turned through a series of back streets and came out on one of the major streets that formed an arm of a major crossroads. As soon as we came onto the major street the bus stopped and for over an hour as we approached the crossroads our pace never reached a walk in the small intervals of movement we achieved. The street had six lanes divided by a central grassed strip. The grassed strip was raised by a ten inch kerb so it was impossible for vehicles to mount it. Our bus was on the left, next to the strip and my seat was also on the left. After about fifteen minutes I jolted to attention, noticing that there was another line of vehicles to my left, going in our direction on the other side of the median strip. It was made up of buses and trucks, mainly, asserting their right as ‘heavies’ to pass anything that got in the way. As we ‘progressed’ I saw that, characteristically, to the left of the heavies a line had built of another sort of heavy, more expensive looking cars, usually black. Cars of this sort in China seem to believe they can do anything they want. Isn’t it lovely how we speak of cars doing anything they want rather than the driver they personify?

I sat wondering where the police were? They were nowhere to be seen and they were making no attempt to stop the insane disobedience of the heavies. We continued toward the nexus of this phenomenon, my companion and I exchanging snide remarks and chuckling occasionally. I looked to my right and noticed that another extra line of cars, perhaps two, were progressing along the service road and footpath! Eventually, we got to the intersection where the police were feebly trying to move people in a way that gave a modicum of progress.  As we crossed the intersection at a snail’s pace I looked around me and saw that each arm of the crossroads had six or sometimes seven lanes of converging traffic and only one outlet lane. The Police were doing nothing at all to deal with the problem at its source by preventing the six to one phenomenon.

It is a characteristic of Wuhan driving that it runs on the principle of every man for himself. The Police lend validity to this rule of driving by taking no action whatsoever when someone does something outrageously against the written rule of the road. If no one is knocked over it is likely that a driver can get away with breaking any rule he/she feels like breaking.

The behaviour of ‘going round the obstacle’ is standard. If you have two lanes on your side of the centre line and they are blocked ahead of you, you can try going onto the other side of the road to pass them. In fact if you don’t the people behind you will think you are a silly fool. Oh, the oncoming cars? Don’t worry about them, it’s bad manners for them to object to what you are doing. Therefore a common peak hour sight is a road with four lanes in one direction and two in the other, on a four lane road.

It is this behaviour that built up to the situation of six to seven lanes entering that intersection on Christmas Eve from each arm of the hub, while only one lane was left free on each arm for traffic to exit by. How could people be so stupid? No, I don’t apologise for my ill-mannered assessment. It is only logical. Simple, really.

The old joke? Don’t bother telling it in China. No one will understand except my jocular companion. I thank God for him. He saved me from apoplexy by laughing with me.

Dear Students, I have to leave you and return to Australia. Sorry my friends, I didn’t intend this to happen. Unfortunately I have become too sick to continue as your teacher and will go back to my own country. I will miss teaching you and will miss China very much. I hope you will keep visiting my blog so you know what happens to me and I will be very happy if sometimes you write to me in the comments section below. I know your new teacher and she is an interesting person with a very wide experience of life. She loves China as much as I do and has been here for six years. I am sure she will become your friend as I did.

Let me encourage you once more to use English every day outside of classroom life. The more you talk with your friends in English the better your spoken English will become. One day you might become truly bi-lingual. That would be a treasure for life. Performance in exams is nothing if the ability is not there but if the exams reflect true ability you are an excellent student.

There is an unfortunate culture in China that encourages cheating and using ways to gain high scores that avoid the need for true learning. Without true learning there is no true success. It is all ‘emptiness and chasing the wind’. I know you are capable of true learning. If you seek true learning you will achieve true success. I wish you all well. I want you all to become the best kind of people and make your country and your families proud.

Your friend and teacher, Hugh.