Tuesday, April 2, 2013

My Experience so far Teaching English in China


While we were planning our move to Kunming, we budgeted around the assumption that I would be able to earn some extra money as an English language tutor. Plenty of blog posts and other personal anecdotes seemed to indicate that this was relatively easy to acquire - especially for native English speakers with a college degree. As many of you know, China is pretty cheap; even if I could bring in $50 a week, that’d be a substantial contribution.

When we arrived in Kunming, these assumptions were quickly validated. The woman we are subletting our apartment from (let’s call her Maggie) immediately recommended I get in contact with a friend of hers who ran an English school in town (we’ll call him Chad). Within the first few days here, I met an Israeli and a Swede who both spoke English as a second language. They were earning $15 an hour tutoring in English and assured me that, as a native speaker, I could enjoy the going-rate of $25 per hour. By the second week, I was talking to Chad about teaching English at his school.

It wasn’t going to be possible to teach at Chad’s school since we’re only here for the short-term, but he said he knew a few parents who were looking for a tutor. He asked me to hold on for a minute while he went and called them to discuss the details.

Ten minutes later, he came back with two interested parents allegedly willing to pay $40 an hour. I was astonished at the higher rate! With those kind of prices, I could pay for all of our combined living expenses if I worked just 4-5 hours a week. However, things that seem too good to be true usually are.

After this fortuitous meeting, I talked with Maggie and a few other people in a position to know and they were all incredulous that I was being offered $40 an hour. They all said it was much too high. The next week, I sat down with Chad and one of the interested parents to hammer out the details of tutoring a little girl we’ll call Cindy. (Note: A lot of Chinese people have western names and a lot of the names are generationally anachronistic, so it would be totally normal for a little girl here to be called “Cindy”.)

The meeting lasted about an hour - the last ten minutes of which we actually discussed a schedule and the content I’d be teaching. God knows what they were discussing the first 50 minutes. I was just the white dude in the room for most of the time. One thing I’ve learned about doing business here is that 90% of the discussion is small talk and 10% is actual business. Also, bring gifts. There is a whole economy here of gift giving that we’ve had to learn about. At first, we thought we’d go bankrupt trying to get gifts for everyone, before we realized that re-gifting is totally acceptable.

I had no idea what they were talking about, but at that time, I at least knew numbers and numbers correspond to wage. I didn’t hear many numbers discussed, especially not the magic numbers that Chad had enticed me with the previous week. After we left the meeting, I asked him if the $40 an hour wage he had mentioned at the outset was still accurate. He stopped in his tracks, screwed up his face and said,
“No, no, no, that’s far too much to charge!”
“But that’s what you had quoted me last week when you talked to her?!”
“Did I? Oh my gosh, I’m very sorry. I didn’t realize that. I think $40 is too much.”
“Ok, what rate should I charge her?”
“Hmmm, I don’t know, maybe start with $30? Go to the first few classes and then later on bring it up to her and see what price she thinks is good.”

Mind you, $30 is still more than I had bargained for, so I was still happy with that. What concerned me was that I had just committed to a job without knowing how much I was going to get paid. Apparently, that’s somewhat normal here. As the connector, Chad was looking to score points with both me and Cindy’s mother by putting us together and working out teaching plan. He had nothing to gain from either relationship by wading into the distasteful world of money, so he left us to sort that out... even though I was under the impression that it had already been sorted out.

It’s China. Sometimes you just have to have a little faith and trust that things work out. If you only act on certainties, you’ll be waiting for a loooong time.

At the first tutoring session, Cindy and I got to know each other and her mom was never far away, monitoring our progress. I had decided that we would read the book ”Matilda” by Roald Dahl. Roald Dahl was one of my favorite authors as a kid and, since it’s about a bright little girl who overcomes adversities, I thought it would be a good match for Cindy. We’ve had six hours together so far and we’ve made it 6 pages into the book. It appears we won’t finish the book before I leave Kunming, but maybe we’ll finish the first chapter?

I don’t have much experience teaching, but I have done some tutoring in my day. To me, the most fun part is figuring out the level of the student you’re teaching. With Cindy, it’s been difficult. Her knowledge of English and cultural references has some pretty dramatic peaks and troughs. For example: she doesn’t know the words “adult” or “grown-up”, but when she read the word “genius” she blurted out, “THOMAS EDISON SAYS THAT GENIUS IS 90% PERSPIRATION, 10% INSPIRATION”. “Perspiration” and “Inspiration” came out a little jumbled, but otherwise she pretty much nailed it. And she definitely said it in all caps. Amazing! Also, she had never heard of the name “Michael” (Matilda’s brother) but when I quizzed her on the names of Matilda’s parents, she blurted out “NICOLAS SARKOZY”. Where does she get this stuff? By the way, Matilda’s parents names are Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood. Very little resemblance to Nicolas Sarkozy.

Our class runs from 5-7pm. At 6pm, her cousin gets home from school and things get a little sad. I don’t know the circumstances, but Cindy’s cousin is 11 - a year older than Cindy - and yet she has spoken not a word of English to me and shies away from me every time I try to speak Chinese to her. Granted, my Chinese is terrible and probably pretty frightening, but it’s unnerving to see the difference in personality between Cindy and her cousin.

Cindy’s parents are pretty well-off. They live in the most exclusive apartment block in town, which to me basically means that the facade is red-brick. I know of no other apartment block in Kunming with a red-brick facade. The apartment interiors themselves are nice, but nothing extravagant. The location is also good, but I only live a five-minute walk away and I can guarantee you that our apartment isn’t nearly as exclusive as their aparemtne.  As far as I can tell, it’s the red-brick facade that does it.

Cindy is the product of a privileged upbringing. She’s confident, sassy at times, speaks English really well and knows how to be the center of attention. Her cousin is not. While I’m there, at least, the cousin hides in her room and watches us from the shadows. When I invite her to join us, she ducks her head and runs off. At dinner, she gets served last and seems to generally be ignored. I imagine that her less well-off parents are trying to give her a better upbringing by shipping her off to live with the rich in-laws, but from what I can see, she’s growing up in the role of the red-headed step-child.

At 7pm, Cindy’s grandmother stops the lesson and serves dinner. This part of our evenings is probably the most educational for me. First, her grandmother makes great food and indulges my questions on what everything is. We’ve had some sort of pork belly every night so far, which is awesome, but she’ll also throw some curve balls in there like tonight when she served chicken-blood soup. My stomach was already a little squeamish after battling a stomach bug and that didn’t help. I managed to keep it all down, though.

Dinner can also be an alienating time for me. The rest of the family (grandmother, cousins, mother, sometimes aunts - the father is never at home as far as I can tell) sits down and converse in Chinese, as is natural for Chinese families to do around the dinner-table. I hope that I’m somehow learning things through osmosis, but sometimes, the conversation completely loses me. For example, at dinner tonight, Cindy and her cousin just randomly burst out laughing. I would have chalked the outburst up to just being girls in their tweens but even the grandmother was tearing up she was laughing so hard. Had I done something? What was the deal? Cindy was the only one who could shed light on the situation but all she would tell me was “poop”. It will remain a mystery.

Cindy and I had our third class together tonight - that’s six hours I’ve worked total - and I still don’t know how much I’ll get paid, let alone received any payment. Her mom promised to have the money for me at our next class on Tuesday. I’m an American capitalist, so of course I’m interested in getting paid but honestly, working with this little girl and sharing a few hours a week with her family is a wonderful experience that is more valuable than $30 or even $40 an hour.

There’s this sentiment here in China that discourages building relationships based on money. Once you get into a personal relationship with someone here, the balance of payments is calculated in gifts and favors - not money owed. The bottom-line isn’t necessarily cash, which throws me off a bit. Now, go to a factory-manager in Guangzhou or Shanghai, and I’m sure money still talks as loud as it does in the US, but in personal relationships, at least, money is taboo and people prefer to accrue and pay off personal debts to each other in other ways.

I suppose that, as a businessman, I should avoid the entangling tit-for-tat exchange of favors that makes up a personal relationship here; but where’s the fun in missing out on that?

1 comment:

  1. All she said was poop? Sounds like the perfect conversation to me.

    ReplyDelete