la0wai

I think I'm growing to hate China. And when I say that, I do not mean Hong Kong or Taiwan in which ideas like democracy, human rights...where Chinese people actually live with dignity.

One of my coworkers was recently fired. He missed a class because of some errors in communication between staff. My boss specifically said that he was firing him because the foreign teachers took too many sick days this month (I didn't take a single one, in case you're wondering) and he wanted to make an example out of him. He didn't care why he missed the class. He also didn't care about the terms of the contract they signed or the fact that he's worked for them for over three years.

I could dissect and analyze certain aspects of (mainland) Chinese culture that I feel are relevant to this, but I don't feel like it.

China is currently convulsing with political controversy. Bo Xilai, the CCP secretary of Chongqing, was recently purged. Before that incident, he was widely believed to be a future member of the Politiburo, a group of nine people who basically run this country. Bo became very famous in China for three important reasons: a very aggressive campaign to stamp out organized crime in Chongqing, his own model of economic development (the so-called "Chongqing model") and...I'm not really sure how to explain this part. Just know that Chongqing under Bo was probably the reddest it's been since the Cultural Revolution.

I won't delve into the reasons why I think he did any of the things he did in this entry. But I will tell you this. His downfall exposed tales of corruption so wicked and evil I'm not sure anyone could actually make it up. Graft on a multimillion dollar scale. Murder. You can get away with all of these things and more in China as long as you keep the peace.

The CCP is frantic right now because Bo Xilai's downfall has exposed a lot of evil deeds, and it's obvious that he's not the only leader here who has ever abused his power for personal gain.

I think that this is the Achilles' Heel of this country. This will stop China. This country is run by a very small group of people that will probably pay any price to hold on to its power. The Pentagon is always bitching about increases in China's reported defense spending, but they actually spent more on domestic security last year than they did on their military. This culture of corruption and control is smothering these people and their leaders don't actually give a shit because all they care about is themselves.

And these weaknesses trickle down to the tiniest microeconomic level. My boss has the power to have this guy's visa cancelled. He knows that he has a lot of power over him in this country and he's using it as a club to beat him into submission because this is a struggling, poorly run business and they have to use dirty tricks to stay afloat. They wouldn't last six months in the US because they'd get hit with so many lawsuits they'd have to flee the country.

There are people who have jobs with descriptions that say they need to help foreigners when they're being treated unfairly by their employers. I met these people in Zhengzhou once and they were the laziest, most good for nothing sacks of shit I have ever come across. I met another one here in Harbin recently and told her about problems that I've been having at work and so on, and she just told me to go to another fucking office of a different ministry and didn't even tell me where it was. And this was probably because I didn't grease her palm. In the US, people go to college to become lawyers and doctors because they want to make money. In China, people want to work for the government and become PAR-TAY members because they can make so much money on the side.

Anyway, I've gotta meet my girlfriend at the airport. Fuck China and fuck the Chinese Communist Party. This place will never overtake the USA because the CCP would probably start nuking cities to hold on to its own power.

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My job sucks so badly I can't summarize all of the reasons I feel this way in one entry. So I'll just go with one or two in this one: It interferes with my studies and my personal life and my boss is a dishonest, mean, miserable, ugly, worthless sack of shit that wouldn't be able to hold down a job in a more civilized country.

I signed a contract to teach for 22 hours per week. The contract further states that I do not have to do overtime if I don't want to. My school has a bad reputation in this city, so they can't recruit foreign teachers locally. People are already reluctant enough to move to this city as it is because it's cold, isolated and unremarkable. Most people don't teach English overseas for more than a year or so, so they don't want to waste their time in a boring place like this.

When I started working at this school, we had about 18 teachers. We have about 13 now, but there was a point when we had less than ten. We recently hired three more (now we have 13 and I am bad at explaining shit), but it took over six months for management to trick anybody else into working here.

This shortage of teachers that we experienced for a while matters because as a result of it, management started to force everybody into doing overtime whether they wanted to or not. I put up with it for a while because winter break came and I had time and I wanted the extra money. Right before school started, I emailed my boss and politely asked him to reduce my hours to the agreed level, but he refused. He accused me of being a bad teacher and that he'd fire me, cancel my visa and have me "blacklisted" if I refused to cooperate with him. I've been doing overtime ever since.

I am being paid for these extra hours, but that isn't the point. I want to focus more on my studies. I'm falling behind in my classes because I spend so much time at work. My girlfriend regularly complains that I don't spend enough time with her. We live together, but I spend twelve hours in the office on Saturdays and Sundays. She stays at home doing nothing. Hell, even during the week I'm at the office until 8:00PM.

The worst part is that there's nothing I can do about it. One of my (now former) colleagues refused to teach a couple of classes and she was promptly fired. She has a new (and better) job now, but that's not the point. The point is that I don't need that kind of anxiety right now. That lady isn't struggling to learn Chinese and she isn't clinging desperately to the only stable relationship she's ever had. I am. I don't want to risk losing these things because I crossed some unscrupulous asshole. Things actually could turn out worse for me than they did for her. If my boss decided to fire me and not give me the paperwork I'd need to get another job, I'd be in a world of pain.

I know that I'd be able to get around just about anything this guy throws at me, but I'd rather avoid confrontation altogether. Like I said, I don't need the stress. I'll just have to muddle through the next four or so months and hope that I'll manage to secure a better job later.

I really wish China's visa laws weren't so backwards. I've heard that English teachers in Japan own their visas and can leave a job whenever they please. That's not so in mainland China. Employers have too much power here and they can and often do abuse their foreign employees. The shenanigans would probably stop if we foreign teachers had the right to leave if we're unsatisfied with our jobs for whatever reason.

And we do leave sometimes. It's just that usually when a teacher gets pissed off and decides that he or she has had enough, they go back to their countries of origin or go teach in another country because those are their only choices. And with them they take bad memories of being in China, and they share them with their friends, their families and whoever else will listen, which makes China look like a bad place to live, much less work. It's already hard enough to get people to teach here because places like South Korea, Japan and the Middle East treat their foreign teachers so much better.

The demand for foreign teachers here will only increase in the future because Chinese people are so desperate to learn English if for no other reason than to get higher scores on admissions exams. It's obvious that there's already a shortage of foreign teachers here.

Ideally, schools would only hire teachers from a small number of English-speaking countries. That is reflected by the labor laws here. But I've worked with Russians, Africans (not South Africans), Austrians...people from a lot of countries who can't legally teach English here either because they aren't from certain countries, they aren't native speakers or both. If they could find enough of us, they wouldn't need to lie to their customers about our nationalities or our qualifications.

Oh, well. I'm tired of writing about this. Happy birthday to me.

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Eli Porter recently claimed to be "the Skrillex of rap".

What the fuck does that mean?

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I went to Shenyang with my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago. When I made up mind to leave Zhengzhou, I was determined to come to the northeast. Shenyang is the largest city in this region and it, along with Harbin and Changchun and maybe Jilin, were on a short list of cities I was considering.

People always say Shenyang is just a big, dirty, boring city. To some extent, it is. But I think I'm biased because with the exception of that trip I took to Shenzhen during Chinese New Year this year, I hadn't spent a day outside of Harbin, much less the northeast.

I'm tired of life here for a lot of reasons. The local cuisine isn't good. There were a lot of northeast style restaurants in Zhengzhou, but now that I'm actually here and have eaten more than my share of it, I know why it's not very famous in China, much less abroad.

People in Harbin are lame and often not very friendly to foreigners. I probably have the relatively large and much shittier expatriate Russian community to thank for that. People are constantly mistaking me for a Russian here and it does affect the way people treat you. One of my former colleagues revealed to his landlord that he was British and his attitude towards him instantly changed. Before that moment, he was cold, dismissive and unhelpful. After that, the next time he came to his apartment to fix something, he was wearing a sweater with a huge Union Jack on it.

But I was talking about Shenyang.

It's a lot bigger than Harbin. They also have a subway. Not a big one, mind you, but it's new and it's clean and I found it convenient. They're building one in Harbin, but it probably won't be finished by the time I plan to leave. There is also a significantly greater variety of food available there. It's home to this Manchu restaurant that has a few branches in other cities in China (only Tianjin and Harbin, I think) that was amazing from top to bottom. I know I just complained about the food from this part of China, but this was really good. If only it were always like that.

The best thing about Shenyang is its history. It's basically the capital of Manchu culture and I'm pretty sure it was the capital of China for a while at the beginning of the Qing dynasty. I was able to visit a lot of really beautiful historical sites like the Forbidden City (they have one in Shenyang too) and the Qing tombs. But the historical stuff isn't limited to the Qing era. There are a lot of things left over from the Japanese occupation of Manchuria as well.

One thing Harbin is better for than Shenyang is drinking. I only wen to one bar down there, but it was a lot more expensive than any place in Harbin. And they water down their drinks.

I'd say more, but I need to go home and do more work and then probably go get drunk.

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TIME TO START THINKING
America in the Age of Descent
By
Edward Luce

"In any case, China's relative economic rise is a
good thing, certainly compared with the
alternatives. True, China's geopolitical power
will grow, and that will be a nuisance. If we want
to worry, however, the more appropriate worry
is not that China will succeed but that it will fail. As was true of Japan a generation ago, only
much more so, China's obvious strengths cover
underlying flaws and weaknesses. Its
government is corrupt, rigid and (of course)
authoritarian. Its economy is rife with politically
imposed distortions. Its schools, like Japan's, rely heavily on rote instruction, good for playing
economic catch-up but not so good for taking the
lead. Its infrastructure buildup, also like Japan's,
feeds on an unsustainable diet of political
cronyism and environmental depredation. And
its message to the rest of the world is less 'Give us your huddled masses' than 'Give us your
precious minerals.' If I had to bet on one system
being in decent working order a generation from
now, it would be ours, not theirs."

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Before I joined my company (I don't know how long), my current supervisor and some guy with a similar position who no longer works here found a rat outside one day. They trapped it and then my current supervisor tortured it to death with a saudering iron while his former colleague filmed it on his phone.

Later, my supervisor walked around the office showing the video to other people. He thought the whole thing was really funny.

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Life is pretty good right now.

Things with my girlfriend couldn't be better. Those things that were nagging me before aren't nagging me anymore. For once I've been wrong about something important and it didn't ruin my life.

School is finally satisfying. My teachers this semester are serious and professional. My Chinese is rapidly improving. And I know it is because my teachers aren't afraid to make me do work. My teachers last semester were even lazier than I've ever been. One in particular was just appallingly unprofessional. She was the laziest of the three I had, but she was also tremendously arrogant. She probably got her attitude from the fact that she's teaching at one of the most prestigious universities in China. But she's proof that you don't need to be a good teacher to get a job here. I hope she'll never teach me again, but I have four semesters left here...

My job is horrible. It gets worse every week. I'm reading this book about The Great Leap forward right now and a lot of the decisions being made by upper management at my company are so obviously wrong and destructive I can't help but be reminded of my own workplace while reading it. Granted, nobody is starving to death, but they keep coming up with ideas that conflict with what are likely their primary goals: to make money and teach Chinese people English. But I have less than six months left on my current contract and when it expires, I am going to get another job. I don't want to dwell on this because it'll just make it harder to put it behind me when the time comes.

Also, I've pretty much quit drinking. I did get drunk last night and I did get drunk last week, but last week was the first time in at least three weeks. Mostly, I just stay home with Frankie and study. We go out to eat pretty often (I think we had Cantonese food four times the week she came back to Harbin), but that's all there is to do in this city.

I've been talking more with my mom more often now that she has an Apple device and she's probably going to visit me here instead of me visiting her, but it's going to have to wait until I'm in a better city. It would take her at least 20 or so hours to get to Harbin from San Diego, and there is virtually nothing to see or do here. It would be a really boring, disappointing trip that would give her a bad impression of this country. But Shenzhen and Hong Kong would be unforgettable.

Blah. Tired of writing on this thing again.

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How do you feel about cigars?

I've got a fat Cuban between my teeth at the moment. There's (or was?) a cigar shop by my university and sometimes there were guys sitting out there smoking, and it smelled like burning dirt. I was like, Why would anybody do that? Like, smoking is the only vice I haven't got. And I had a friend in an Econ class and we were talking about this and he was like, Yeah, I have a cigar sometimes. And then I was like , Smells like burning dirt. And he was in the Marines before he web to college and he laughed his ass off. Probably because he knows what dirt smells like when there's fire on it for some reason.

Now I'm like, This is great. We're going to look like total pricks when we get to that club. We don't even fulfill the right stereotypes!

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