I taught English in Beijing when I was twenty years old, in 1979. At the time, being an American in China was such a novelty that my nationality was pretty much all that was required. Luckily for my students (all of whom were older than I was), I had this weird latent Protestant work/guilt ethic streak, and I felt obligated to do a good job, as much as I was totally in over my head. I went to the parents of my best friend with whom I’d traveled to China, professional teachers, and begged them to help me, to tell me what I needed to do to be a good teacher and help my students. I ended up being dragooned into making language tapes for no money at my school, a branch school of a more famous university. And though I knew I was being taken advantage of, to some extent, I didn’t really mind too much. I liked the idea that I was leaving some sort of legacy behind, at the age of 20, that students would be listening to my voice reading these lame essays — lame, but read with decent pronunciation.
In recent years when I’ve traveled to China, I’ve had all kinds of job offers to teach English, just by virtue of my showing up and being able to speak some Chinese. I have no formal training in teaching, and I would have thought that by now, there would be enough qualified folks teaching English that someone like me would not be offered a job as I was more or less walking down the street.
Well, not so much.
Here’s a cautionary tale that compares teaching English in China to the worst sort of sweatshop labor that immigrants to America have traditionally endured:
Tanya Davis fled Jizhou No. 1 Middle School one winter morning in March before the sun rose over the surrounding cotton fields covered with stubble from last fall’s crop.
In the nine months Davis and her boyfriend had taught English at the school in rural north China, they had endured extra work hours, unpaid salaries and frigid temperatures without heating and, on many days, electricity.
Hearts pounding and worried their employer would find a pretext to stop them leaving, the couple lugged their backpacks, suitcase, books and guitar past a sleeping guard and into a taxi.
As they drove away, “the sense of relief was immense,” said Davis, a petite, soft-spoken 23-year-old from Wales. “I felt like we had crossed our last hurdle and everything was going to be OK.”
It’s a new twist on globalization: For decades, Chinese made their way to the West, often illegally, to end up doing dangerous, low-paying jobs in sweatshop conditions. Now some foreigners drawn by China’s growth and hunger for English lessons are landing in the schoolhouse version of the sweatshop.
In one case, an American ended up dead. Darren Russell, 35, from Calabasas, Calif., died under mysterious circumstances days after a dispute caused him to quit his teaching job in the southern city of Guangzhou. “I’m so scared. I need to get out of here,” Russell said in a message left on his father’s cell phone hours before his death in what Chinese authorities said was a traffic accident.
As China opens up to the world, public and private English-language schools are proliferating. While most treat their foreign teachers decently, and wages can run to $1,000 plus board, lodging and even airfare home, complaints about bad experiences in fly-by-night operations are on the rise. The British Embassy in Beijing warns on its Web site about breaches of contracts, unpaid wages and broken promises. The U.S. Embassy says complaints have increased eightfold since 2004 to two a week on average.
Though foreign teachers in South Korea, Japan and other countries have run into similar problems, the number of allegations in China is much higher because “the rule of law is still not firmly in place,” said a U.S. Embassy official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“A number of substandard English language teaching mills have sprung up, seeking to maximize profits while minimizing services,” the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee said in a recent report on Russell’s case. These institutes have become virtual “‘sweatshops’ where young, often naive Americans are held as virtual indentured servants.”
Davis said officials at her school in Hebei province piled on classes without compensation, dragged their feet on repairing leaks in her apartment and would deduct sums from her $625 monthly salary for random taxes and phone calls that were never made. These ranged from $30 to $85, she said.
She recalled nights without electricity when there was nothing to do but sit in candlelight.
The more “we let them get away with, the more they tried to get away with,” said Davis, who now teaches piano in Beijing…
…John Shaff, a graduate from Florida State University, said everything went according to his English-language contract at Joy Language School in the northeastern city of Harbin — until a disagreement over his office hours erupted into a shouting match on the telephone with a school official.
A few hours later, several men led by Joy’s handyman showed up at his school-provided apartment, physically threatening him and cursing him in Chinese, said Shaff, 25. About 10 minutes later, they left, and soon, so did Shaff.
“They were all men who would have been formidable to fight,” Shaff said in a telephone interview from San Francisco, where he now lives. The manager of the Joy chain did not respond to interview requests.
Like Shaff, Darren Russell had a disagreement with the manager of Decai language school in Guangzhou, where he had been promised 20 hours of classes a week. Instead, Decai had him teaching at two schools, where he put in up to 14 hours a day and oversaw 1,200 students, Russell’s mother, Maxine Russell, said in a telephone interview from Calabasas.
The school had troubles with foreign teachers. Two had quit by the time Russell showed up, and a former Decai employee, a Chinese woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she left because she was asked to recruit foreign teachers by offering attractive contracts that went unfulfilled.
In April 2005, sick from bronchitis and exhausted from the work hours, Russell told manager Luo Deyi he wanted her to lighten his work load. An argument ensued, Russell resigned and threatened to tell police Luo was operating illegally, the former employee said.
The school then moved him into a low-budget hotel. A week later he was dead. Police told Decai and Russell’s mother that Darren had been killed in a hit-and-run traffic accident. The body was shipped to California.
Maxine Russell, however, said Chinese authorities could not provide consistent witnesses and a time of death. According to the congressional report, which was the outcome of a family request to look into the Russell case, a California mortician who handled Russell’s body said he had suffered a blow to his head and his body did not have bruises and fractures consistent with a car accident. The mortician, Jerry Marek, is a former coroner.
While Maxine Russell and the former Decai employee say Russell was a beloved teacher, Luo, the manager, insists he was often absent from class and his “teaching methods failed to meet the requirement of the school and fit the students.” She said he had been hired on probation, which he failed partly because of a drinking problem.
“It was very strange and irresponsible for them to blame us for their son’s death,” Luo said in a telephone interview.
So, those of you currently teaching English in China — what are your experiences? Rewarding, life-threatening, or somewhere in-between?
cross-posted on the paper tiger
1
By Philip Sen
Mine were somewhere inbetween. The basic thing to remember if you are heading for China is that the moment you step off the plane you stop being a human being and become a commodity. This is an unfortunate truth in many respects: the poor will understandably see you as a walking cash machine; shopkeepers will attempt to get the highest prices possible; and schools and businesses will try and extract the maximum they can too.
One advantage that I had in the beginning, back in 2003, is that I went to China via the CIEE, an agency with 50 years of experience in cross-cultural education exchanges. They did charge quite a bit of cash, but since I was in it for the experience and not the money then I was glad of the protection and negotiation facilities that they offered.
But for those who head to China on their own, there should be some kind of supervisory body to which they can turn when things go wrong. As the author notes, however, there’s no rule of law in many aspects of life in China and the treatment of workers – let alone foreign workers – is one of them.
August 6, 2006 @ 3:04 am | Comment
2
By Ivan
Hm. After reading that story, I thought: Such a waste for such (apparently) nice young people to be harried out of China, while some other foreign English teachers remain who should have been escorted to the tarmac in a straitjacket….
August 6, 2006 @ 3:59 am | Comment
3
By chris
my experiences have been fairly positiv. i now have a great wife, and a decent business. In fact i have just gotten a new office near da wang lu. nayone want to come by and have lunch with me?
August 6, 2006 @ 4:23 am | Comment
4
By chris
my experiences have been fairly positive. i now have a great wife, and a decent business. In fact i have just gotten a new office near da wang lu. anyone want to come by and have lunch with me?
August 6, 2006 @ 4:24 am | Comment
5
By Jim
In addition to teaching theology at the seminary, I taught English at a Nanjing college through the Amity Foundation (an agency of the Chinese Protestant Church). They look out for their teachers well-being and make sure the placement is a good one. However, Amity considers the teachers “volunteers,” so the pay is limited. I had a wonderful principal, which made all the difference.
There’s no doubt that foreign teachers will be overworked and underpaid by Western standards. It is important to make sure there is a support system in China from the agency that arranges the placement. I talked to other teachers who never saw anyone from their agency.
August 6, 2006 @ 4:29 am | Comment
6
By Mike
If you cannot read and understand a contract, you should not come to China. If you think a school will follow the spirit of an agreement rather than the strict letter, you should not come to China. If you are the type who is willing to “go along to get along”, you should not come to China.
If, on the other hand, you demand respect from your employer and insist on problems and misunderstandings being fixed immediately, then you will have a wonderful time in China. The bad schools, and there are several, will not even hire you because they know you will not put up with their nonsense.
August 6, 2006 @ 5:04 am | Comment
7
By Liuzhou Laowai
Most of the problems arise in schools which are employing the teachers illegally. Illegal workers have little protection anywhere in the world.
August 6, 2006 @ 5:04 am | Comment
8
By Ahmet
I’m wondering if there any standards for the teaching of English in China. I say this because my Chinese fiancee’s grasp of English is excellent despite obvious poor instruction. At the same time when I watch CCTV 10’s “Outlook” program I am amazed at the almost daily mistakes in usage and pronunciation in a program watched by millions. Currently, the 2006 English competition is being shown and a few of the competitors have a truly outstanding English speaking and reasoning ability, yet most are embarrassingly bad. Worse yet are the hosts of the show and the judges whose English skills are laughably bad. I’m glad that there are dedicated workers and volunteers who are trying to help and would hope that they would not be abused (or even killed). I have been working one on one with new Chinese friends when they ask me for help. I find that the exchange of language pointers (English for Chinese) is worthwhile and quite satisfying.
August 6, 2006 @ 6:39 am | Comment
9
By dangfingers
I have had a very rewarding experience not only in the schools where I have had the pleasure to teach but also in the students I’ve met as well as the colleagues I’ve had. I also got married to a wonderful Chinese woman and have a whole family here now (though sometimes it’s a lot of responsibility and hard work) and I too, not unlike Lisa try to do my best. The most important aspect, in my humble opinion, to teaching is to enjoy doing it. Inherently it is an extra responsibility to find ways to keep up one’s enthusiasm on a daily basis.
[quote\] �Don’t frown. You never know who is falling in love with your smile.�[/quote]
Unknown
August 6, 2006 @ 8:22 am | Comment
10
By Mark Baker
This sounds more like the situation in Korea as I found it (mid-90s). It was so bad that my friend Doug’s “blacklist” of the worst schools in Korea, to warn people off from the worst of the worst, became almost unmanageably long – http://members.tripod.com/~taegu/blacklist.html. The article here makes it sound like China is “catching up” in terms of these privatized language schools, which I don’t think really existed in China when I got there (’93).
I “lucked out” in all my teaching posts in Asia for a couple reasons: (1) I only went through placement programs and agencies that had both verifiable track records of putting teachers into good positions and strong support systems once their teachers reached their new posts; and (2) I only considered posts at colleges and universities (never private language schools!) where my placement program or agency already had an existing relationship.
I suspect that those two factors (apart from a teacher’s own moxie and ability) are the best insurance against these kinds of Teaching Experiences from Hell.
August 6, 2006 @ 8:52 am | Comment
11
By Precious Slices
Hey Jim! I was an Amity teacher, too! I was in rural Jiangxi for 2 years, plus 2 more as an “independent” in Beijing. Overall I had positive experiences teaching, with the exception of a year at one school in Beijing that was so bad that they moved campuses and changed their name to escape all the bad press they received.
August 6, 2006 @ 11:30 am | Comment
12
By Mark Baker
This sounds more like the situation in Korea as I found it (mid-90s). It was so bad that my friend Doug’s online “blacklist” of the worst schools in Korea, to warn people off from the worst of the worst, became almost unmanageably long. The article here makes it sound like China is “catching up” in terms of these privatized language schools, which I don’t think really existed in China when I got there (’93).
I “lucked out” in all my teaching posts in Asia for a couple reasons: (1) I only went through placement programs and agencies that had both verifiable track records of putting teachers into good positions and strong support systems once their teachers reached their new posts; and (2) I only considered posts at colleges and universities (never private language schools!) where my placement program or agency already had an existing relationship.
I suspect that those two factors (apart from a teacher’s own moxie and ability) are the best insurance against these kinds of Teaching Experiences from Hell.
August 6, 2006 @ 12:44 pm | Comment
13
By TM
Huh, wow. I actually know Tanya Davis.
No wonder she never talks about when she lived in Jizhou.
August 6, 2006 @ 1:09 pm | Comment
14
By Ivan
The quality of so-called “English teaching” in China will always be inversely proportional to how the English language is considered to be a mere business commodity in China.
The English language is not a business tool. And anyone who wants to learn the English language as a “business tool” will always speak and write it in a very shitty way.
August 6, 2006 @ 3:29 pm | Comment
15
By Mark Baker
Hi Ivan,
“The English language is not a business tool.”
Not sure I follow–do you mean that it shouldn’t be thought of _only_ as a business tool…or that to view it as a tool for business _at all_ is completely illegitimate…or something else?
August 6, 2006 @ 7:04 pm | Comment
16
By Aramel
At the same time when I watch CCTV 10’s “Outlook” program I am amazed at the almost daily mistakes in usage and pronunciation in a program watched by millions. Currently, the 2006 English competition is being shown and a few of the competitors have a truly outstanding English speaking and reasoning ability, yet most are embarrassingly bad. Worse yet are the hosts of the show and the judges whose English skills are laughably bad.
I know. A few years ago it was a hobby for me to listen to CCTV 10 and make notes of all their mistakes. After a while I gave up because there were too many. I run into a similar problem when I enter English competitions: most of my fellow competitors have awful English (the superb ones being few and far between), and most of the time they have almost nothing original to say. (I mean, “I am a happy girl”? That’s all?) And most of the judges have worse English than the competitors and wouldn’t understand a subjunctive if it dropped out of the sky and smashed them on the head.
August 6, 2006 @ 9:48 pm | Comment
17
By Brendan
My understanding (admittedly fragmentary) of Russell’s case is that the guy was paranoid and drinking heavily – possibly on drugs – and that the “he was killed by the Chinese government” nonsense is wishful thinking on the part of his parents. I guess it’s not inconceivable that there was something shady going on, but the notion that there was any kind of government activity is just laughable — the Chinese government doesn’t care about foreign drunks; that’s why it allows so many of them to teach here.
A lot of schools do welch on their contracts — the one I used to teach at in Harbin certainly did. It seems to be more or less de rigeur – as it is for foreign teachers to do runners. Most of these teachers have no training or qualifications to teach, and are working illegally on L or F visas, so small wonder if they don’t get any legal protection. Not to pull a Cunningham here, but I have Chinese friends on student visas in the States who can’t get delivery boy jobs because of their visa status. I also can’t imagine foreign citizens strolling cheerfully through US Customs and Border Control with a string of 14 tourist visas in their passport and claiming that they had no intention of immigrating or working.
Also, amazing – I find myself agreeing with Ivan! I love the English language, which is one of the reasons I’m profoundly glad that I got out of the teaching business. Long hours, thankless work, and generally crap pay. I make less money translating, but at least I don’t spend every day hating my life.
August 7, 2006 @ 12:04 am | Comment
18
By Brendan
Oh, and while I’m not arguing that a lot of people work under lousy conditions when teaching English – low pay, nasty apartments where nothing works, long hours, mean parents, indifferent coworkers, etc. etc. – comparing English teaching to sweatshop labor seems a bit over the top to me. No foreign English teachers are getting their hands caught in machinery, or living 20 to a room in tenement housing, or being exposed to toxic fumes. A little perspective, please.
August 7, 2006 @ 12:08 am | Comment
19
By OtherLisa
I think the article made that comparison, Brendan…at least I thought it did…but I was posting pretty late at night, after a party, so it might have been me, which would be a little embarrassing, as I think it’s a bit over the top as well.
My own experiences were certainly not sweat-shop-like. For one thing, the school wasn’t heated.
August 7, 2006 @ 12:49 am | Comment
20
By Brendan
D’oh – yes, you’re right; it’s a line from the US House of Representatives. Man, that’s offensive.
August 7, 2006 @ 2:55 am | Comment
21
By OtherLisa
Oh, good! I mean, good that it wasn’t me…
August 7, 2006 @ 10:18 am | Comment
22
By Shanghai Slim
My experiences teaching have been quite positive, but I was careful about where I worked and under what conditions. For example, I knew that you should be VERY wary of accepting school-provided housing, as most schools will cheerfully put you up in some complete shithole and pocket the difference (much better to take the extra pay and find your own place, if you are up to the task).
As other posters have noted, many of those who have problems in China are young naive westerners, often fresh out of college with no working experience in their homeland, much less abroad. I am constantly amazed at the young people who will accept a job over here with no prior research or checking of references at all. Then they are surprised to discover they are working for a conniving exploiter in the middle of polluted nowhere. I wouldn’t take a job in the US with so little knowledge of my potential employer! Yet it seems there’s an endless supply of witless young pidgeons willing to do so.
August 8, 2006 @ 7:08 am | Comment
23
By Arne
If you cannot stand the heat get out of the kitchen. Face it, Chinese people are obsessed w/ the Yankee dollar, and all that implies. Just be thankful you don’t wind up groggy, in a bathtub filled w/ ice and a surgical scar where your left kidney used to be.
August 8, 2006 @ 8:12 pm | Comment