[Don’t] Teach English in China! Or, the dark side of the glossy recruitment flyer

Come work in China, they said. It’ll be fun, they said… 

 After two years of fun and merriment, lectures and late nights, coffee shops and pubs and socials and general joie de vivre that characterised my time at uni, with the advent of my third year things began to change. You graduates – you know how this rolls. One minute you’re sipping cocktails on a Tuesday night with a bunch of your friends, and the next you’re staring at your inbox which seems to be full of bright, falsely cheery information in bold-lettered emails: ‘About to Graduate? Talk to the Careers Advice Centre!’ ‘Come to this afternoon’s Careers Fair!’ and ‘English graduates – fed up of being told to become a teacher? Come work in recruitment!’ (let’s face it, most people want to work in recruitment even less than they want to become teachers.) It was November 2012, and I felt like I should make some kind of decision about what I was supposed to do with my life. The more-irritating-than-a-severe-case-of-hives question: ‘So what are you doing after graduation?’ dogged me like my own personal black cloud, although in all fairness, the only reason I despised the question so much was simply that I had no flipping idea.

 Due to cuts in research council funding, I found that I was unable to easily pursue the journalism Masters I had thought I would be doing, and, wending my way home from the open day for said Masters in my student’s union, hands shoved moodily in my coat pockets, I found that I did not really have it in me to fight off stiff competition for that Masters anyway, much less the determination or capability to fund myself through it. It was then that I gave serious thought to the shiny red flyer I had seen in our Careers Centre, advertising a year abroad teaching in China.

 Now, I’d always wanted to return to the Far East, having been born in Hong Kong (although I’d moved to Cyprus aged two), and had often given a certain amount of thought to teaching English as a foreign language. I pictured some charming mountain town with a small school full of cute little Chinese kids all incredibly obedient and willing to learn (I laugh at my own stereotyped views even as I write this now!) and thought that it sounded like a sweet deal. I wouldn’t get paid a lot, sure, but I was told that China is so cheap it doesn’t matter, AND I would have free accommodation, AND a free TEFL course, AND loads of time to travel and enjoy myself. I and a friend, Nicola, met with the guy who ran the organisation with which we were considering going, TEIC (Teach English in China.) His name is Phil Thomas and he is a retired professor at Cardiff University (and also Newcastle if I remember rightly.) He travels all over the UK promoting TEIC at universities, though his daughter in law Jasmine Hagger handles all applications.

 What seems to happen is that you apply (CV, statement of purpose, photo, standard stuff) and they pass your details onto their partners in China, one in Beijing called Doris (I couldn’t vouch for her professionalism or lack of as I didn’t go with her) and one in Hunan province called Lany (by whom my application was received.) You pay a ‘support fee’ of £190 (directly to Jasmine’s bank account!!) for your application to be processed (whatever that means…) and then as far as I can tell Jasmine does pretty much nothing except email you a bit. Apparently she does the job in her spare time. I mean, it’s not a bad part time job, making money off gullible graduates, so, y’know… probably pays well… I will admit, it did look a little suspicious and I was wrong to overrule my instincts. It seemed good….too good. I began wondering what exactly Jasmine and Phil got out of it. Phil seemed very eager to recruit Nicola and I although a little vague on the finer details (such as who Lany was exactly; he seemed to imply she was just someone who organised all this out of the kindness of her heart…) TEIC does mention they are affiliated with some government department in China so I wondered if they got a little pay from them for getting foreign teachers. It all seemed barely legit, but little did I know that I had just begun to scratch the surface. It was gonna get a whole lot murkier once I dived in.

 And dive I did – for better or worse. I paid the support fee, chose to be placed in Hunan province alone (and not go through Doris in Beijing which would have meant being placed anywhere in the entire vast country that is China…) I began to correspond directly with Lany in Hunan about my placement. When I think of the amount of time in my thoughts, my daily life, and even my holidays, that the idea of going to China consumed, I do feel ashamed of myself. I should have checked this out more thoroughly. But the reason I write this is so that others will do the research I didn’t and think more deeply than I did about rushing off to the other side of the world seeking adventure. I was so keen to escape the rat race that offered itself to me upon graduation that I hardly stopped to consider other options but ploughed all my efforts into going to China. However, it took a long time for Lany to arrange our placements and I only got a confirmation that I was going to China in mid-June. Which left me with not long to get all the injections/insurance/flights/visa and whatnot – TEIC did not lift a finger to help with this. They promise on their flyer a paid return flight – pah. This translates into ‘you pay upfront and we get your school to repay you a fraction of the money it took to get out here.’

Even with this I didn’t balk – I should have, but in my head I was going no matter what and with a lot of effort again I managed to get most of that done. I’d saved nearly £800-900 from my part time job in final year – all of that went on medical insurance and expensive injections and getting my visa on time and buying my own personal pharmacy, among other things. I even had to make a day trip back to Cardiff when we were all on a family holiday at a festival in Somerset just to post my visa application and get an injection. To get the second of those jabs I had to arrange to have it done when I was in Cardiff for graduation and, when I forgot my money, ask my brother to sub me the cash, which I would pay him back, and run to get it to me. It was not easy getting prepared! Further, I had to ask my parents to pay the cost of the outward flight, which I would then pay them back for later.

 To make matters worse, Lany’s emails were vague rather than informative, she seemed to think I wanted to teach older students for some reason (I’d asked for primary kids) and her bad English was weird considering she claimed to have been bringing foreign teachers to China for 30 years. You’d think after that long of liaising with foreigners your English would be tip-top? Apparently not. She seemed friendly over the Skype ‘interview’ we had - interview, pah, she was in her PJs when I was ‘interviewed’! She seemed more concerned with whether I could play a musical instrument, sing, or dance than whether I had any teaching qualifications or not. Again, alarm bells should have sounded but it seemed the switch was broken. I wasn’t hearing any of these warnings. Our ‘TEFL course’ consisted of a 12-page booklet with ‘fill-in-the-blanks exercises, emailed to us TEICers along with a pamphlet about teaching. It kinda seemed like a comphrension exercise than anything to do with teaching.

 Well anyway, the fateful day arrived and my arrival in China was as I have described in the previous post - devoid of any kind of teacher training, pretty much without organisation of any kind, a baptism of fire into the so-very-Chinese ad hoc way of doing things. After the initial first few days of training, some people were to go on to their schools (including Nicola), some were to do ‘teaching practice’ at some schools in Hunan (which, I later heard, ranged from light and interesting teaching to drudgery that involved getting up at 5am every day.) I and a few others opted for ‘homestay’ -that was, staying in a Chinese person’s home and tutoring their child for the week in English. I was placed in the home of May and Shu (English name, William Shaw), a lecturer couple who work at Xiangtan University. They and their twelve year old daughter Abigail live in the nice area of Xiangtan in a pretty sweet fourth floor flat. I have to say that while I was still suffering from jetlag, culture shock and homesickness I did manage to enjoy my stay with these kind people. ‘Tutoring’ basically involved just conversation practice – or in other words, hanging out – with Abi and her friend Phoenix, also twelve, who came to stay for the duration of my visit. They are sweet kids and I had fun with them, biking around the campus of XTU (Xiangtan Uni), going swimming, and making apple crumble (well, an attempt at apple crumble anyway.) That was enjoyable although I did feel bad that I had not been trained in tutoring at all so I hadn’t got a clue what to do. I only figured out towards the end of the week that I was ostensibly just an honoured guest and should make myself at home.

 After this week, it was time for us TEICers to reassemble at the Green Tree Inn for our medical check in Changsha (the regional capital, about an hour from Xiangtan by bus. We got there, managed to get through the medical, then hung around in Changsha for a bit at Lany’s instigation (who basically told us to go enjoy ourselves in a strange city where we don’t speak the language after a kinda scary medical check – seriously??!) Anyway once that was over our schools came to collect us. I was met by the representative from my school, a young woman named Jenny in a bright yellow silk dress who was about the same age as me, very pretty and very clueless. I liked her, and even the two smiley non-English speaking blokes she had with her, although it was a longer drive than I had anticipated from Changsha to Yiyang (where I had assumed out school was, though it turned out to be in a neighbouring county, Taojiang). We got to Yiyang in about 2 and a half hours and had dinner there, but it was another thirty minutes or so before we reached Taojiang town, a pretty small place, and drove through it to the school, which stands a ways outside the town, on a road where one way leads to town and the other to an even smaller mining town in the hills, where they mine limestone or granite (not sure which). All that was missing were the tumbleweeds…it really looked like the back of beyond.

 I was assured that another foreign teacher would be coming later in the week, but their current foreign teacher, a Mr. Allen, was yet to move out. He turned out to have a Mrs. Allen as well, and a brother staying with them in a shiny white marble apartment that seemed a little too spotless and clinical to have had people living in it for a year. What worried me was Mrs. Allen’s response when I asked her if she liked living there. ‘No, I don’t like it. Too quiet. Not any other foreigners.’ Well gee, thanks for making me feel better I wanted to answer. They were pleasant people, if a little odd. They claimed to be from Canada but their accents were clearly African, maybe West Coast African, Nigerian at a guess. Allen’s Chinese was fluent and his wife’s was pretty good, which made sense as he said he’d been living in China for the past four years in different provinces. His brother was just there visiting apparently, though in the two months he had been there he’d managed to pick up a fair bit of Chinese. This lot left the next day, and I spent my time in the next day or two doing up my room, visiting the supermarket in nearby Taojiang with Jenny and her friends, befriending a teacher named Cassie and watching a lot of TV on my laptop.

 It turned out there was nothing much for me to do and we still had a week until we were due to begin teaching. So with the help of my new friend Cassie, I packed a small bag and went to the city of Zhuzhou, three hours southeast, to see Nicola, who had been assigned to teach in this city, and also had some time before she began teaching. This was interesting; I took the wrong bus into town at first and had to ask the bus passengers for directions with just my Chinese phrasebook! I underlined the word for ‘bus station’ and they all passed it round and it seemed to be decided that I would get off at the same stop as one of the men. He led me to the bus station in the centre of Taojiang town. I knew I needed to get the bus to Yiyang train station, but couldn’t see it. Then a Chinese girl about my age came up to me and introduced herself in English as Jenny. She asked me where I wanted to go, and I told her, so she took my hand and led me across the bus station yard to the right bus and helped me get on. As she led me to the bus, I could not help but think of a Scripture I had read the previous night, a psalm that says: ‘For I the Lord your God will hold your right hand, saying to you: ‘Fear not, I will help you.’ I knew it was God’s provision that I was meeting so many kind, friendly people.

 I met some more nice people along the way, including a girl in the train station in Yiyang who spoke to me for a while, a station guard who helped me get on the train, and a woman called Michelle on the train who spoke English fluently and shared her lunch with me. When I got to Zhuzhou, I had a lovely time, and the day before I was due to leave, a newly made Chinese friend called Christina told me there was a job for a foreign teacher at her school in Zhuzhou if I wanted it.

 That night, I got a message on Skype from Lany, telling me that I was to pack my bags and go to the city of Yueyang, four hours away from Zhuzhou, with no explanation of why. When I asked - several times - she eventually admitted that the school in Taojiang where I was supposed to teach had no government license to have a foreign teacher and so she was sending me to Yueyang, and had already arranged everything with a school there. I was absolutely steaming mad at her cheek, daring to arrange this without my permission and, as a typical Brit does when angry, sent a very aggressive letter to her. I then attempted to get the job in Zhuzhou I had been offered. The school in Zhuzhou were happy to have me teach there but we had to just get Lany to agree. She tried her best to stop me getting this job, even to the extent of blackmailing the school in order to stop me taking the job, but I dug my heels in and refused to move. The school that were offering me a job gave me an interview with a woman at their office, name of Yahui, who is quite a nice lady. She advised to to apologise to Lany and all would be made well. This made me want to scream - apologise to her?! For what?! But in the end I swallowed my pride and did it, realising it was probably some Chinese face-saving custom or something. That phone conversation was weird - Lany was refusing to acknowledge that she was speaking to me until I uttered the fateful words ‘I’m sorry.’ Like a lightbulb flicking on she was suddenly all sweetness and light and couldn’t do enough to help me. And that unbelievably quick turnaround is the reason I have never trusted her from that day forward.

 As I had prayed he would, though, God ‘gave me favour in the sight of my enemy’ and I was allowed to stay in Zhuzhou. Through this time, Nicola’s prayers and help were invaluable and I was very blessed to have a friend like her around.

 Before I could go back to Zhuzhou, I had to go back to Taojiang to get the things I had left there. I took a late night train to Yiyang, and the station guards, upon realising I could not speak Chinese, collared a random middle aged bloke who was also going to Yiyang and assigned him to look after me This man helped me with my luggage and made sure I got a taxi when were arrived in Yiyang at midnight. The taxi was a black cab which I know are illegal, so I was terrified, but the man from the train negotiated a price for me, took the driver’s number and took pictures of the front and rear plates. It turned out that the taxi got me back to Taojiang and the school OK, and the next day I was sent to Xiangtan to recieve new papers from Lany and was to be picked up by my school. The school drove me to Xiangtan, whereupon we had a rather awkward ( at least for me) lunch with Lany and her husband (ever had a massive argument with someone and then had them invite you for lunch like it’s NBD? I have. It’s weird.) From there Lany let me nap in a nearby hotel, renting me a room for the lunchtime nap hour, and then when I was awake, tried to persuade me once more to go to Yueyang and take the job there. I declined, once more, both forcefully and graciously (which believe me is hard to do.)

Yahui was also there by the this point, sitting silently as Lany tried to persuade me into taking her offer. I murmered to her something apologetic about causing her trouble, as Lany paid for the hotel. She shushed me, telling me we could talk later. Once we were safely away from Lany and in her own car, Yahui sat back with a sigh of relief, telling me that she was glad I hadn’t taken Lany’s offer and had chosen her school instead. I got the impression Yahui did not like dealing with a recruiter like Lany any more than I did... a suspicion that has been confirmed since then. She proceeded to take me for a massage and a meal with her cousin, and some well-needed relaxation. Upon getting to my school, I was shown to my room, and fell asleep, grateful to God that He had given me a place I felt like I was happy to be in.

 If I could tell you one thing about teaching in China? Do NOT come with an agency. They do not train you. They do not look after you. They rip you off ( I am paid less than half of what I am entitled to; the rest of my pay goes to Lany because of the school’s arrangement with her for my services.) If you have problems with our school (as I did) they do not help. Your ‘return airfare’ will hardly cover your flight out. Your ‘TEFL certificate’ will be worthless, because it is very unlikely to be accredited. NOTHING is as advertised. I am lucky; I have heard since I settled in Zhuzhou and got to know other, more experienced foreign teachers of people who had a far worse deal than me with teaching agencies.

 If you are serious about coming to China to teach? Ignore jobs that offer less than 10,000 RMB; they are not worth wasting your time on. Google blacklisted teaching agencies and become aware of the scam outfits. Get jobs through friends, ideally (pretty much everyone these days has at least one Chinese friend, right?) Make sure the school do things like cover your flight out and return (plenty of reputable schools will pay this upfront) and be prepared to negotiate your contract, down to the last tiny detail (ESPECIALLY if you are supposed to get decent, free accomodation. It will most likely hardly be adequate unless you specify exactly what you will and will not put up with.) Also, learn some Chinese before coming out - this will definitely cushion your landing! And finally, it’s a golden oldie but worth remembering- if something looks to good to be true, it almost certainly is. TEIC and their sister organisation MKT (Middle Kingdom Teachers) and others like them exist to make money, for both the British and Chinese side. Trust me, you do not want to be caught out by them.