| When I first met my boss David, I had a strong impression that he was not someone to be trusted. I talked to Nina and Damian from Slovenia about it several times since Damian and I both worked for him, and Nina had seen him on many occasions. Both of them said, “No. I don’t see any problem with him. He seems like a nice guy.” I agreed with them about one thing. He was very nice. Several times, he invited us to restaurants, the traditional circular table restaurants with the turntables and dishes, as well as barbecue restaurants where people can grill their own food on a heater covered by aluminum foil like small octopus, sea cucumber, mushrooms, and other kinds of meat and vegetables. Being kind is however different than being honest, and David’s dishonesty finally started to show itself after months of working for him. Many times when I would come to the office downtown on Anqing Road, the same road I now lived on, though miIes away from my home in the downtown area, I had a strange feeling that there was some secret being kept from me, a big secret that possibly had dangerous implications. The smaller secrets came out first. Several months in a row, David was late with the salaries for Damian, a Chinese teacher named Sophie, and I. It was in the contract that he would pay us on time on the first day of every month. We started to question why he was so late with our money, and then we got our answer. Somehow, we found out that David was buying a new apartment. We figured he was either using our salaries to make payments on his new apartment, or he was using them to ensure he had enough money after he spent all of his own cash. Damian threatened to quit, and that caused David to rethink his financial strategy because they relied heavily on Damian to teach at different schools around the city. He had so much work that he started coming down with stress-related illnesses. The parents of the students always favored Damian over me because he was a lot more active and vocal during class, but he was also much more quick-tempered than I, and would easily get very frustrated with the students. I was always very patient with them, even though I wasn’t as outgoing as Damian. There were also rumors that the parents were selective of their children’s teachers based on superficial matters such as appearance and ethnicity, but of course no way to prove it. They definitely put on an air of some kind of superiority instead of a welcoming attitude when they would be observing classes. David was also supposed to pay the rent for Nina and Damian’s apartment because he signed a contract with Nina’s boss at Jordan’s Language School and said he would do that. But until now, he hadn’t paid anything for it, and Nina’s boss was getting angry. She threatened to take legal action and close down David’s business, and the next day, the money was transferred to her bank account. The best way to motivate David was to threaten to take away what he seemed to care about most, money. Teaching with Hilary was never easy because she was very impatient. The young students would always look at me and point to her and put on a sad face because they knew she had some kind of problem. Nina didn’t have a very high opinion of her either. She said, “I think Hilary is a little weasel. She looks like she knows how to use a knife.” One day, after we finished teaching our first class at Yong Hong Primary School, one of the students, the naughtiest student in the class named Kenny, came to me and started counting to ten. I was so surprised because he never liked to participate during class and would always harass other students. As we were counting together, Hilary said, “Let’s go,” but I kept counting with him because this was a rare moment that he spoke any English. When we got to ten, Hilary said again, but much more forcefully, “Let’s go!” Something inside me snapped. It must have been the accumulation of everything Hilary did that I didn’t like leading up to that final moment where I couldn’t take any more of it. I looked at her intensely and said, “What the Hell are you yelling at me for?! Do you think I’m your slave?! What problem do you have with me?!” This was the first time she ever looked scared that I saw, and she said, “I didn’t know if you heard me or not. I was just trying to get your attention.” A few of the students came up close to listen to us, and one of the students named Christa, a very bright student, said “Oh teacher! No.” They didn’t know what our problem was with each other because their understanding of English was so limited, but it wasn’t hard for them to know there was a problem. Even though I think Hilary brought that kind of reaction from me on herself, I still had a guilty feeling inside of me after we went into our next class. I looked at Hilary, who was sitting down at a table writing something. She looked so pitiful. I had no idea about her past life and what made her seem so closed off to other people, but I decided to reach out to her at that moment. I said to her, “I’m sorry, Hilary. Maybe I shouldn’t have yelled at you.” And she said, “I’m sorry for yelling at you” back to me. It was one of the rare moments when she showed human emotion. She always looked so serious and unhappy. After that time, she seemed to have a little more respect for me, and didn’t stand over me as much during class. Our football team continued to play games every Sunday. The most common place to play at was the Agriculture University. The young woman named Nancy whom I had met at The Long Bar’s reopening night sometimes came to watch us play, as well as my student Qi Sheng and the other players’ girlfriends. Nancy and Qi Sheng became friends there. I had a lot of fun playing football with my friends, but my inexperience with the sport showed itself in a way that I would never forget. One time as we were playing, the football was kicked into the middle of the field, and I thought I had a great chance to get it because everyone else seemed to be occupied or too far away. I ran at full speed to get the ball, but I didn’t see my teammate James running for the ball from the opposite side, until it was too late. We crashed into each other head-on, both at full speed. All of the Chinese students who were watching the game collectively went “Ohhhhh!” as it happened. I saw a flash in my vision as James’ forehead crashed into my jaw with at least 30mph of combined speed behind it. All we could do after that was look at each other and hold the part of our face that was hurting so much and make painful noises. I think we both couldn’t believe the amount of pain that was traveling through our bodies as we looked at each other with disbelief. David from Australia came up to us and said, “Come on guys. This is no time for kissing each other.” We lost the game, but James and I walked off the field feeling like we won just because we didn’t get our faces crushed when the accident happened as we were laughing and patting each other on the back. James said to me, “God! You have a hard head! It felt like thunder when we crashed into each other.” I never felt pain like that before. Someone later said to me, “Man, you should be careful. People sometimes end up going to the hospital for things like that.” We also played a football game at Ke Da, the University of Technology one morning. There was a foreigner from Cameroon named Chris who was going back to his home country soon, so this was his last chance to play a game with us. Chris was very talented at playing football, and he was very comical. At Best Beautiful, he had a dance he liked to do where first he drew in the attention of everyone around him, and then he moved his leg like he was having spasms in it. The thing that made it so funny was that it was the only part of his body that he was moving, and he would start dancing like that every time. It rained for a while as I was one of the first people to arrive at the field deep inside of the university. Elvis and a couple others showed up. We were worried that not enough people were coming, so we started making phone calls to the others. Finally some others from our team and the other team showed up. It was just Ted from Texas, me, and the Africans to play against the Chinese team. No one else came. Julius’s girlfriend Vivian sometimes played commentator. Playing in the rain was another new experience for me. There was one time where one of the Chinese players slipped on the wet grass and crashed into me from behind, and he landed on my back on the ground. It seemed like it was taking him forever to get back up, so I crawled out from underneath him. There was a lot of slipping and sliding going on. Our goalie, a very big man from Congo, seemed to be having some problems with goaltending, so we had to select a new goalie. They chose me, but I told them it’s not wise because I never did that before. In about five minutes, the other team scored two goals on me. I could see the players on the other team laughing and smiling at my ability to defend the goal, and I decided to make them pay for it. When we changed goalies again, and I got back out on defense, those guys weren’t laughing anymore. I ran twice as fast and put on twice the amount of pressure on them. They stopped coming by me because they knew what was going to happen to them each time. At halftime, Chris and the others pulled out some Snow Beers and started drinking them down to celebrate the last game Chris would play. The Chinese players sat down underneath the shelter and looked at them and said, “You’re crazy” in Mandarin. After we began the second period, the beers they all had started to show in their performance on the field. Everyone was getting sloppy and missing opportunities that they could have made before. One time, someone from the Chinese team kicked the ball from near their own goal high into the air. Our goalie was at about the middle of our zone and watched the ball fly over his head and into our goal without doing much to try to stop it. It looked like he was watching an airplane flying in the sky over his head. By the time the game was finished, the score was about 13 to 3. I said to the others, “Why did you drink in the middle of the game? Why not wait until the game is over first?” Ted just shook his head and said, “It doesn’t matter.” I guess not if you’re playing to lose. |
China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling
The games that people (in China) play
The games that people (in China) play
