Community: Real Life

Liz at large


Liz red

Liz is a 24-year-old who has decided to take a break from city life and visit one of the most mysterious and colourful countries in the world.
Entry: 2

Liz decided to spend her gap year somewhere out of the ordinary. After finding work in a primary school in China, she has tried to get her head around a country full of surprise and contradiction.

I've discovered that being dragged off to dinners to impress local government officials who can pull strings for the school is part of my job. Recently we were all piled into a big black car and driven to a floating restaurant; a gaudy, multi-storied monstrosity with mini-golf on the roof, where we spent a few hours in a private room, eating fish heads, duck's feet, and sea slugs, shouting stilted conversation across a huge table. Conversation was translated to and from our host by an underling who seemed to be doing his best to tone-down his boss's treatises on topics like: "what qualities make a good wife". A team of waiters hovered around behind us, daintily extracting detritus from our plates with tweezers; topping up the men's glasses with beer and the women's with hot corn-puree.

There are some lovely local girls on staff, always keen to show me around; hold my hand; take me to dinner; shopping; wait patiently while I try on 15 pairs of jeans, etc. I'd hoped some of their style would rub off on me when I went shopping with them, but they kept selecting outfits for me which they thought were very "special" to which I had to, politely, say were perhaps a bit too "special". Clothes with buttons, bows, graffiti, diamantes, sequins, lace, chains, spots AND stripes are big here. And when they insisted I looked awesome in jeans so tight they were cutting off circulation to my arse, I realised I'd better keep my wits about me. They really came into their element when haggling for the jeans I wanted to buy. Imagine three dainty young women shouting and waving their fists for ten minutes, pretending to leave five times, eventually storming off down the street, only to be called back by the shopkeeper finally agreeing to their price. An elaborate pantomime in order to save me about 70p.

"Waiters topped up the men's glasses with beer and the women's with hot corn-puree."

The gawping from Chinese people is constant, but usually doesn't really bother me. I just have to be extra vigilant about making sure my fly's done up, not picking my nose, etc. However an unfortunately largish crowd of gawpers did gather just when I was trying on those arse-numbing jeans.

In other work-related fun, I was asked to give a seminar to parents at No.1 Primary School, on helping their child learn English. This is fairly ridiculous since I'm pretty new to teaching and even newer to kids. As three or four hundred parents gathered in the auditorium, I thought: 'hmmm a big turnout'. Then my boss pointed out that the camera in the middle of the room was broadcasting me to TV sets in other classrooms, where over 1000 more parents who couldn't fit into the auditorium were watching. It was hard to fathom, except when the power went out a few times and suddenly I'd hear a thousand sighs in unison coming from all over the school (Sighs of relief that is).

But it could've been worse. My Scottish co-worker was asked to give a talk on 'Australian Agriculture' a few months ago. Then they realised what they meant to ask her was to talk about  'Australian Culture'.


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