Jobs in (and around) Xiamen

Christmas is 2 days away and Xiamen is doing a pretty good decorating job.  On the main shopping street they’ve juxtaposed this big tacky Christmas tree with some kind of rabbit-mobile.   

Festive.

But there’s no holiday, no family and the apple-giving craze has started up again.  So to take my mind off missing home and to take a break from listening to Mud’s ‘Lonely this Christmas’ on repeat, here’s a blog about the weird and wonderful jobs I’ve sourced in Xiamen so far.

To keep a tentative grasp on my dignity and professional pride I have a very respectable weekend job teaching children English/piano/English via the medium of piano in a little house school.  It is inexplicably called Banana Club and the ‘school’ is in a lady’s apartment on the rich side of town.  I am the feature attraction; here’s the entrance hall…

Xin Laoshi, said owner of apartment and ‘school’, is a little nuts.  Her poodle is her baby.   

She schedules meetings for me with prospective parents and then tells me after they’ve been waiting half an hour.  She is obsessed with the songs ‘Do-Re-Mi’ and ‘Edelweiss’ and seems to think I will teach the children English like Maria taught the von Trapp children how to laugh, and we will all perform in grand music festivals before we escape over the mountains into Switzerland.  She also timetables lessons poorly; when I don’t have a classroom I have to teach outside a coffee shop downstairs, which is mildly irritating but we do get snacks.

I was poached from the Banana Club by a man called Alex who hired me to hang out with his 8-year-old piano prodigy daughter and pretend to teach her piano and English while she plays impeccable Mozart and rolls around the room pretending to be a cow.  The family are lovely though and always give me a great lunch – last week I had home-grown salad and home-made yoghurt.  How the other half live.

Apart from teaching, China offers the very lucrative job of being white.  As Westerners we are pretty much constantly offered jobs modelling this, selling that, promoting the other.  Of course, you never quite know what you’re getting into...

Exhibit A.  We are informed about a job sitting at the back of a televised economics debate, trying to look interested.  We are told to dress smart, like businessmen/women. 

Reality: we are extras in a fake hairstyling competition on a soap opera.

Here I am with a guy who might have been a TV star.  We really weren't sure, but all took pictures with him just in case.

Exhibit B.  I am asked to pour wine at a fancy wedding in a hotel in a town an hour north of Xiamen. 

Reality: my friend Alex and I end up in a rural village where it is evident that nobody has ever seen foreigners, dressed as Heineken girls, opening beer bottles in a building that looks like it hasn’t been finished yet.

This worked out ok though, because we told them we weren’t happy, sat down with a beer and people just took pictures of us.

Exhibit C.  Alex and I are asked to go to Nanning, capital city of Guangxi province to pour wine at an event.  We are told it is French wine, so can we please take a guy who speaks French.  We take my classmate Antoine.

Reality: we are promoting the Spanish wine Tio Pepe and our only job is to drink wine with the guests.  Also, we are all Spanish.  There was a lot of confusion over this, mainly because none of us were speaking Spanish and we kept accidentally telling people we were English/German/French.  On the second day we were driven 2 hours away into the countryside where we drank tea all afternoon and then did another wine-drinking event.

Here are Alex and I employed to do nothing.

Here’s Antoine pretending to be the Spanish ambassador of Tio Pepe.

We stayed in 5-star hotels.  It was not the worst job in the world.

China may be trying at times, but there are certainly ways to make the system work in your favour.  Just make sure you're getting a fair price for your soul.

Father and Fuzhou

Back in November Dad made his grand return to China.  I like to think I provided him with a much improved experience of the Orient – no Pingxiang squat toilet accommodation and no missed trains (I did manage to buy tickets for the wrong train, but this is an entirely different matter).

Unfortunately he picked Xiamen’s one week of rain to turn up so the first couple of days were a little gloomy.  We managed to climb up the hill behind the Nan Putuo Temple though; a tourist hot spot, campus adjacent with nice views over Xiamen University.  Not that we saw any particularly nice views, because it was raining, but it was good to know they were there.

For the weekend we took a train up to Fuzhou, the capital of my current province Fujian.  We stayed in a nice hotel because I found a good deal online and Dad was paying.  Here I am in the glass lift.

Fuzhou didn’t have an awful lot going for it but there was a nice old part called San Fang Qi Xiang (3 lanes and 7 alleys) which we visited.

Surprisingly, there were 3 lanes and 7 alleys.

Here's a traditional pharmacy.  They were pretty annoyed with me taking this picture.

We then spent a while trying to get a photo of me, but Dad really can’t take photos.  It got a little ridiculous.  This was his best effort.

On the next day we climbed Gu Shan, the Drum Mountain to the east of the city.  A good hour and a half of climbing up steps, and then down the otherside.   

There was a decent temple at the top though.

However, the most special thing about Fuzhou was that I saw my first pandas.  I know that 2 pandas have recently moved to Edinburgh which somewhat decreases the novelty but it was still pretty exciting.  On the last morning (since we didn’t have time the day before due to aforementioned and ignored train ticket buying mishap) we went to Fuzhou Panda World where there were both Giant pandas…

And Lesser pandas, which were super cute.

Usually I don’t like zoos but pandas are so lazy I didn’t feel like they minded just sitting there all day eating and occasionally wandering around.  One panda just sat there and a worker had to physically put a bowl of food into its hands.

Silly spoilt pandas.

Back in Xiamen I took Dad to Gulangyu, the biggest tourist attraction in Xiamen.  I’m sure I mentioned it back in March…  I’ve been a couple of times since moving here and mostly been disappointed but we found a great area with few people and some beautiful architecture tucked away.

Here’s Dad on the ferry back.

So it was another swift but packed visit and I got to see a new city and a few pandas.  And Dad, of course.

Pingxiang Revisited

I’ve managed to get back to Pingxiang twice since returning to China, mostly for the street food (wrap man had clearly missed me) but also to see Lydia.  The first time was early September, en route to Xiamen.  I can’t remember if I mentioned that Lydia was pregnant, but she was 7 months in at this point and pretty big.  To celebrate her size and the fact that I was in Pingxiang, she decided that we should have a photoshoot to ‘preserve the happy memories’.  So, for sheer comedic value, here we are, preserving the happy memories…

As you can see, for the first take, we went pink.  The colour of babies.  Observe the fake eyelashes that were stuck to Lyd’s belly to make a face.

The photographer also did individual shots of us both.  Here's the most obvious choice of poses for a pregnancy photoshoot - behind a small dressing table, holding a pot of flowers, shouting something.

In the second and much more uncomfortable take we went ‘dark and sexy’.  And, in Lydia’s case, largely unclothed.

There are few words.  It was quite the Chinese pregnancy experience.
 

Anyway, a couple of months later, in the first week of November, I returned to pick up the rest of my clothes and visit the newest addition to Lydia's family, Yang Zhen Yi, English name Jenny.  She was born on 1/11/11, is in good health, super tiny and, sadly, the spitting image of her dad.

Here’s the proud mother.

And here I am on the 22-hour train ride back to Xiamen…

Until next time, Pingxiang.

...and a New Beginning

Well it’s about 3 months overdue but I thought it was about time I revived the blog.  I think I was assuming that studying at a reputable university in a well developed city would leave me with little to blog about, but China will be China and I think that keeping a record will remind me that life wasn’t always like this…

So here I am sitting in my room on campus at Xiamen University, trying to ignore the fact that Christmas is fast approaching and the most festive I’ve felt was listening to somewhat misplaced Christmas music playing in McDonalds last week.  And here’s what I’m still doing here in China…

After struggling with the language last year I realised the next best step was full-time studying, so I applied for the Chinese Government Scholarship (pretty much on a whim after meeting a couple of guys travelling who were on the scheme).  For lack of any real desire as to the location I put down Xiamen as my top choice and now here I am, living and studying in China courtesy of the Chinese government (they even give me pocket money each month).  

I should admit up front that it's been a bit of a struggle going back to being a student again, hard to settle and surprisingly difficult to be surrounded by white people (somehow in China it just feels wrong).  I've felt far more homesick this year and am still missing the good old Pingxiang crew from last.  In short, not the best start to my second year, but in this magical country where you really do have to either laugh or cry I've decided to start focusing on the positives.

I briefly visited Xiamen back in March but definitely did not appreciate its full potential.  The biggest draw to the city is how (relatively) clean the air is, and how nice the environment is.  Xiamen is located on the south-east coast of China, directly opposite Taiwan on the mainland, in some happy little bubble of almost permanently good weather.  I arrived in early September and didn’t see rain for months.  The temperatures have dropped a little recently but today was 26°C so I feel no reason to complain.  It’s sunny to the point where I've actually started getting a bit annoyed with the weather.  I don’t understand why it has to be so infuriatingly happy all the time.

Above is a photo of my kite-surfing friend Matt, who knows how to appreciate Xiamen's efforts.

My scholarship means I have free accommodation on campus and I was fortunate enough to land the glorious Cai Qing Jie building, dormitory for overseas students, PhD students and Chinese holiday-makers; next door to the building where I have class and 5 minutes from the beach.  

It is officially the best dormitory on campus, notable for its lift, the tiny shop downstairs where you can buy anything, the friendly security guard Xiao Han who will bring you delicious ‘local flavour’ (read unfathomably dry peanut powder biscuit) whether you want it or not and the room service that the restaurant on the ground floor offers.  If we ignore the rats out front and the fact that someone stole half my pants from the balcony, it’s a great place to live.  

When I first moved in I had a roommate, Molly from the U.S., who just happened to have the misfortune of checking in at the same time as me.  We spent the first few weeks looking for apartments off campus because we couldn’t stand the sight of each other (and she couldn’t understand simple English like ‘knackered’ and ‘bin’) but eventually decided just to stay put and enjoy spending all the money we’d save on accommodation on massages and cheesecake instead.  Here's one of the more attractive photos of the two of us, on a free tour (cue tour group hats) of Xiamen back in the first week of term.

Sadly Molly recently ran off to France and left me all alone.  To celebrate her departure we bought incredibly stylish animal shirts off the market.  

I hope she’s wearing her zebra in Paris with pride.

It was a little weird having my own room at first but 2 single beds pushed together is a luxury I can’t not enjoy.  Of course, it’s probably only a matter of time before one of the staff realises my roommate is missing and I get a new one.  But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, and, in the meantime, continue to rearrange the furniture from time to time to avoid all suspicion.

So here’s my university, officially the most beautiful campus in China.  It’s pretty nice.

And here's one of the running tracks, conveniently situated just behind the Cai Qing Jie.  Note the original 1921 architecture.

But we’re not here to admire the scenery, obviously.  I am a student of Chinese, fully dedicated to the pursuit of fluency in order to foster good relationships between China and the West.  Studies are my sole priority.

But here's the nice beach road that starts from the back of campus and runs for miles down the coast.

And here we are at shao kao, the nightly street BBQ...

And here I am by the campus lake.

Also, here's a whimsical piano.

But yes, studies.  Us foreign language studes are divided into a number of classes at a variety of levels and I’m in a nice small class of about 8-13 students (attendance is somewhat flexible) where everyone is a different nationality.  I am the only native English speaker so am frequently called upon to answer troubling questions such as "What is the difference between a ram and a goat?" and “How does one pronounce ‘comparison’?”. 

Classes are fairly unstressful.  We have 2 teachers: He Laoshi, our writing and comprehensive teacher who sticks mostly to the book but is too young to dare reprimand us for making any mistakes or not doing our homework (instead she sort of giggles), and Tang Laoshi, a ridiculously cute, if somewhat unprepared, teacher who likes playing games in class, gives us MnMs as prizes and took us to the Botanical gardens for a picnic.

Here's a complete picture of the class, except some of them aren't my classmates.  Also, some of my classmates aren't in it.

Last Saturday we had a class Monopoly night.

Tang Laoshi likes showing us clips from China’s Got Talent, the latest of which featured a Chinese woman singing Puccini’s ‘Nessun dorma’ who can’t pronounce the Italian so just substitutes in the names of meats and vegetables.  Tang Laoshi was pretty sure this was a valuable teaching tool.  Later she taught us a poem about a rabbit.

So that’s my current situation: a lowly student again but studying in a pretty great city.  Stay tuned for tales of Fuzhou with father, Pingxiang revisited and the many jobs available to white girls in China…

The End...

So my year in Pingxiang has come to an end and I have time for one more post as I sit here in my depressingly bare apartment, missing the sounds of Terry’s chair scraping along the floor upstairs…

Over the past week the students have acknowledged the fact that my departure naturally turns me into the world’s greatest teacher and they have expressed their love and devotion with meals and gifts.  English Education 3 took me out for dinner and forced beer down me until I agreed to take them to the Square and watch the old women dance.

EE9 took me and Chrissy for lunch at the new buffet in the city.

It was possibly the sweatiest meal of our lives.


Somehow I ended up kissing Baby.

My Business English fresher classes presented me with books full of messages from them and photos.  Really sweet.  Though the quality of their English somewhat negates their praise and gratitude for all I've taught them.

Some final developments in Pingxiang Land include the opening of a pool at my gym, which has been bliss in the current humidity, and the unveiling of a big Mao statue at the front of the college.  The ceremonial fireworks almost killed Chrissy and I, who were on our last run round the college track.  Pingxiang College apparently ascribes great importance to aesthetics.  See how grand our statue is.  Let’s all ignore the state of the classrooms…

Bob took us out for a final banquet on Tuesday lunch.  We had all been a little annoyed for him for various reasons, such as forgetting to give us references, assistance and huge amounts of money.  But after a few beer challenges and his adamant promise to cook us his famous egg and tomato dish when we come back to visit next year we forgave him.  Here he is arm-wrestling a visiting German…

After lunch Bob wanted to take photos outside the library but we got majorly distracted as we passed Shandong wrap man and ended up all attempting to make our own wraps.  These wraps are some of the best street food in Pingxiang (which is quite a feat as the food here is good).  Here’s Terry’s stunning attempt.

And here I am with wrap man and what I’m pretty sure is a perfect wrap.

Anyway, in conclusion, it’s been a fascinating year: challenging, entertaining and progressive.  There have been ups…

And downs…

Highs…

And lows…

Ingenious inventions...

5-year-olds cage-biking...

And lots and lots of photos...

I’m feeling sad to say goodbye to my first Chinese home and all the people I’ve met here but I’m also feeling ready to move on.  Next year, if all goes to plan, I will be returning to China to study Mandarin on a scholarship from the Chinese government.  Of course, since it’s China, I won’t know where it is, when I start or if I’ve even been awarded the scholarship until next month, a few precious weeks before the new term begins.  But if China has taught me one thing, it’s how to deal with the unexpected.  Perhaps preparation is overrated.

I’m sure I’ll return to Pingxiang next year to visit (if only because I’m leaving half my stuff in Lydia’s apartment).  At the rate the city is developing it’ll probably be unrecognisable but I hope it continues to thrive.  Despite or perhaps because of all its deficiencies and difficulties, my little city has been the perfect introduction to the country and its customs; Pingxiang has been my stepping stone into the culture and my first year of what I hope will be a continued experience of living and learning the bizarre, bewildering and strangely beguiling world of China.