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.
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.
