My faith in humanity damaged and then restored

Email received from Patric the Irish guy on Friday.

Hi ****,

hope u are well. I have a quick question for u…
Are u working tomorrow? My friend (chinese businessman) needs a girl to go to a businese dinner(in jiangdu) tomorrow.hotel & transport supplied.500RMB.leave Sat 3pm & return Sun 10am. If interested I can tell u more.
Patric

How could I say “No” to an offer like that? I rang Patric, and he promised me it wasn’t as dodgy as it sounded – I was relieved. He told me that a Chinese businessman needed a Western woman to go to a dinner with him and pretend to be a kindergarten teacher at a school run by his company for the employees of Sinopec.

I walked over to HongWu Lu to see his Administrator (Cathy) and she assures me that I will get my own hotel room and won’t have to do anything except drink large amounts of Baijo (evil Chinese liquor). She tells me that the girl who I am pretending to be, is famous for her ability to drink a lot of Baijo and so I will also have to do this. Little does she know that there is absolutely NO WAY I am drinking Baijo – beer or wine is fine but definitely not Baijo.

So, with freshly laundered clothes I head to the city centre for a spot of lunch and then to the office of “Harry’s English/Herry’s English”. I find a cheap looking Chinese fast food sort of place where you can pick up the dishes you fancy. I pick some veg and a meatball in a saucer of gravy. However, as I found out to my cost, eating a large meatball with chopsticks is a bit tricky and predictably it fell into the saucer of gravy and covered the front of my clean pink shirt.

An emergency purchase of a bottle of water followed and I found a security man’s bench under an umbrella where I sat and spent 5 minutes making my shirt wet and transparent. A coughing fit followed and I threw up my lunch on the floor under the bench. Thinking it was best to make a quick exit I walked round the corner of Bei Men Qiao to find a shop called “Brioche French pastry”.

Now after spending some time in NJ you learn not to get too excited by what it says on the shop front as there is often disappointment inside. I was keen to replace my first breakfast but although the shelves were fully stocked there was nothing on them that looked at all edible. There was certainly nothing French about anything inside.

With empty stomach I went to the office where another teacher was waiting. Her name was Fatima and I took an instant dislike to her. She completely ignored me and even though she wasn’t Chinese, spoke to Cathy in Chinese. Even when Cathy spoke English to us she replied in Chinese. I diagnosed an inferiority complex.

So off we went to the bus station to get a bus to Jiangdu. The 2.5hr journey turned into 3hrs when Cathy got the tickets. “I have bought the tickets for the fast bus” she said “So it will go directly there and not stop anywhere”.

Alarm bells started ringing. “Cathy you said it was a 2.5 hr journey now you are saying it’s 3 hrs, does that mean it’s going to be 3.5 hr?” “No it will be 3 hrs” I was already getting quietly angry because I realised that I had been duped – it was going to be a long bus journey.

As we left the city behind us I wondered whether there was any countryside which was less attractive than the countryside in Jiangsu. Through YiZheng and onto Yangzhou, endlessly industrial wasteland a backdrop to numerous small-holdings.

3.5 hrs later and having had numerous stops to pick up more passengers, we arrive at Jiangdu where I meet the owner of the school. This man had obviously had some sort of identity crisis as brochures in the office had “Harry’s International English” and “Herry’s International English”. When I asked why they were different Cathy explained that he had changed his name from Harry to Herry and then back to Harry and now was calling himself Owen after Michael Owen, the Liverpool footballer.

I brought up the subject of the length of the bus journey with “Owen” and said that I would not have come if I had known it would take 3.5 hrs. He stood speechless and then led us into a room full of Sinopec managers who were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Western teachers. I had already worked out my excuse for not drinking Baijo – it brings me out in blotches (they were sympathetic) but I explained that I would drink Beer.

So followed an evening much like any other Chinese business meal – everyone got very drunk very quickly and it was all over by 9:30pm. Sober, I collapsed onto the bed in a dingy room in a Sinopec hotel on the main street only to find it had no mattress! I pulled up the sheets and although it did look like there was a mattress it felt like a plank of wood. A cheap Karrimat on the floor would have given more comfort.

Setting the alarm clock for 2:30am I spent a disappointing 1.5 hours watching a dismal England performance against the USA and then turned off the light to go to sleep. But the market traders setting up their stalls under my window and vehicles driving past blasting their air horns meant that sleep wouldn’t come. By 7:30 you can imagine I wasn’t in very good spirits and went in to the bathroom for a shower. The whirlpool bath had evidently not whirled for years as the taps were broken. So I stuck my head in the sink and washed in cold water.

Never mind, I thought, I will be on a bus back to NJ in a few moments. However, on meeting Cathy and Owen it became clear that they had other plans for me.

“We are doing a 30 minute demo lesson for the headmaster of the kindergarten”. Now I was really losing my sense of humour.
“There’s no way I am doing a demo lesson. This was not in the deal. Give me my money and I will go back to NJ”.
“Please just come to the kindergarten and say hello to the headmaster. The other two teachers will do the demo lesson. It will only take half an hour”.
“OK but I am leaving straight after that.”
“Yes, we will all go together”

Arriving at the kindergarten I was finding it difficult to retain the ‘jolly fun teacher’ I was supposed to be. I refused to sit-in on the demo lessons.

“You never mentioned this, you have not been honest with me”.
“In one hour we can leave.”
“One Hour! you said it was half an hour”
“The headmaster wants us to do an hour demo”
“I will wait in the staff room”

Half an hour passes and I spend the time texting people about my woes and reducing the pile of fruit on the table. Then in comes one of the teachers

“I have done one lesson, I have two more to do”
“Hang on a minute, that means there is 1.5 hours of demo lesson”
“Yes, that’s right”

Now I am pretty mad and so when he’s gone I get Cathy’s handbag which I assume has all the money in it, walk out of the school (I was told not to leave but I am passed caring now) and sit in the shade of a tree.

My reckoning is that she is not going to leave without her bag so I will not get left behind. I also wanted to get back at her by making her think someone had stolen her bag. I toyed with the idea of taking what was due to me and leaving but thought better of it. After all I didn’t even know where I was.

A short while later Cathy found me and told me that Owen had said I could go home on my own. Hooray.

“I will pay you now and put you in a taxi to the bus station in Yangzhou”. She reaches into her bag “Oh I don’t seem to have enough money to pay you”. I was firm but controlled “I’m not leaving here until you pay me. Find the money somehow, I don’t care how you do it but you will find the money NOW”
Off she goes to find Harry/Herry/Owen and miraculously the money is found.

I am bundled into a taxi and thank God I am free of them – just want to be back in NJ now. A moment after the taxi leaves, it stops and collects another person.

“Hey what’s going on here, get out of my cab”
“Your friend only paid me 20 Kwai” the taxi driver tells me.
I get it, so he needs to collect other people to make it pay! We pick up three extra people who are crushed onto the back seat with their baggage and half an hour later we arrive at the bus station in Yangzhou.

As soon as my ticket is purchased I see the bus start to pull out of the station. I walk across the yard to get on it and as I get close I see several students about 18 years old waving frantically at me. I assume that there is a friend of theirs behind me but on entering the bus I am given a round of applause by three students waving at me and all shouting

“Herro, Herro. Where you are from? Can I take your photograph?”. I was so surprised at getting such a VIP welcome that I give them all the fruit I have stolen from the staffroom.

It’s a wonder that a bus in this dire state of repair still goes. Only in Africa have I seen vehicles this dilapidated. But the driver was merry and the 5 passengers were merry and I was a VIP.

“Could you ask the driver to go a bit faster? I can walk quicker than this”. Everyone on the bus (5 plus the ticket seller) laughs, even the bus driver. He explains “It’s a very old bus” and they all laugh again. They are in such high spirits and it’s such a relief to be amongst happy smiling people that I relax, sit back and sleep, my faith in the people of China restored.

postscript
Found this on a teaching centre review site.