I am the only qualified teacher at the school where I am currently doing some part time work. The other teachers are good people and do their best with what they are given. The Chinese teachers are routinely overworked and probably underpaid.
I am valued. I know this. The staff and management say nice things to me and are always relieved to see I have turned up. This last week has been a special week for the school, a celebration of 20 years and they held a few events to mark this.
One of them was an English week for which I stubbornly refused to get up an hour earlier than normal on Friday in the dead of winter (dark and very cold) to march around the school in stupid clothes with kids hitting drums.
I didn’t manage to get out of everything though. I still had to host the grade one stage show which took up the whole of Christmas Day lunchtime and for which the poor local teachers had been working furiously at short notice.
The show was ok – I did the easiest part which was to introduce the others. But it has become increasingly obvious that the attribute which I possess which the school most values is my white skin.
At every turns there’s someone with a camera taking pictures of us foreign teachers, our beautiful white skin shining in the winter sun, with our tall bodies, light coloured hair and winning smiles. Sometimes this week it felt like the only reason we were doing all these activities was to provide the marketing dept a photo opportunity. (Probably not far from the truth)
And as if it wasn’t good enough to have foreign teachers with our shiny white skin, the school management then decided they needed our likeness in the form of life-size cardboard cut-out.
So I was met at the main entrance of the school this week, by myself! When they took the photo I was clearly in no mood to be turned into marketing collateral and therefore, where my American colleagues had all struck poses, looked cool and friendly, I stood there, arms by my side with a grumpy expression and my mouth half open saying “Have you finished yet”?
Fabulous! So now, whenever there is an event at the school I will be marvelled at, not for my teaching skills, experience or qualifications but because I am a foreigner and of course, in China, it’s clear that if the school has foreign teachers, qualified or not, they can attract more students.
I suppose I am fed up of being valued more for the colour of my skin than what I can actually do in the classroom. China places a high value on white westerners and some schools would rather hire a white unqualified face than a brown face of a qualified native-speaker experienced teacher.