Success and Teaching English

I once read a post on a well-known travel forum from someone who wanted to not just travel but live abroad, and wanted to know how people actually went about doing that. Someone commented that there are many different ways – some go to travel, find an opportunity and stay. Others are able to find jobs on their own due to their skills – often IT professionals, doctors of some sort, teachers or people with various other qualifying jobs. Still others join the foreign service or are sent abroad with their companies. They finished with “for those with talent, there will always be opportunities”.

This was a long time ago – possibly several years – but that memory, combined with my recent trip back to the USA and catching up with friends there, got me thinking about “success” as it exists within the expat life.

Let’s be honest: most young folks from English-speaking countries who go abroad do so by teaching English. It’s pretty much the only language teaching field where one can get a job without a certification or experience, which has (somewhat deservedly) earned it a dodgy reputation as a job type and even dodgier as a career move. Who would move abroad to teach English if they had any other talents or skills? Who would do it as a career other than the sketchiest of guys (and yes, this reputation by and large attaches itself to men. I’m not saying it’s fair, I’m saying it happens)? How could anyone do that and actually be considered successful? With low salaries, few worker rights, few worker perks – how many of you English teachers in Taiwan have ever gotten a paid vacation, an annual bonus, extra pay for overtime work or any of the other perks one would otherwise expect from any other job? – is it a field that anyone who actually desires professional success would ever go into?

On the surface, no. All of my friends back home have gone into more typical “information economy” jobs: office work, professional work, business, graphic design, public health, one lawyer who is having a tough go of it. And yet, I desire professional success, and I went into English teaching. I suppose I could have become a right proper “teacher”, the kind who need Master’s degrees and have unions representing them, but while I love teaching (and am good at it!), I don’t particularly relish or dream of spending my entire working day with children. I like them, but not enough to make them central to my career.

It is true among travellers that “English teaching” has a bad rap – and often for good reason. In many cases it’s the ultimate minimum wage job abroad (in many others, English teachers earn well above local salaries, but rarely do they earn anything approaching traditional expat salaries), akin to immigrating to the USA and working as a takeout delivery guy. In many ways it’s more challenging than that, but let’s be honest, if you don’t need experience or training to do a passable job at something, it’s not that hard a job. And I say this as someone who’s done it. So when talking to people who know a few things about international living and travel, you can almost hear the disdain in their voices: “Oh, you’re an English teacher? Well, I guess that’s one way to do it.” Foreign service officers, journalists, students, expat business owners and company-based expats don’t get the same sneering tone – even if the traveller herself couldn’t hope to land such a job, nor might she want to: I know I wouldn’t want to go abroad only to work long hours in an office doing managerial work, nor would I want to work towards upholding US foreign policy in the foreigner service. I respect people who do it, but it’s not for me.

That tone says: “you chose the easiest possible route to living abroad”. It’s a hard thing to fight back against. Note as well that it generally comes from other expats and travellers, rarely if ever do you hear it on the lips of locals.

Now, I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who has since become a career teacher, or “corporate trainer” if I want to be pretentious about it. There are plenty of young, upwardly mobile types who go abroad, teach for a year or two and then go home to pursue other fabulous careers (or they just start the slow slog into the morass of middle management), just as it’s popular to go abroad and work as an au pair for a few years, do Peace Corps or study abroad. They only prove my point: that ambitious people mostly leave English teaching for other pursuits.

And yet I say all this not to dump on English teachers abroad – heck, it’s my own job, and it’s one I’ve chosen purposefully. I was once a newbie with no experience, too.

I used to work in finance. Granted I was in my early 20s so I wasn’t exactly scaling the corporate heights, but the heights were there to scale and I had the potential to make it happen, but I left that more lucrative field to do this. I’m good at it in a way I was never good at office work, or at least the sort of office work I did in my previous incarnation. Clearly I believe there is merit to it, and while I’m not too worried about the salaries of inexperienced young kids who show up and are shoved in a classroom, I do feel that people who are trained, experienced, know the language in and out and kick ass at teaching English deserve to be compensated fairly. More fairly than many of them are. I can name more than one trained, talented and competent teacher who was willing to work for less than NT$700 an hour. It sounds arrogant but it’s true: I wouldn’t get out of bed for that, and they shouldn’t have either. I won’t say what my bottom line is because I don’t wish to discuss salary, but let’s just say that it’s more than NT$700. Both of them worked for Kojen, both regularly worked 6-day weeks and both felt they were getting a fair deal. They weren’t.

I realize I’ve just made a case for “English teaching” not being a job that offers professional success, but honestly, I do consider myself successful. My husband and I have a pretty comfortable lifestyle, comparable to what reasonably successful early-thirtysomethings in the USA might enjoy. We’ve swung some sweet vacations, and we don’t travel “on a budget” (no hostels, no self-catering with the exception of our month in Istanbul). We’re about to move to a very comfortable and well-appointed apartment that is well within our means. I work with businesspeople and my salary could compete well against theirs – from what I know of average salaries in Taiwan. I teach and earn the respect of CEOs, vice presidents, executives and senior managers and I’ve brought in business on more than one occasion, from companies you’ve heard of. I’m looking at starting a Master’s program next year. I do all this while working a job I genuinely love, that I do well. Note that I love my line of work and the students I work with – my actual company is hot and cold at best. I recently negotiated a very good raise. I took it upon myself to get certified once I decided that this was the right path, and I’ll certainly go on to higher qualifications in the future. What I do now is related to what I did when I was a newbie, but comes with challenges I hadn’t imagined facing, and that I couldn’t have overcome five years ago. Who wouldn’t call that successful?

I don’t mean to imply that I, self-satisfied as I might sound, am the only one to accomplish this. I’m not as far as I’d like to be, and I have plenty of peers who have also gone far in the field.

So here’s where I confess. I do hold prejudices. Well, duh, Jenna, we all do. Yes, yes we do. Here’s one of mine: I do have less respect for the long-termers at the lower end of the market – the ones who showed up with no experience or training (nothing wrong with that  - I was there once too, and I do feel ) and have stuck around for years, if not decades, working for peanuts at a lackluster buxiban for lack of another clear path, and have made no attempt to either find another path or work to become better teachers who demand better treatment and better pay. I confess that some of them rub me the wrong way. I try not to take the few bad eggs and judge the whole lot of ‘em, but I can’t help but wonder: if you’re still working at the ghetto end of the market after however many years, maybe it’s because that’s what you’re worth?

I’m sure I’m going to get dumped on in comments for that, so I’ll admit it now: yes, it’s a prejudice and yes, it’s unfair, even if there’s a kernel of truth in it. People end up where they do thanks to a combination of personality traits, random circumstance and socioeconomic opportunity and yes, I know, if someone ends up at the lower end of career English teaching abroad, it would be better to look at the whole person. But I’d rather be forthright about my prejudices rather than pretending I don’t have them.

I occasionally hear complaints that restrictions for teaching English in various countries have become tighter: now you can’t hope to get much of a job in China without a certification (for awhile the government wouldn’t even give you a visa to work as a teacher without one, I’m not sure if that’s still in effect) and you can’t hope to get much of a decent job in other countries without one. My sister is one of those “no experience, got a job teaching kids” types – but she has talent and she’ll do well no matter where she ultimately ends up – and she’s in Taiwan working for less than I earned when I started. In Turkey, well-paid jobs abound for those with training and experience, but even in Istanbul you can’t hope to make much more than US$12 an hour without those things: even with a CELTA and no experience you might not start out much higher than that.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: yes, teaching English can be a low paid dead end job, and it attracts its fair share of dodgy people. That said, it can also be a real occupation and provide true professional paths, if you’ve got the drive and talent to make it happen.

Asiaworld. Asia...world.

We move in 3 weeks to a much splashier apartment in a more central location. Today I had no class - which didn't bother me too much because I have worked enough this month to earn a nice chunk o' change - so I schlepped up to Asiaworld Mall to peruse IKEA and Nitori to price items we might like to buy for the new place. I didn't buy much; it makes more sense to do that after the move, but I did buy a floor cushion from Nitori that I believe will soon be discontinued and some Glogg (it's that time of year!) from IKEA. Otherwise I spent my time wandering about and noting down prices of various items we may choose to buy.

After my wander, I stopped in the Asiaworld B1 restroom, and a memory came rushing back. Many of you know that recently, Asiaworld underwent a massive renovation and now no longer looks like the slightly ratty, dinged-at-the-edges department store from the '80s ('90s?) that it is. Now it's flash: maybe not as flashy as the new Tianmu Sogo, but plenty flash. The bathrooms used to be one step above MRT bathrooms - not that those are bad, but that in other department stores the bathrooms are all swanky with makeup areas and mirrors with vanity lights and cushioned pink chairs. Now, Asiaworld's ladies' room matches that aesthetic.

But not so long ago, it was just a restroom, and a kind of forgotten one at that. Way back in the day I was shopping at IKEA - I do that a lot, I'm totally addicted to home decor - and I went to use it.

There was an attendant. She doesn't appear to be there anymore, but I haven't forgotten her. She was 70 years old if she was a day, and looked like she'd had a tough life. I said 你好 and smiled, and thought that was it. While washing my hands she started talking to me. I couldn't place her accent, because she was clearly learning disabled or had some sort of disorder or intellectual challenge, and her speech was a bit slurred and lisped, but not in a way that reminded me of a stroke victim. More in the way of someone who's had a lifelong disability.

She told me, unprovoked and unasked, about how her family came to Taiwan around 1949, or rather half of them did. I couldn't understand her well enough to tell if she said she was from Jiangsu or Gansu, but either way she (the eldest daughter), her brother and her father came over while, for reasons that she didn't make clear, her mother and younger sister stayed behind, ostensibly to follow later.

"But they killed them, they just killed them!" she said. "Dead! I never saw them again! Or my uncles or aunts. Dead!"

She talked about how a lot of people who came over were able to get back on their feet and establish themselves and their families (those with closer ties to the KMT or who had government/military favor, mostly) and how they're mostly rich now, but not everyone was so lucky. I already knew this: I have a student whose father came over in '49 who worked as a bus driver. They didn't have much. His children are successful through hard work, not favor or socioeconomic inertia.

"We had nothing, and I couldn't go to school. I had to stay home. They thought I was stupid. And they killed my mother and sister," she repeated. "Dead!"

I have no idea why she told me all this, and more. Maybe, being a foreigner who indicated she could speak Chinese (although "你好" is hardly an indicator of that, plenty of locals think it means you're fluent), she felt she could unload on me, but not others. Plenty of foreign women, many of whom must speak Chinese or at least seem like they can, also must pass through that bathroom, though - after all, it's right next to IKEA. I have no idea if she told her life story to all of them, or singled me out. Or maybe she just told everyone and got fired for annoying the patrons (that would be sad - I was affected by her story but not annoyed). Old Fang - my ancient Hakka neighbor who was given away as a child because her family didn't want another girl - did the same thing, but foreigners are more rare my side of Jingmei. I stick out.

Or maybe it's just that she was old, and old people, like the bathroom attendant and Old Fang, like to tell their life stories.

Either way, it did affect me deeply, but I didn't tell anyone about it. What would I say? What would be the point? I filed the story away but never quite forgot it. I always remember her when I go to IKEA. I haven't seen her in years.

Taiwan has changed a lot since then. In another part of the city, glass and steel glitter above wide, clean streets. Department stores are full of wealthy and upper middle class Taiwanese shopping for Georg Jensen business card holders, Patek Philippe watches, Coach bags and Anna Sui accessories. Starbucks and high-end cafes and bars litter the city. It's not uncommon to get cut off, as a pedestrian, by a Mercedes or BMW. You can see the change right there in Asiaworld, where she used to work (maybe she still does and I've been missing her shift, who knows). Gone is the dingy basement bathroom and the old lady attendant, and here come the young xiaojie in short skirts, pink gloves and little hats shouting "WELCOME!" at you in shrill Chinese, imitating department store girls in Japan.

I can see the change even in the five years I've been here, and I arrived well after Taiwan had undergone its most aesthetically powerful changes.

It's easy to forget, as you wander ever more modern streets, that the pain in this country still runs deep, and a lot of the people you meet have suffered hardships you can't - you really can't - imagine (and I say this as someone whose family mostly escaped the Armenian genocide. I can't imagine that, either. Not with my comparatively privileged life). The wounds, in places and at times, are still raw. The younger generations have mostly forgotten or have reconciled, but memories linger. Like an earthquake fault line, it runs deep, and it's not going to go away soon. A hundred years, maybe, and maybe not even then. And the pain runs deep on all sides - not just the Hoklo, not just the Hakka or aborigines, not just the waishengren, who didn't all escape from Taiwan's not-too-distant past unscathed, either. Their kids shop at SOGO, but they remember. It's part of why I am so interested in the stories of the elderly in Taiwan, just as I know my own family stories from relatives who have since passed, and a few who are fortunately still with us.

It's also a powerful reminder that life is not fair and people, for better or worse, don't alway get their just desserts.

So.

I left Asiaworld at about 4:30. The sun highlighted slate and peach clouds hanging over Taipei Arena. The warm colors that filtered through made even Nanjing E. Road look attractive, and let me tell you, that's an accomplishment. The air was warmish, the wind cool. I was wearing soft old jeans, a green jersey-knit top and super-soft shawl given to me by my mother-in-law. I clutched the cushion from Nitori to my chest as I walked to the bus stop in this weather - not quite winter, but Thanksgiving is coming - it all felt so soft. The soft heather clouds, the luminous late afternoon sun, the shawl, the cushion, a bit of cool breeze, also soft. I got on the bus. I felt conflicted. I feel so comfortable in Taiwan. Soft, even. I feel safe. I feel secure.

And yet, I remember the bathroom attendant.

Tsai Ying-wen Campaigns in Wanhua

Yeah, big surprise there, I know.

My friend Joseph, the man behind Taishun Street, shook her hand this week while he was there for the Qingshan Wang temple festival. He's got some pictures and commentary here.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggeringly Bad Satire

So as you've probably all heard if you follow politics in East Asia, Paul Kane has come out saying that his recent piece of stinky tripe was a "Swiftian satire", a piece meant not to be taken seriously but to provoke debate by playing a fierce devil's advocate.

Uh huh.

Thing is, I don't buy it.

We all know the tired cliche of someone who makes a big, stinking gaffe trying to cover his butt by saying "oh, it was just a joke! Can't you guys take a joke? I was MAKING FUN of it by pretending to support it, I didn't mean to be taken seriously!"

I mean, I can understand little comments here and there where one speaks hyperbolically (I've done that), but this was an entire op-ed piece, and if it was a satire, it wasn't a particularly funny one, nor was it particularly obvious. The secret of good satire is that it has to be clear to most people that it is, in fact, a satire, without having to tell them. Even if it sounds serious, even plausible. If this was a satire - and I don't believe it was, I'm in the "he's trying to cover his butt" contingent - it was remarkably ill-conceived and poorly executed.

As Jon Stewart said of an unrelated news item - I believe it was Herman Cain saying he'd build an electrified fence on the US-Mexican border, then saying it was a "joke", that he wasn't serious, and then saying that he wouldn't rule out the idea of a fence: "it's like a teenager hitting on a girl. 'You wanna make out? Hahaha, I was just kidding...unless you wanna make out.'"

I don't think Paul Kane's belated "oops" is really all that much different.

Qingshan Wang 2011

Every year around this time - based on the lunar calendar - 青山宮 (Qingshan Temple) on Guiyang Street holds its annual celebration. Other temples from around the area come to pay homage to Qingshan Wang (The Lord of Green Mountain), and Qingshan Wang himself makes a circuit of the other nearby temples. The festival usually spans three days, with the biggest processional taking place on the night of the final day. It typically ends between 11pm and 1am.

It's a favorite among campaigning politicians as many of Wanhua's residents turn out to see the festivities.

We try to go every year, which has not gone unnoticed. The day before yesterday our friend Joseph was there and managed to shake hands with a campaigning Tsai Ying-wen (蔡英文). I'm looking forward to his blog post with pictures on that. Some campaign assistant asked him "is this your first time to this festival?" and some local shot back "no, that guy comes every year". To be fair, Joseph kind of sticks out. The year previously, I was jockeying for a good position from which to see the parade and a guy stood in front of me. I complained and he said "we see you every few months at these temple parades. You always get the chance to take pictures, so I don't feel bad for you!"

This year was my favorite so far - we left at about midnight, and it was still going. The highlight of the night was the delegation from the Tiger Temple (虎爺宮) in Xinzhuang (新莊), which I now feel I must visit. People involved with the temple, male and female, wore tiger-striped jackets and yellow headbands, came in shouting "TIGER GRANDFATHER!" (虎爺), "ho ya" in Taiwanese. Apparently this deified tiger has the ability to control ghosts, demons and other celestial bad boys. They piled up firecrackers to about knee height, positioned the idol's palanquin over them and set off the pile. The palanquin looked quite worse for wear. So did the guys.

There were also techno-dancing "god children" (san tai zi), lion dancers, dragon dancers, idols, Eight Generals and the usual contingent of tall gods and short dancing gods (七爺八爺) who have their own story (they were two real-life generals from history who were such good friends that they were like brothers, so when they were trapped under a bridge during a flood, they stayed and drowned together rather than be separated).

I told the story of Qingshan Wang here, back in 2008, and have more posts on this particular festival here, here, and about Hao Lung-bin's appearance at the festival here.

Updated with photos!

Me an' my HOMEBOYS

Now, we don't want no trouble, OK?

Birth Control and Freedom in Taiwan

A letter of mine has been published in the Taipei Times again, this time on the topic of National Health Insurance's lack of coverage for birth control.

It's copied below as well. Enjoy.

Birth control and freedom

In my five years in Taiwan, I’ve been consistently impressed with the healthcare system here.

That’s why I was surprised to learn, after using the system for so long, that birth control is not covered by the National Health Insurance (NHI) and the birth control options available to women in Taiwan are limited at best. The cheapest options are similar in price to one person’s NHI monthly premium after employer subsidization. This is an insult to women’s rights and choice. It needs to change immediately.

I realize there are two factors at play in the decision not to cover contraceptives: The first is that the Taiwanese government is preoccupied with raising the birthrate and covering birth control appears to contradict that goal. The second is that it’s “elective” and not a necessity for a healthy life (although I could argue that for many women, it is a necessity for a fulfilling life).

I accept neither of these excuses. As for increasing the birthrate, making birth control needlessly expensive is not the way to do it. Middle-class and wealthy women in Taiwan can afford the NT$450 to NT$650 a month that birth control costs, as well as the initial OB/GYN consultation fees, but poorer women cannot. Does the government really want to raise the birthrate only among women who are pregnant only because they can’t afford birth control? How about among women whose husbands force them to have sex and who won’t wear a condom? Are these the households in which we want children to be born?

Shouldn’t the government instead pursue a policy in which babies are born into stable families who planned for them, want them and will love them?

Birth control is more than an “elective” — access to it is a necessary component of women’s freedom and rights. For some women, it’s the only thing standing between them and poverty, as they — married or not — can’t afford to raise a child.

It’s not a complete solution to say: “Make him wear a condom.” Unfortunately, many men in Taiwan refuse to do this, including married men. For many women, especially those in abusive or controlling marriages, taking control of their own form of contraception is the only option — and it’s a pricey one. It is one of the most expensive long-term medications to take, because it is not covered as most long-term medications are.

For some women, birth control is a medical necessity brought on by various health issues, either to maintain chronic conditions or because pregnancy would be dangerous or life-threatening.

This creates an unacceptably sexist bent to Taiwan’s national health policy. With Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in the running to be Taiwan’s first female president, Taiwanese women can only hope that she, in fighting for greater women’s rights and equality, will take a hard look at the issue and decide that things need to change. Now.

Jenna Cody

Taipei