Li Yang is an evil son of a bitch, Part I

Last year, a friend of mine worked at an English Camp during the Spring Festival holiday.  She returned to Shenzhen with 4,500 RMB, close to $660, for 10 day’s work.  She talked about how networking at the camp had gotten her more than enough tutoring opportunities and possibly a job at a university.  She said the camp was easy because the students were intelligent and eager to learn.  She judged a few English competitions, and on the eve of the Lunar New Year, she walked on hot coals with other foreign teachers.  It sounded like she had a great time and made a nice chunk of change doing it.  The negatives she mentioned included the food and lack of internet.

She never mentioned Li Yang, his lectures, or his many airbrushed pictures.

A couple months ago, my nameless female friend gave me the phone number of a man to contact about getting a job at this winter’s camp.  I called him up, made an appointment, and went to see him.  His English name was Clark, and his office featured framed pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.  He referred to the camp several times as being a Crazy English Camp.  I’d heard of Crazy English before, but I can only recall hearing about this company when discussing textbooks to use with adults I tutored.  Under the impression that Crazy English was just a normal, faceless, for-profit company dedicated to helping Chinese people learn English through its camps, books and MP3 downloads, I signed a contract to teach at this year’s camp.

Clark never mentioned Li Yang, his lectures, or his many, many airbrushed pictures.

As a foreign teacher who has lived in China 15 of the last 17 months, I’m highly disappointed in myself for not knowing about this man, especially since he calls himself an English teacher (he’s a businessman first and foremost), and he has an incredible amount of influence on Chinese youth, who will shape China and its relations with America down the road.  Furthermore, since Clark has worked as an outside contractor, finding foreign teachers and directing them during the camps, for the past five years, I feel like he should have at least said Li Yang created Crazy English and demanded foreign teachers sit on stage with him so he could use them in his lectures.

That way I could have gone into the 31^st Li Yang Crazy English Intensive Training Camp with a bit of a clue.

I had none.

My eyes were opened slightly when most of the foreign teachers traveled to the camp together two days early.  Standing around at a train station, a girl from Florida informed me that it was similar to Jesus Camp but with English in place of Jesus.

This scared me a bit.

The Floridian, who was a 2009 college graduate who had majored in journalism, referenced this article from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/28/080428fa_fact_osnos

She told me about the kowtowing incident and said that Li Yang was controversial.  At this point, I was glad that I had brought my video camera and camera.  Then, upon arriving at the hotel where I would stay for the next 12 days, I met the man who ended any dreams of capturing substantial proof of Li Yang’s antics.

His English name was Daniel, and he was a thin Chinese man in his late 20s-early 30s.  His lips curled out in an odd manner, which made him look awkward when he wasn’t smiling and devilish when he did.  Daniel spoke to my fellow foreign teachers and I under a pavilion in front of the hotel.  He wore a light blue golf shirt tucked into gray trousers.  The letters CE were in a Superman crest on his chest.

Moments after introducing himself, Daniel said, “The most important thing about Crazy English Camp is that you follow the rules.  If you’re late for a class once, you’re docked 500 RMB, if you’re late again, you’re gone.  If you break any of the rules, you’ll be docked money the first time, and then if you do it again, you’re gone.”

I hated Daniel immediately.  What kind of a person threatens teachers who just want to work with kids in such a reckless manner upon meeting them?

After Daniel left to attend another meeting, an American named Martin, who had worked a few Crazy English Camps in the past, stood up and said, “I’m glad Daniel left because I do not agree with everything he said.  They way they teach here, some of it’s good and some of it’s bad.  That’s up to you to decide.  At times during the camp, you will feel like a clown.  You’ll be on stage with Li Yang, and you’ll be used as a prop.  Some of you might not like it.  Try not to let it bother you.”

Martin didn’t elaborate what he meant by clown, and, looking back, I wish I’d asked.

Our hotel was next door to a high school campus.  The campus and hotel were on the bank of a clean-looking river, a rarity in Guangdong Province, surrounded by mountains with nowhere to go within walking distance.  After our meeting, Clark took us on a tour of the campus.  Entering the quad by the front gate, I had one of those “Oh my God, what am I doing here” moments.  I counted 10 pictures of Li Yang in the quad.  His face was plastered on giant billboards with propaganda slogans in English and Chinese.  One read, “Make the voice of China to be widely heard throughout the world.”  Another read, “Conquer English to make China stronger!” and it featured Li holding his fist in the air, with a Chinese flag above him.  In the picture, he’s also wearing a Led Zeppelin shirt.  The banner was so big it covered a quarter of the front of a building, and it was the third smallest banner in the quad.

The Quad was nothing, though.  After dinner, I got to see the auditorium.  I counted 15 pictures of Li.  There were two giant banners on either end of the building facing each other, and billboards lining the length on top of the bleachers.  There also were two pictures of Li on either side of the stage.  So, if you were a student looking at the stage, your eyes were filled with five pictures of this man.  This also means that when Li was on stage, preaching from his podium on the catwalk, he could see 10 pictures of himself.

Makes you wonder what the word for narcissistic is in Chinese.

Propaganda slogans featured alongside Li’s airbrushed face in the auditorium included, “Always remember: learning English is actually physical work,” and, again, “Conquer English to make China stronger!”

The biggest banner featured a 10-foot tall picture of Li’s face and his definition of the word Crazy:

“Crazy stands for the human spirit of transcending yourself.  It stands for the single minded pursuit of goals and dreams.  It stands for the total devotion to your work and mission.  It stands for the passion of commitment to reach a goal.  Once you have this crazy spirit, you can achieve anything you desire.  With this crazy spirit deeply rooted in your soul, you can easily conquer English and make all your dreams come true.”

My run-in with Daniel occurred the next night in the auditorium.  The Chinese teachers who worked at the camp were rehearsing the opening ceremony.  I’d caught a glimpse of an earlier rehearsal, and I wanted to record it.  Chinese teachers were strategically placed around the auditorium, and they bounced and flailed their arms to a song about Li Yang.  I’m not making this up.  We heard this song throughout the camp, and each time it played, a different foreign teacher would ask aloud, “Are they saying Li Yang’s name?”  To which someone always replied, “Yeah, they definitely are.”

Not even two minutes after I took out my video camera, Daniel was in my face about it.

“We do not allow cameras in here,” he said.

I apologized, said something about wanting to capture the moment to share with my mom and remember forever, and then put my video camera away.  Every Chinese person with a microphone in their hand screamed, and my fellow foreign teachers and I weren’t doing anything.  So, I walked up to the bleachers and took a picture of one of the billboards, with Li’s airbrushed picture next to propaganda.  Daniel sprang into action.

“Sir, this is twice now.  I already told you to put the camera away.  We are trying to have a rehearsal here.”

I gave him attitude.

“I was just taking a picture, man.  We’re just sitting around doing nothing.  Did me taking a picture really disrupt the rehearsal?”

He just stared at me, his thin lips protruding.

“Fine,” I said.  “I’ll sit down.”

I walked off, muttering under my breath.  Moments later, the foreign teachers were all excused from the rest of the rehearsal.  In the morning, Clark gathered all of the foreign teachers outside the hotel for an important announcement.

“Last night there was an incident concerning one of you and a camera.”

I stopped him right there, admitted to the group of about 20 teachers that he was speaking about me (most of them already knew since they were there when it happened), and then I used the “no one told me taking pictures and making videos was against the rules” defense.  A couple people stood up for me and complained that Daniel was too strict.

We walked to the campus for the opening ceremony.  Along the way, Clark told me that this was Daniel’s first camp in charge, and that’s why he’s cracking the whip.  Then this humpty-dumpty looking 72 year-old American man named Wayne approached me.

“This camp is going to be the most enjoyable experience of your life,” Wayne said.

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “The Steelers won two Super Bowls in the last decade.  I doubt an English camp can top that.”

Wayne was a religious man who had been living in China for 30 years.   He’s been working at Li’s camps since they began.  He persisted.

“I know Daniel very well,” he began.

“Whoa,” I said.  “That’s a bold statement.  How close are you?”

“We’re very close.”

“Wow, maybe you should be the one to tell him to take the stick out of his ass then.”