China goes Gaga

By Gavin | March 8, 2010

I don’t think it can be overstated how much Chinese students love Lady Gaga.  This may sound like an exaggeration, but Lady Gaga might just spark a revolution here. ….No, seriously, when I was at that damn Crazy English Camp, small children under the age of 10 were listening to her music.  It’s not hard for them to watch her music videos online, either.  If people are afraid it will warp the minds of America’s youth, just think of what it will do to the Chinese. … I’m all for this, naturally.  This country is very strange when it comes to sex.  Prostitution is out in the open, pushed in people’s faces practically.  Yet, I’ve met so many people who graduate from high school without ever experiencing their first kiss. … Last week, I decided to show a Lady Gaga music video at the end of a few classes.  Don’t worry; not one of her actual videos.  I found a video of her performing an acoustic version of “Paparazzi” live – just her on a piano.  The kids loved it.  And then, in a hilarious twist, I was asked if I thought Lady Gaga was beautiful. 

“Sure,” I said. 

Then the girl replied, “Many people on the internet don’t think so.”   

            “Is it because of her nose?” I said.

            The girl began to giggle, and her friend put a hand over her mouth.

            “Did you read a funny rumor about Lady Gaga’s body?” I said.

            Both girls were laughing now.  “Yes,” they said in unison.

            Imagine being one of the most influential musicians of your time, having fans love you all the way in China, and everyone thinks you’re a hermaphrodite.  That’s gotta be annoying.

            Then today I walked into a class, and four girls were standing around the computer listening to Lady Gaga’s song called, “Christmas Tree.”  The lyrics were running up the page.  I read half a verse and stopped them.

            “This song is not about a Christmas tree,” I said.

            One girl looked at me with a smirk.  “We know.”

            They know. …. They … know.

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I’m the white person here

By Gavin | March 8, 2010

The back alley near our school is called Nine Street.  It’s your typical back alley: garbage, construction, trinkets, small restaurants.  On some days, it really smells, and on others, you can barely maneuver it due to trucks hauling material down the narrow street.  It is so off the beaten path that Beer Monster and I stick out like sore thumbs, even more than usual.  To the surprise of both of us, we saw a white woman and her two small children walking down the street on Thursday of last week.  I had to do it.  I’ve been dying to do this for over a year, especially whenever I saw a white person near the Black River.  I walked over to the one woman, who appeared to be buying fruit from a fruit stand.  I tapped her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” I said.  “But, what are you doing here?”

She began to mumble, unsure of how to answer.

“I’m the white person on this street.”

It’s a joke completely ripped from “Not Another Teen Movie,” in that cinematic gem, it was about the token black dude at the upper middle class high school party.

The woman and I both laughed, and then I spoke to her 3 year old daughter.  Her son was one and being pushed in a stroller.  The little girl, named Nikki, actually chewed my ear off – adorable little thing.

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Food

By Gavin | March 8, 2010

Not sure if I’ve written about this: corn on the cob is sold on the street here.  Men with food carts sell them usually near bus stops.  You can also get sweet potatoes or stinky tofu.  Chinese people love tofu, which I never knew before moving here.  But, the corn on the cob continues to blow my mind.  It’s not uncommon to be walking down the street, even early in the morning, and see a man or woman squatting down near a bus stop and rapidly devouring boiled corn on the cob, without salt, pepper or butter. 

I went into my local Vanguard this evening to buy a few things for dinner.  I had a bag of pasta in the kitchen, and I wanted to grab some beef.  The beef and pork are all mixed together.  I picked up a slab of meat that was covered in plastic wrap and turned to an old woman and asked her if it was beef or not.  She said it was beef.  I stared at the meat a moment, thinking about whether or not I actually wanted to mix beef, spaghetti and tomato sauce.  It didn’t look like the freshest of pieces of meat, and none of the others seemed much better.  As I stood there waffling, the butcher came out from the back room with this enormous knife.  This butcher’s knife was as long as my forearm and about 8 inches wide.  The old woman began to speak to him.  She then pulled out a plastic bag from her purse, and in the bag was a dog’s hind leg.  The butcher took the leg and began chopping it into pieces on his wooden block, which is not behind a counter, and which I was standing right next to.  I could smell the meat, and the sound of bone crunching echoed off the walls of my brain.  I hurried away without buying any meat. …

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Li Yang is an evil son of a bitch – conclusion

By Gavin | February 27, 2010

Li Yang ruined my last class with my students.  That bastard picked that time period, when all the foreign teachers had class, to sign autographs.  I really enjoyed my class and most of them were in line for that asshole.  I pulled them out of line with five minutes left so I could have my picture taken with them.  The kids who go to Li Yang’s camp and walk away loving him are brainwashed.  Critics of Li Yang are right to call his camps a cult.  He’s a businessman, not a teacher, not a celebrity – a fucking infomercial superstar.  That’s it.

He’s such a douche bag that he didn’t even say goodbye to the camp in person.  He videotaped it and had his tampon of a sidekick Daniel show it to the camp.

I made sure all of my students, except for the children I looked after during the VIP sessions, knew I did not like Li Yang.  And I told them why.  I argued with one of my TAs, the only guy, about whether Li was a business man or teacher.  I still can’t believe anyone could think he’s a teacher.

I have a week of teaching at my school under my belt, and I made sure to talk about Li Yang in all of my classes.  Only one of my students has ever gone to one of his camps, and he hated it.  You have no idea what a relief it was to find out all of my students think Li Yang is a crazy man who is only in it for the money.  I even spoke to other teachers and a few faculty members here at Nan Tou, and they all said the same thing.

Thank God.

So, from now on, I’m splitting Chinese people into two categories: those who like Li Yang, and those who have minds of their own and hate him.

If Li Yang accomplishes what he wants to do, which is to teach 300 million Chinese how to speak English, he will be one of the most influential men in China.  If he continues to say Americans are too stupid to learn Chinese, and if he continues to say quasi racist shit on stage in front of children, there are going to be a lot of Chinese who are affected.  Down the line, that could be a problem, but I have faith that Li Yang will fail.

China fell for a douche bag who had pictures of himself everywhere and made crowds chant propaganda in unison once before, and I doubt China will fall for it again. …

As for how I acted at the camp, obviously I could have handled it a little better.  But, you know what, I’ve always hated authority, and the way Daniel came down on me those first two days, it made me want to be an asshole.  I don’t regret it.  I gave Clark a lot of headaches, but you know what, fuck him.  Maybe from now on he’ll warn Americans about Li Yang before they sign a contract.

And a lot of the other foreign teachers were complete tools.  There was this potbellied weirdo from Texas who was missing a tooth.  There was Wayne, the Bible thumper who sucked Daniel’s dick.  There were these two Canadian guys, Edward and Martin.  Edward was a tall, skinny, beady-eyed Christian, who told a bunch of people “Lady Gaga sold her soul to the devil.”  Who does shit like that?  Lady Gaga is HUGE in China, and, in a weird way, Lady Gaga’s popularity here is a good thing for America.  It makes this place more westernized. … Leave it to a Canadian to say something like that.  Martin was cool, but strange.  He said he was convinced the Oklahoma City Bombing and 9/11 were carried out by people inside the American government.  There was this middle-aged woman who was way too energetic.  She referred to the students as her “Chinese grandchildren” and she rapped on stage during the Lunar New Year’s Eve celebration.  There were these anti-social American girls who were strange, and then, of course, there was my money-loving nameless friend, who had this “let’s go gang” spirit the entire camp that made my blood boil.  She was the one who decided, and then organized, the final “performance” that the foreign students had to do.  She had us something called the Cha Cha dance.  Everyone had to do it.  I just stood in the back and pretended to be moving.  On the final day, she wore a turtleneck, and when I saw her in it, I wondered if the 31st Li Yang Crazy English Intensive Training Camp would be the demise of our friendship. … I hope not.  She’s cool if you have her in small doses, when she’s not wearing a turtleneck, and not butting into your conversations and arguing with you. …

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Li Yang is an evil son of a bitch – Tim Lyde edition

By Gavin | February 27, 2010

Following Li Yang’s “I’m mature.  Nothing offends me” comments, we walked back to the hotel for lunch.  We ate lunch and dinner in a private room at the hotel’s restaurant.  They put out the same buffet for each meal.  Good food, but the same stuff for each meal for 12 days. …. At lunch that day, some black dude in his 50s showed up with a Chinese woman and a half black-half Chinese baby girl.  He sat down at the table where I was sitting and introduced himself.

“I’m Tim, and I’m here to observe and evaluate,” he said.

“Are you sure you’re not here to replace one of us?” I said.

At that point, I really thought I was going to be fired.  Actually, I kind of wanted to be fired so I could return to Shenzhen and write.  It didn’t happen, though.  Tim really was there to observe and evaluate.

“I just got done working another camp, and I wanted to have a few days off, but Li kept calling and calling begging me to come here.  The man doesn’t take no for an answer.  Then Clark called me, and I gave in,” Tim said.

I wasn’t buying it.  I immediately assumed he either was replacing me, or he was there as Li Yang’s token black friend.  The latter turned out to be true.

The other people at the table began asking him questions, like where was he from (Dallas), how long he’d been in China – shit like that.  Tim said he started working in China many years ago, when he helped put the first Wal-Mart in the country.  He then pulled down his yellow coat to reveal the Wal-Mart logo on his shirt.

“So you were corporate Wal-Mart?” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Tim said.

I wanted to puke.

It’s funny.  Here in China, I have no problem going to Wal-Mart because I know it’s a safe bet for buying food and accessories.  But, in America, I fucking hate going into Wal-Mart.

Tim didn’t exactly look like corporate anything.  I haven’t seen a set a teeth that jacked up in a long time, and I’m living in China.  His one front tooth was practically backwards.  Tim Lyde is one ugly son of a bitch.

I had a feeling this asshole was going to show up at my class that day, and sure enough, right as I was about to start teaching, he struts into the room.  I had written the lyrics to Dave Matthews Band’s “The Dreaming Tree” on the board.  Clark had told us to teach the students these retarded questions and answers, but, like almost all the other teachers, I’d given up on that after Day 1 and was doing whatever I wanted.  I put the lyrics on the board with blank spaces so the students could listen to the song and try to figure out what word was omitted.  It’s a pretty good listening exercise.  Other songs I had the students listen to at the camp included, “I’m only sleeping,” by the Beatles, “What a wonderful world,” by Louis Armstrong, and “Hurricane,” by Bob Dylan.  I played the latter after Li Yang’s ridiculous “very dark skin” comments.

Tim walked in and shook my hand.  The Chinese teacher assistants had no idea who Tim was or what was going on.

“I’m just gonna sit in the back and observe,” he said.

“OK,” I said.  I turned to the students.  “Class, this is Tim.  Tim, this is my class.”

Tim then proceeded to talk for 15 minutes.  He regurgitated the same shit Li Yang has been saying for over a week: talk loud, exaggerate your body language, work hard.  He wasting my motherfucking time, and teaching that class was the only Goddamn thing I liked about the camp.  I wanted to kill him.  Every time he glanced my way, I gave him a mad face.  I even looked at my watch a couple of times.  Still, he kept rambling.  Then, without giving any warning, he turned to one of my TAs and asked her to translate what he had just said.

“I’m sorry, but I could not follow you,” she said.

Like all of the students, she had stopped paying attention, as well.

“You’re not good then,” he said.

Then Tim Lyde pointed at another TA, who was probably the only person in the room paying attention, and was able to translate.

I finally had enough and interrupted him.

“Class, Tim here used to be a big man for Wal-Mart.  You all know Wal-Mart, right?  Well, in America working for Wal-Mart isn’t exactly a good job, but here in China, it can be a good place to work, and if you know English, you can get a really good job with Wal-Mart.  Back me up on this, Tim.”

Tim didn’t look too happy, but he backed me up anyway, and said something about how Wal-Mart would cling to them like a life preserver if they spoke English.  There’s no way the kids understood ‘life preserver.’  They also had no idea what “cookie cutter” meant, but Tim kept throwing it out there as a term for some reason, even after I told him they didn’t understand him.  Finally, I put my hand on Tim’s shoulder and said, “Let’s hear it for Tim,” the students clapped, and Tim left the room without observing.  The second he left, the girl he offended said: “Gavin, who was that man, and why was he mean to me?”

China has a shame culture, and my TA had “lost face” in front of the students.  After the class, I hunted down Tim and asked him what his deal was.

“Why’d you disrespect that girl?”

“I didn’t disrespect anyone.”

“You told that girl she wasn’t good at English when you asked her to translate.”

“I didn’t say that.  I was merely–”

“No dude, you did, and I’d appreciate it if you came back to class tomorrow and apologized.”

Tim agreed to say he was sorry, but the next day he didn’t show up during my class.  I asked the TA if he had apologized outside of class, and she said no.  Again, I hunted this prick down and asked him what was up.  He said he was going to stop by, but hadn’t gotten around to it, yet.   Fine, I said, and walked away.

The next night was the final exam for students.  As a class, the students had to recite this idiotic passage Li Yang had written about the differences between American English and British English.  The passage contained the phrase “the differences between American English and British English” four times.  Li Yang believed the students’ English would be improved if they could blindly memorize and recite the speech without knowing what most of the words meant.

I had to be there for this.  Li Yang walked around the building visiting each class.  He had entourage with him, as always.  His entourage always contains a camera man and a photographer.  It’s disgusting.  Tim Lyde was a part of the entourage to witness the test.  When he followed Li into the room, I grabbed Tim’s arm and gave him a stern look.  He shook me off, and then tripped over part of the teacher’s stand.  Li, who was carrying the Olympic torch he carried before the Beijing Games, didn’t even listen to half the speech.  He stopped the students, told them they passed, and then posed for a picture with them.  I was standoffish with the man.  He had to say “join us” twice to me, once when he and his entourage stood in front of the room to hear the recital, and again when he posed for the picture with the class.

After the picture, Tim walked over to the TA and said: “This was great.  You are great.  Everyone makes mistakes.  Keep working hard.”

He tried to head for the door, but I grabbed his arm again.

“That wasn’t an apology, Tim,” I said.

He shook his arm free.  “I gotta get going,” he said.

“That wasn’t an apology, Tim,” I said again, louder.

What a fucking asshole.  I hope that fucking prick gets what he has coming.  He insulted a few other students and teachers in his 3 days at the camp.  Everyone tolerated him because most of the time he had his baby with him.  The money-loving nameless friend who got me the job said several times how cute Tim’s baby was.  I got sick of it.  Fuck that guy and his baby.  I started telling people his little girl looked like my asshole.

And Li Yang used Tim exactly how he wanted.  He called him up to speak during one of his lectures.  He threw his arm around him.  He made the students look at his baby, as the camera man focused on it, putting its picture on the movie screen on the stage.  Timothy Lyde, Wal-Mart cocksucker, Li Yang butt buddy.

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Crazy Chinese back alley dice game

By Gavin | February 27, 2010

I found a series of sketchy back alleys across the street from my apartment complex.  The area begins behind the row of shows Beer Monster and I call the Welding District, and it stretches to the Wal-Mart near our school.  One of the streets has a plethora of restaurants, one of which looks incredibly out of place, with nice finished wood paneling and tables with bench seats.  It’s a Hunan joint, which means the food is extremely spicy.  Walking home from dinner there on Monday night with two friends, I suggested we turn right and explore a section I hadn’t yet seen.  My friends agreed.  These roads do not smell good at all.  There are little shops where you can buy live ducks, chickens, and birds to eat.  Food carts line the right side of the road and open air markets are on the left.  We walked about 50 yards and came upon a crowd of people standing in a circle under a tent.  They were yelling and screaming, so we walked over to investigate.  There was a table in the middle, and on it was a board with six squares.  In each square was a picture.  There was a crawfish, fish, crab, lion, hookah, and chicken.  A man had a cup cylinder down on the table.  Under the cup were three dice, and on each side of the dye were the pictures that were on the board.  People put money down on the picture, or pictures, they thought would come up.  Then the man shook the dice and lifted the cup.

We had to get in on this.

My friends and I started placing bets.  The first time I won, I got really excited and yelled, “Boom!”  The crowd laughed, and one woman began to imitate me whenever she won.  I walked away with 150 RMB more than I started.

The next night, I took another friend, one who loves games of chance, to the back alley.  We got there at 7:30 p.m. and the table and board were not there.  I looked around to see if any Chinese people would recognize me, and sure enough, some guy gave me a head nod.  I made a dice-throwing motion, and he nodded his head and smiled.  Then he told us 8 o’clock in Chinese.  My friend and I walked around for a half hour and returned for the start of the game.  In a matter of seconds, the game was set up and a crowd of people holding wads of money appeared.  I lost about 100 RMB, and then one of the lookouts yelled something.  There was a mad grab for money, the board and table disappeared, and then everyone ran away.  Someone picked up my friend’s money, but it was returned to him before we walked away.  I didn’t see any cops, so I have no idea what happened.

That same friend returned to the game last night with a British guy he met traveling through Cambodia.  They discovered that you can place money on the line between two pictures and win double if they both hit.  My buddy figured it out that if you bet on one picture, the odds of winning are 42%.  The game is fun in small doses, and it’s hilarious to be playing a back alley dice game in China.  But, it’s impossible to walk out of there with a substantial amount of money, and you’re more likely to lose, so it’s not really worth it.  I can’t wait for Beer Monster to return to Shenzhen and play.

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

By Gavin | February 23, 2010

During his lectures, Li also taught English, if you call yelling the same word or sentence over and over again teaching.  He repeated the following sentence one day: “Learning can become a way of life which helps you to achieve your greatest potential.”

He yelled this sentence over and over, breaking it down word by word.  The Chinese national anthem began to play, and the campers repeated each word of the sentence after Li, while holding their books to the heavens.  Then he told them to stand, and they pumped their fists to the anthem, repeating the sentence.

It’s pretty obvious what Li Yang is doing: he’s taking advantage of China’s national pride and making a profit.  What’s pathetic is that there are more Chinese students under the age of 18 than there are people in the U.S., and most Chinese parents will do almost anything to make sure their child speaks English fluently enough to get accepted at a good university.  Thus, Li doesn’t have to tug on the national pride strings, but he does anyway with his picture everywhere and crowds chanting his name in unison.

Anyone who knows China’s history knows this is dangerous.  The baffling part is that at the center of this is an American woman who is married to and has children with a Chinese man who uses Americans as a punch line while teaching English.  Some people could complain that I’m being too politically correct here, but I don’t think I am.

Li’s goal is to teach 300 million Chinese how to speak English.  Let’s say he does that over the next decade.  A whole generation of Chinese – a group of people who outnumber the citizens of the United States – could be greatly influenced by a man who sees no problem with pointing out how dark a black man is to a crowd filled with children, has no problem telling small children that they have to learn English because Americans aren’t smart enough to learn Chinese.

Americans aren’t “Crazy” about learning Chinese because only people in China speak Chinese. … Plus, a lot of Americans are more concerned with learning Spanish right now anyway. …

But, does Li tell them that?  Of course not.

The English Camp was more about Li Yang than learning English.  That’s obvious from all his pictures, and the sad part is the children at the camps worship him like he’s a celebrity and not just a businessman making money.  This guy got to carry the Olympic torch.  People admire him.  Think about it: 300 million Chinese speaking English and influenced by this guy.

The greatest outrage of the entire camp occurred during the Lunar New Year’s celebration.  The night started out great.  I danced around a bonfire with students, clapped while people danced on stage, and had my picture taken countless times by students.  Afterwards, we went into the auditorium.  Some of the foreign teachers were going to perform for the camp.  And when I say “perform,” I mean lip sing “Beat it” on stage while acting out the music video.  I wanted no part of the “performance” on account of coolness and principle.  It wasn’t mandatory, and I wasn’t alone.  The rest of us sat in the bleachers and watched.

Then Li took the stage around 11:30 p.m.  He couldn’t lecture without Americans on stage with him, so those of us who didn’t “perform” had to sit up there.  OK, I get it; whatever: someone had to go up there, and what’s fair is fair.  Part of the lecture was shown live via webcam, and the students thanked their parents for everything they’d been given in English.  It was touching, and expected, given this is China’s equivalent to Christmas Eve.

Shortly before midnight, I was informed by an American sitting next to me that Li Yang had just said, “Americans trying to learn Chinese is pitiful.”

The wind from an open door punched my legs.  I was cold and wanted to go to bed, and Li was talking shit on Americans again?  I walked up to the bleachers and told Clark what I thought.

“This is bullshit.  You work for a racist asshole.”

“I agree with you sometimes,” Clark said.  “Here take a seat.”

I wasn’t about to sit down in the bleachers where it wasn’t cold as cold.  That wouldn’t have been fair to the people on stage.  So, I returned to my seat at the end of the catwalk.  A few minutes later, the teachers who “performed” were allowed to leave and return to the hotel.  Three people didn’t go out of respect for the people on stage.  None of them was the nameless female friend who told me about the camp.

Li lectured on.  Several of the VIP students in the front row rested their heads on the catwalk near his feet and slept.  Li lectured on.  His own daughter fell asleep in the second row.  Li lectured on.  That motherfucker spoke until 1:15 a.m. on the most important holiday of the year.  I felt so bad for those kids.  I hated being there.  I can’t even imagine what was running through their minds, especially the ones who were forced to go there by parents.

At one point, he wanted to break down the word ‘necessary’ phonetically.  As he usually does, Li turned around and walked the microphone to his American stage clowns.  Every time he did this, I just looked away and hoped he wouldn’t call on me.  That night, he asked me to say ‘necessary,’ a fitting word considering it was almost 1 a.m.

“Necessary,” I said.

“Slower,” he said.

I looked him in the eyes and said, “Ness – ess – air – ee.”

He got the hint.  Li asked one more person, and then chirped back, “Wow, why didn’t you sound more like him?”

When it was finally over, I got in Clark’s face a little bit.  I couldn’t believe the other foreign teachers got to leave just because they bounced around on stage to a Michael Jackson song.

“Don’t complain to me here,” Clark said.  “Maybe you should keep it inside.  You’re not allowed to complain on campus.”

Yeah, that was a rule.

The next day, Clark sat down next to me on a couch in the lobby.  He wanted an apology for getting mad at him, and I gladly apologized.  He was just taking orders from Daniel, who danced really weird on stage at the bonfire to techno music.  While I was talking to Clark about why I was upset the night before, who sits down next to us but that nameless female friend.  Naturally, she had to interrupt the conversation to argue with me and state why she felt it was fair that she didn’t have to sit through that God awful lecture.  She’d interrupted a couple other conversations of mine over a three-day span, each time to argue with me.  She had witnessed Li last year and didn’t feel the need to warn me at all.  I don’t see how anyone could ever work at a Li Yang camp and NOT walk away talking about this guy.  I couldn’t take her anymore.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said.

I continued to talk to Clark, and she interrupted again.

“I’m not fucking talking to you,” I said.  “Shut the fuck up.  Stay out of it.”

I wasn’t the only one who voiced their opinions about the camp, and at the next Li Yang lecture, he turned to the Americans on stage and said: “You can say China is a third world country.  I won’t get offended.  It’s true.  You can say Chinese are rude.  I won’t get offended.  It’s true.  You can say Chinese spit and litter, and I won’t get offended because it’s true and I’m mature.  Nothing offends me.”

That afternoon, I told my class of 20 students that Li was ignorant, that Americans can learn Chinese if they want, and that you should never, ever, point at a person and talk about the shade of their skin.

Two days later, Tim Lyde arrived at the camp.

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

By Gavin | February 21, 2010

I wanted to make it through the next day without any problems.  I actually wrote down in my journal that this was a goal of mine.  Didn’t happen.  I was assigned to a Junior 2 class.  Junior 2 students in China are the equivalent to eighth graders in America.  Each class had four Chinese teachers, who acted as teacher’s assistants when the foreign teachers had the floor.  When I got to my class, my teacher’s assistants didn’t seem to know what was going on.  According to the schedule, I was supposed to help them teach pronunciation for a half-hour, then I was to have the class for 45 minutes.  I was given the floor immediately, which made me think I had to do the assisting at the end.  However, according to the schedule I had VIP teaching from 5 to 6 p.m.

I did not know what was going on, and I did not want to get in trouble.

I finished teaching and went to the foreign teacher’s office.  Along the way, I saw that my friends were still in their classrooms.  No other foreign teachers were in the office.  Afraid of causing more problems, I went back to my classroom and walked around the room helping each of my 20 new students on a one-on-one basis.

In the long run, this was a beautiful move because my students fell in love with me.  But, I had skipped the VIP class.  The VIP students were special because their parents were dumb enough to shell out 18,000 RMB (approximately $2,630) so their children could have the following: one hour a day to spend time with a foreigner, two dinners with their foreign friends, special Li Yang VIP lectures, and front row seats to Li’s normal lectures. … Many of the students in the front row used the catwalk to sleep on.

Clark pulled me aside at dinner and said I was in trouble again.  It was the first day of the camp and my second full day there.  Walking to the auditorium after dinner, Clark said Daniel wanted to fire me.

“You have a 50-50 shot,” he said.  “It’s gotten around that you have been saying negative comments about the camp.”

“That’s just not true,” I said.  “I’ve been saying negative comments about Daniel and Li Yang.  Not the camp.”

Luckily, a middle-aged American woman made the same mistake as me and skipped VIP class.  I imagine I would have been fired if she hadn’t made the same mistake.  As it was, I was docked 500 RMB. 

We were walking to the auditorium to welcome Li Yang to the camp.  The lights went out, and on the stage a video began to play on a movie screen.  It showed Li in a courtyard with his arms above his head, his fists clenched.  He was surrounded by students clapping and chanting his name as they approached.  Soon, the mob was all around him.

“Li Yang!  Li Yang!  Li Yang!”

A spotlight swirled all over the stage before landing in front of it to the right.  Li Yang was making his entrance.  He walked through a crowd of Chinese teachers, who were all wearing the same yellow and white coat.  The teachers gave Li high-fives as he approached the stage.  It was like a boxer making his way to the ring.  Li wore a Barack Obama “Hope” shirt, dark blue jeans, and white Nikes.

Li took the microphone and the lights came back on.  He invited the foreign teachers to join him on the stage.  With the movie screen at the end of the catwalk, there wasn’t much room.  Several of us, including yours truly, sat in chairs in front of the stage.  Sitting there was a bad move because Li screams into his microphone, and the speakers are behind you at ear level on the stage.

            Li owned the campers, which ranged from 5 year old children whose parents want them to get a good start on English to adults trying to upgrade careers.  He made several jokes about Japanese students.  He even went as far as to call them lazy at one point.

            Have Americans ever called Japanese people lazy?

            One of the foreign teachers was a white-haired American woman in her 70s.  She taught adults at the camp, and she had been teaching in China off and on for 10 years.  She was sitting in front of the stage near me when Li asked her to step onto the catwalk and talk to him.  He asked how long she’d been in China.  When she told him 10 years, he asked her a question in Chinese.  After she answered it, her tones way off, of course, Li turned to the crowd and said it was pathetic that her Chinese was not better.

            Fair or foul?  I say foul.  The older you are, the harder it is to learn a language, and a man who claims to be a teacher should know better.

            Li escorted the woman away from the podium.  He turned to one of the young American teachers sitting in a chair at the end of the catwalk and said, “How about you climb down and sit in her seat and let her take your chair.”

            Obviously, this was the right move.  No one wants to make an elderly woman climb off a catwalk.  But, then Li had to jab and say, “We here in China respect our elders.”

            This after calling the woman pathetic in a different language to a crowd of students?

            Also seated at the end of the catwalk was an African American teacher.  Near the end of his lecture, Li turned to the foreign teachers and said, “Can someone come up here and imitate Obama?”  He pretended to scan the crowd of foreign teachers, and then pointed at the only African American.

            “How about you?” Li said.

            For those who don’t think this is racist, allow me to tell you about Li’s next lecture.  He wore the exact same outfit because all of his speeches are recorded, and he had to wear the same clothes for a video he was making.  The fact that he went out of his way to wear an Obama shirt for some video he would sell and profit from made me sick.

            At the beginning of his lecture, he asked to see several of the foreign teacher’s smiles.  “Oh your mother raised you right,” Li told a Georgian man.  “You have a nice smile.”  He inspected another smile, and then remarked, “In America, dental hygiene is important.”  Then he turned to the crowd and spoke in Chinese.  He pointed at the African American and said, “Look at him.  His skin is so dark.  I bet he has very white teeth.”

            Li turned to the American teacher and said, “Can you smile for us?”

            The American was fluent in Chinese, though, and understood everything Li had said.  Tight-lipped, he shook his head.  Sitting next to the African American was Kim Li, the American wife of Li Yang.  She wrote a note to the teacher saying, “I’m sorry.  He shouldn’t have said that.  I’ll talk to him.”

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

By Gavin | February 21, 2010

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 31st 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.”

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China VS Santa Claus VIII

By Gavin | December 23, 2009

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