Wake up!

“Whoa, whoa….why were you taking a bath with Billy?”

(Gales of innuendo-fueled laughter)
“No no no, we were taking a bath downtown, with wheels”

                “Oh, a bus!” was my exclamation, as the veil of second-language interpretation lifted incrementally.  At least it let me make male/male bath jokes for the rest of the class, which work even better in a culture not accustomed to mixed-company needling.  I had been given the highest-ability English class, you see.

(Falling asleep, glasses riding up the forehead like a compass pointing northwest)

“Gregory! Wake up, kid!”

(Stands up instantly, hands at his sides and chin held high; glasses still pleasingly askew)

“Hahaha!” (mimics the snap-to attention, boy scout salute cracks up to my right brow)

                You’ve got to keep them awake should they drift, and broad physical clowning is the only way to quickly convince them that they’re not in any serious trouble.  They were, after all, undergoing military training in the exercise yard this time two weeks ago, so it is a slow battle convincing them I do not require them to jump to attention in order to answer “how are you today?”.  I had, in fact, also been given the lowest-level English class possible.

                Settling in was a slow process unaided by a solid week of crippling omni-flu which left me perilously close to wit’s end, but eventually it happened despite my pathogens’ best efforts.  The school had 4 teachers (including myself) with which to deliver the comprehensive curriculum required by the ministry of education.  Through a breathtaking display of staffing I found myself the only Humanities teacher in a school whose entire purpose is to teach people English, and therefore in line for a self-styled promotion.

                My broad claim to be head of Humanities (H.O.D. English and Social Studies, if you prefer) was as ridiculous as it was irrefutable; the other three men being math/engineering-centric had no objections to my humourless assessment of the situation, as they were quite busy at the time.  There was, however, help at hand for us in a roundabout kind of way.

                Known variously as the ‘office ladies’, the ‘helper maidens’, or the ‘feckless five’, there were also a quintet of women at work with us on a daily basis.  I say at work, though, in a rather broad sense, because short of the brief period of very visible travails accompanying our arrival, they were very hard to fully understand.  They spoke, on average, passable English, and were largely responsible for the extracurricular ESL classes (all taught in perfect Mandarin), for helping the older students fill out English-language forms (often right after they walked out of English class), and for counselling the students should they encounter some emotional difficulty – though by their own admission the students were unaware of this capacity.

                One day the ‘hot-shot’ English speaker of the bunch was in our staff room discussing our upcoming vacation plans (a week off was in the offing) when she started teasing us about something or other; this was an astonishing development to say the least, because we were unaware that teasing was even on the table in this workplace dynamic.  This inexorably led to the following:

“So Ms. X and Ms. Y are responsible for A and B, Mrs. Z is responsible for keeping our passports for some strange reason, and you basically do all the hard office work?”

                “Yes…”

“So our school has 4 teachers to deliver the entire curriculum, and 5 people to supervise self-study, help kids fill out forms, and make them feel nice?”

                “Aha! Ha! Yes…”

                I realised almost immediately that I had gone a bit far by logically cornering somebody in their second language, and spent the afternoon considering an apology to keep things copacetic.  It was with some trepidation, then, that my hoochador compatriot and I edged into the office some hours later to ask if they could translate ‘can we see his form from the gym the other day so this other guy can copy how it was filled in?’ into the zany pictographs of the Chinese language so we could give it to a no-doubt gobsmacked gym attendant.

                It was with a trace of vindication that I received a copy of the form from the other day: bilingual and filled out to exhaustion by one of the helper maidens while my compatriot stood nearby paying for his membership.  We gave our thanks, and left with heads just high enough to avoid the lintel on the way out.