i shall overcome?

Alright, so there was a post slated for ‘publication’ about a week ago, but unfolding events in my increasingly erratic life in Taiwan called for several revisions. By the time things settled down I’d made enough editor’s notes and addendums that I figured it’d be cleaner to start from scratch. I guess you could say this post was born from exasperation, so I appreciate, O Family Members and Friends, your forbearance on its quality.

It began a week ago after I’d moved to my humble new lodgings in the Gongguan area of Taipei. Being without any immediate obligations of a financial or occupational nature, my afternoons were spent languishing with a bowl of grapes in one hand (I’ve become a grape fiend and I eat a bushel a day) and a computer mouse in the other, and between scouring the BBC, news.google, and Digg, I’d occasionally find time to check the job listings and rattle off an application by rote. In a fit of productivity I’d even dial a few phone numbers and ask if a position were still available. Some answered in the affirmative, some were noncommittal, few called me back. So you could imagine my shock, which was rapidly suppressed into a scarcely-contained professional glee, when I answered my cell and heard the uncertain but expectant tones of an older Taiwanese lady asking me to come for an interview at her buxiban, called Cambridge English School. We agreed on a date and time, she provided directions, I thanked her cordially, we hung up, and I excitedly returned to the classifieds to find out specifically which job had expressed an interest in my frequently-revised resume with its patchwork job experience.

26 hours a week at the standard rate, you say? That’s around $70,000 a month. Afternoon hours to accommodate my morning Chinese classes? Better go with the button-down and slacks for this one.

The day of the interview, I called ahead of time to clarify the school’s location, and the lady put on a foreign English teacher to give me more directions. The voice sounded slightly familiar, but in my controlled haste to get to the school as soon as possible with the least amount of visible sweat on my recently-laundered shirt, I unceremoniously kicked that concern to the back of my mind, boarded a bus, and made it to the school.

The older lady was named Ingrid and seemed pleasant enough. At the time I arrived, a class was in session and Ingrid was occupied with a prospective parent, so I was encouraged to look around the premises. The Jonghe division of the Cambridge English Group (at least that’s what’s printed on the woman’s business card) is a small school on the third floor of a very professional-looking office building and it’s across the hall from a very professional-looking office space. It wasn’t nearly as bustling with children as other schools I’ve visited in Taipei (although Jonghe is technically Taipei county) and the  bulletin boards (omnipresent in every children’s school) were filled with test papers and essays, all perfectly spaced and without adornment, in front of the gleaming silver elevator doors. Between the school and its professional neighbor was a chasm of cold blue marble tiles, and inside the school were walls of an impassive white plaster and a marble-tiled floor the color of frozen milk. The walls were sparsely warmed by small cartoon letters spelling out the name of the school.  My overall first impression of the school was akin to those types of forks and spoons that are designed for children – slightly undersized, and whose natural intent for utility grossly exceeds any colorful plastic adornment that would hypothetically appeal itself to young users. I imagine a children’s school would strive to engage students as a place of learning as much as it would seek to impress parents as a place of teaching. You know, a sales pitch on two fronts. But the only warmth in Cambridge’s layout seemed clinical, as if it were added to appease an image, and was considered superfluous to the school’s task.

Feng shui aside, Ingrid eventually finished her discussion with the prospective parent and sat down to chat with me. The interview was routine and went smoothly. She liked me, recognized my 10-month stint with Kojen was out of the ordinary, asked me some questions, seemed satisfied with the answers, introduced me to the only foreign English teacher at the school who was the one I spoke to on the phone… and lo! Behold! I’d met him before. He was the boyfriend of my former Croc House roommate’s sister. A few degrees of separation, sure, but as long as it didn’t seem like nepotism, he could probably put in a good word for me, he said.

Never one to deny a foot in the door, regardless of the shoe, I introduced myself to him for the ‘first time’. We seemed to get along famously, both of us being New Yorkers and the like. Ingrid liked that.

I performed my demo to Ingrid’s relative satisfaction. The children had been taught by that particular foreign teacher for over a year, and as he was the only foreigner who worked at that school in that time, the children were slightly cowed by the unexpected presence of a new one. Afterward, Ingrid took me aside and told me that she’d like me to take the position once the current teacher had left. I almost immediately fantasized about getting myself into a productive and profitable grind that inevitably resulted with me becoming happy, debt-free, and wealthy. This fantasy must have played out on my face, because Ingrid asked again if I would accept it. I snapped to, adjusted my pants, and happily agreed. We set another date and time for me to return and observe some classes, take notes, and begin training.

The next Thursday I returned, greeted the foreign teacher as somebody who I was meeting for the second time, and sat down to take notes. The teacher was evidently quite good at his job and I took several pages of notes on his teaching methods and the fluidity of his style. I was very impressed. At the end of the hour, a break was given to the students, I went to use the bathroom, and when I returned Ingrid unexpectedly asked me to teach the second hour. I wasn’t given any preparation, but I taught an acceptable lesson – nothing that would sell the school to a parent, but for somebody who was only meeting the children for the second time and wasn’t shown the lesson materials prior to being asked to fill in for the next hour, I think I did alright. After the hour was up, I left the school, feeling a bit self-conscious but still unworried, as Ingrid had assured me that the job was mine.

Over the weekend I received a call from the foreign teacher (I had his phone number saved in my phone from a previous encounter months earlier). He mentioned that Ingrid was reconsidering hiring me for the sole teaching position. He said that in my casual conversation with him at the school which Ingrid apparently overheard, she concluded that my English dialect “sounded black”.

Really, that was her reason. It might not sound like the end of the world for either one of us, but I’ve found that whenever these Taiwanese buxiban owners say they’re ‘reconsidering’ a business move, it doesn’t mean that their decision requires additional persuasion. It means they’ve already made their decision, but they don’t want to tell you because they’re afraid of either hurting your feelings or ‘losing face’ (but perfectly comfortable with wasting your time). Because clearly your time, like their time, is made for beating around the bush and taking the circuitous scenic route practically backwards across the planet to get from point A to B.

So suddenly I found myself in a situation where I needed a serious backup plan, or everything would be shot full of holes on account of one middle-aged Taiwanese lady’s inability to reconcile the dialect of my native town with the televised stereotype of African-Americans within a particular socioeconomic strata, as she perceived it. I’m pretty sure she lost her credibility somewhere way before that last degree of separation between her and reality, but it still makes me feel better to spell it out. You’d think maybe there was a reason her school was absolute crap for fifteen years before this one teacher had come by, reorganized the entire thing, and taught it for ten months. You’d think she’d pick up on it.

Then this same teacher offered to throw me a rope. Keep in mind that this school was still my single best prospect for full-time employment and a high monthly salary. This teacher mentioned that he was looking for somebody to fill his apartment, and although he knew I’d just moved into a place and was happy with it, if I could find somebody (re: me) to fill the room and pay him back his deposit, he was sure he could pull Ingrid’s strings the right way and convince her to hire me despite her misgivings. I readily agreed.

Two days later, I visited his apartment with a close friend. It was actually a pretty nice apartment, but I just couldn’t afford it. To this day I still haven’t received my own deposit from the Croc House despite giving three months notice and the apartment being in substantially better shape than it was when I had moved in (although I have reason to believe I’ll get it soon). I can’t keep moving around and paying two months’ extra rent to people without any certainty that I’ll see the money ever again. I told him I couldn’t take the place but I was confident I could fill the room for him before he left Taiwan. After all, it’s not like I didn’t have experience hunting for potential roommates.

The next day I called Cambridge and Ingrid gave me some bullshit reason to redact the job offer. I’m going to skip the part where I lapsed into fury and ricocheted invectives off satellites to bounce back into her untrained ear. Details of the conversation continue to irritate me, although I suppose there’s a novelty to the ordeal; how many people do you know have gotten discriminated against for an ethnicity that they visibly aren’t?

Anyway, later that evening while taking a cold shower (because it’s practically an epidermal orgasm in the Taiwan heat and humidity), I had an epiphany (and all the best epiphanies happen in the bathroom). I found that there was a pattern to my job search criteria that, while convenient, seemed also to be the source of most of my job woes in this country.

I’ve previously been looking for jobs that can offer me a reasonable number of hours (in the 18-25/weekly range) at a single location. This is not rare in Taipei – in fact, most of the best-reputed and well-known outlets are of this sort. These schools also tend to have more competition for available positions because like me, most foriegners play the game to their own convenience. However in my case, I tend to chafe under authoritative and self-indulgent management styles (which abound in buxiban franchises). I’d be better served to find two schools that offered fewer hours each so I’d be less committed, emotionally and professionally, to any one location and a specific set of managers. Also, if I happened to lose one job as I seem wont to do, I’d at least have another stream of income to keep me in the black until I could replace the hours. And although there aren’t many jobs within easy commuting distance that meet this criteria, there are even fewer of the ‘single-location’ buxibans, and the diminished competition for the former means I might actually receive more replies to my applications than before.

(Multiple streams of income seems like a really fundamental way to ensure one’s financial security. Now if only I had more options to irrigate my bank account than simply teaching English… more on that later.)

So I recently interviewed, and had a positive demo for, a nearby buxiban that will offer me an initial 6 weekly hours, to be raised to 10 if I acclimate well. There’s also a possibility of a full-time 20-hour position within a few months, or I could aim for another 10-hour position elsewhere. In either case, I would get 20 weekly hours at a standard rate and could continue living comfortably, and more important, independently.

Sure I’ll make less money than with Cambridge… but at least I won’t have to deal with that racist old witch. And since yesterday I finally put a deposit on the language program and secured my position in the morning class, everything seems primed for the next month or so. If I continue along this line of thought and commit myself properly, I should have a productive three months until the class ends. At which point I’ll have another round of decision-making but I’m reluctant to offer an ETA for my return to the states – I’ve been thinking that I’d be much better able to support myself and live independently in a country where a health care plan wouldn’t cost half my paycheck in premiums, and that would still retain the prerogative to deny me coverage (not that I have any ‘preexisting conditions’, as I think I’m in quite good health these days, but you can never tell with an unchecked profit-driven provider, eh?).

More details to come as circumstances unfold.