I'm half-awake in a fake empire

Good news today from Flora. She has worked out the bare bones of my teaching schedule. I am only a part time teacher, so I have twenty periods to teach each week. A period is roughly an hour, about 50 minutes. Every day (Monday-Friday) a man will come and pick me up at 7:30 to take me to the primary school. I will aide a regular grade teacher there for two periods, 10 periods a week. I will be at the primary school from 7:30 to 9:30, and then I will be driven home. The grade school teachers will tell me what topics they'd like me to cover, and give me advice and be there to translate. That sounds like a lot of fun, as I've been researching online different games to play to help kids learn English. Flora says the kids learn much more quickly how to speak, and are more enthusiastic. So we will essentially be speaking the same language. Enthusiasm! That's half my periods right there. I will be teaching at three different campuses. The primary school with the kids, here at the health school, and across the street at a military academy. I will only teach two periods at the military academy, though. The advanced English class I've taught the past two weeks is two periods long. I will also have two special periods ("teaching on the corner" as Flora called it) where I go to the park with the dragon statues in the evenings and sit at the stone tables and anyone who wants to come and practice having a simple conversation can come. That's 10 periods at the primary school, 2 periods at the military academy, 2 periods of advanced English, 2 periods of "corner teaching", altogether 16 periods. The other four periods are still up in the air. Flora isn't sure yet what I will be teaching with those four periods. She says she will tell me by the end of the week. I am very excited to begin.

I am most excited about the "teaching on the corner". I love this idea! This way the students who feel uncomfortable talking in class can come and have a chat in a more relaxed and casual atmosphere. I would be willing to do it every afternoon, not for just two periods! I think this is a much more practical way to teach English to the students, because I have noticed that they are not used to speaking up in class. Sometimes I can tell they would like to ask a question, but are too shy to speak English to me. I hope I will win them over after a few more classes, because I am not here to judge their English, just to make them try. I would love to try and speak Chinese with them, and show them how terrible I am at it, so they will feel more comfortable! The only thing I have learned how to say so far is "fried dumplings". I was considering paying Flora to teach me Chinese each week, so that I could learn Chinese, but also so that I could give Flora some money. She told me that I make twice as much money as the regular teachers at the school, and that made me feel terrible. Even if they are awful teachers, they have to be better at it than I am! I have no experience teaching whatsoever, and I don't speak Chinese. So right there they have two advantages over me. But I know that the money here is worth only 1/6 of the American dollar, which would roughly be 1/10 of the British pound, so I imagine it would be difficult to find someone from an English-speaking country to come to China for less than the salary they've offered me. But, I will share a secret. I would have done it for free! All I wanted was to travel. I didn't come here to get rich. I came here to see what the world looked like from the other side. I wanted to adapt to a place where they didn't talk like me, look like me, act like me. I wanted to be free! I wanted to see if I could stand the alienation, I wanted to be an adventurer, a stranger in a strange land.

Before I left home I read a book called "Searching for Caleb" by Anne Tyler. I have always loved Anne Tyler, ever since I was too young to understand her. When I was a teenager I read almost all of her books, because I imagined they were a true and unyielding testament to the reality of adulthood. I have found that I am not so far off in that belief. "Searching for Caleb" was one of the few novels that I skipped, because it seemed like this particular story didn't speak to me. It was about a fortune teller, and I didn't believe in the supernatural, it was about family you had to leave behind, and I was wading up to my neck in family I had to leave behind. I finally read that book this summer, and I am glad that I waited, because now I am capable of understanding. Now I know what that story is trying to say. It is about a fortune teller who is really just an advice giver. People come to her with their problems, and she gives them answers. But the thing that touched me about the story is that she didn't need to be a fortune teller to give the answers she gave. Before she even consulted her tarot cards, she would tell each client which path to choose. "Always choose change!" she said. Always pick the road you haven't been down before, always pick the door you haven't opened yet, always pick the opportunity that may never come again. In this way, you can never regret your decisions, because you will never wonder "what might have been, if only..." You will know that you chose "what might have been" and it became "what was". And that is the path of a life. There is no shame and no regret, only a series of choices we make with the best of intentions for our lives. And if that doesn't amount to happiness, nothing would have made you happy, would it? I read this book at a time when I didn't know if I was making the right decision, and I learned that the right decision is easy. It is simply to decide to do what you've never done before, pack in your hopes and your fears, get on the plane, and fly!