Rear Ended

Tonight I met up with my friend Jacky again. I think these Wednesday night get-togethers could become a regular thing. We headed off to the Taoyuan night market, where I proceded to sample various kind of chicken legs, some strange kind of fish soup that was actually pretty good, skark meat with wasabi--no, I kid you not, there are places in the world where people eat shark--and a drink made from strawberry and apple gelatins.

I thought food would be the most exciting part of the evening, until we left the night market to go in search of somewhere to sit and talk for a while. We were near an intersection close to the school and my apartment when we heard a sudden crash, then felt a thud. Jacky's car had been rear-ended.

I know you're all going to ask this, so the answer is, I'm fine. I am not the least bit hurt or damaged. Jacky, however, got out of the car to try to figure out what happened. Basically, some drunken lunatic rammed into the car behind us, causing that car to ram into us. I say lunatic, because the guy punched Jacky in the jaw and tried to push him down to the ground in order to kick him in the stomach. Jacky managed to get away from him by ducking into a nearby garage.

We ended up spending the remainder of the evening in the local police precinct, once the police had come and taken all the requisite photographs. Jacky's car had to be left in the station for evidence, so he had to call his brother to come pick us up. Now, I had been looking forward to meeting Jacky's brother. He had mentioned that his brother is an identical twin, and Jacky and Jason (as I learned the brother calls himself) really are the spitting image of each other. But it was strange to meet under such circumstances.

True to character, Jacky kept apologizing for what had happened and how it "ruined my evening." I told him, politely and truthfully, that I was just glad he was unhurt (beyond the minor pain of the punch he sustained) and that he had nothing to apologize for; if anyone had ruined my evening, it was the maniac who caused this whole accident and assaulted my friend.

The Betel Nut Beauties

Tonight, I got to really eat crow in my adult pre-intermediate class. I told them I had completely misjudged their abilities and been wrong about what they wanted out of an English class. I asked for their suggestions and told them I really wanted to know what they wanted out of our class. So I think I have patched things up and we can move forward in a more productive mode.

For this evening's class, I brought in a photograph of what the guidebooks to Taiwan call "Betel Nut Beauties" and led a discussion about their place in Taiwanese culture and society. Betel nuts are a kind of nut often chewed by truck drivers and others because they have the same effect, I gather, as several cups of coffee or a bottle of Jolt cola. In recent years, it has become common in Taiwan for betel nuts to be sold out of roadside booths with very scantily clad women as salesladies. Competition in the betel nut trade has become very fierce, resulting in these women wearing less and less. And so the women have become a source of some controversy.

I learned, in the course of the evening, that the trade at least is not dangerous. Video monitoring and call buttons prevent these women from being raped or molested by the men who stop in to buy betel nuts. But the overall impression I got was that my students found the betel nut beauty an embarassment, something decidedly not good for Taiwan's image abroad. Mainland Chinese often mention the betel nut beauties in connection with visiting Taiwan.

We had a very spirited discussion about what, if anything, the government can or should do about the clothes worn by the betel nut beauties. There was disagreement about whether the government even has the right to tell these women what to wear as they ply their trade. There was also disagreement about whether any rules about the dress of betel nut beauties could be enforced.

I think it was interesting to get a glimpse inside my students' minds. It's good to have a better idea what they want from the class, and I look forward to doing more discussion-oriented classes in future.

Tammy and the Bachelor

Well, today was an interesting day at school. One class sort of opened (the parents are undecided about when they want their child to begin lessons). One class closed--my adult foundation course, because one of the two people in it has a conflict. The other student is Ruby's son, who will eventually have a private lesson with me but whom I have to figure out how to teach because I have no idea how to conduct a class at that level for only one person. And I got to spend two hours trying to explain the Pyramids to a 10-year-old Taiwanese girl named Tammy.

Okay, that's exaggerating a bit. We had a lesson all prepared for Tammy, who will most likely be taking private lessons with us. But at the last minute, I was asked to switch what I was teaching her to something from a higher level that was not at all appropriate for her, because the girl's mother wanted to try her at this level for some reason. This was part of one of our books in which the main characters talk about places they have seen or would like to see someday, like the Grand Canyon, the desert, and the Pyramids. The vocab included words like "curry" and "camel."

This wouldn't be a bad text for someone at the right level, but for Tammy, it was totally over her head. To get across "camel", I had to try to get across "desert," which was next to impossible. It's likely she hasn't yet learned about these things in her regular classes in her Chinese elementary school. Which made trying to explain them to her in English a lot of fun.

I went through the motions on this for about an hour, but after a short break, I came back and had the guts to ask her if this was just too hard. We ended up talking for half an hour until her mother came to pick her up--really basic stuff like whether she liked her teacher in school and how well she got along with her brother.

Get a Life

I had another tiff with Eve and Ruby yesterday, although this one was at least productive. We have had a lot of miscommunication and I interpreted some things they did and said in ways that were not what they meant. I have apologized to them for it, and I think maybe we can finally find some modus vivendi that will satisfy all of us.

That said, it surfaced in this discussion that someone at the Neili branch of Shane (another branch near us in Taoyuan) somehow found my blog, and some of the things I said about my bosses and the school. The blog is now apparently being read in Head Office.

So, to those of you employed by Shane who may be reading, I have this to say:

Get a life. Seriously. Get a life.

This blog is for my family and friends in the United States. Until someone in Neili found it, a grand total of about thirty people knew of its existence. All of them are people with whom I am personally acquainted in America. While I did say in my first post, prior to departure, that anyone who stumbled on the blog was welcome to read it, I put that in because I knew a couple of my friends might forward it on to others of their friends if they found it interesting or amusing. But this is NOT the front page of the New York Times. It is a blog kept by a bushiban teacher in Taiwan who has, at present, maybe one friend in Taiwan. Its potential to have any effect on the professional reputation of Shane is about nil.

I have a right to a life outside of Shane and my work. I have a right to discuss my problems at work with friends and acquaintances back in the United States, including through this blog. If you are not a friend or acquaintance of mine and are reading this, what you are doing is no different than listening in on someone's private telephone conversation or going through someone's private mail. Stop reading, immediately. If not, I will be forced to make this blog password protected, which is a great inconvenience for some of my acquaintance who read this blog.

Thank you.

The Big Charleston Contest

Today I got to use a technique in both of my classes I had been taught about in my CELTA training but, given the rigidity of the Shane system, never expected to have an opportunity to put into practice. I got to set up a video dictation.

Briefly, here's how a video dictation works:

You set up a video in such a way that half of your students can see the video and the other half cannot. The video is played with the sound off, and the ones who can see the video describe the video to the half who can't. Then, the ones who couldn't see the video are allowed to turn their chairs around so that they can see. The sound is turned on. The ones who viewed the video the first time around get to compare what's actually happening in the movie with what they thought was happening when the sound was out, and the ones who didn't get to view the first time around compare what was described to them with what they actually see.

The point of the exercise is give students a chance to use all the language at their disposal (what we call in EFL-speak a fluency exercise) and get a lot of practice talking.

For a video dictation, any bit of film that's highly visual will do. I have considered doing video dictations with, among other things, the scene in Roots where LeVar Burton gets spirited off into slavery, any of the various scenes in Evita where things blow up (though this poses the problem of the complicated language in the score and having to explain to an unfamiliar and probably uninterested audience the politics of Argentina in the 1940s), and the scene in Oliver! where the pickpockets play-act at being a horse and carriage. But what did I use for my first-ever video dictation?

Oh yes, oh yes--the big Charleston contest from It's a Wonderful Life.

Now, the world is divided into two groups. Scratch that. Americans are divided into two groups. Because the rest of the human species somehow manages to get from late November to December 25th every year without seeing Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fall into that swimming pool even once, let alone 500 times. There are those Americans who see It's a Wonderful Life as, at best, unbearable treacle and at worst as a complete snooze. And there are Americans who treasure it as a part of their heritage.

I confess I fall into the latter category. It's a Wonderful Life has never gotten old or stale for me. I may not longer laugh heartily every time George and Mary Charleston their way into that pool, but the scene still retains its magic as an expression of the joy life does at least occasionally offer. The rest of Christmas I was able to let go when I became a Jew. I can, with perfect equanimity, do without ornaments, Santa, or the "magic" of spending Christmas morning in the throes of materialistic excess. But I cannot do without George, Mary, Potter, the bank run, and--most especially--the whole of Bedford Falls High School Charlestoning into its swimming pool.

Two classes got to see George and Mary today. The first is my CEI10 class. This consists of two fairly advanced children, aged ten and twelve, who are bright and curious but generally pretty rambunctious. I had the twelve-year old do the talking for the video dictation because he has a better range of English; I didn't think the girl's was quite up to it. But he did pick up on a lot. For instance, he described the scene as "grandma and grandpa"--I could tell he was looking for "old-fashioned" but didn't have the English for it. The girl asked me why there was no color in the movie--I think this may have been her first encounter with a black-and-white film. I explained that the movie was old and that they didn't have color films in the old days.

With these kids, I was trying to use the movie to segue into a discussion of the present continuous, and to illustrate its meaning. For those of you who missed it in 10th-grade English, the present continuous (also known as the present progressive) is the construction was/were doing something: "While everyone was dancing, the gym floor opened up." Its function in English is to show continuous action in the past, and one of its main uses is to describe a situation around an event--what was going on when something (in the past simple) happened.

I'm not sure how well I did with conveying that bit of grammar. The twelve-year-old got it right way. The ten-year-old is still struggling with it. But I think it gives me a reference point for this in the future.

I also showed the big Charleston contest to my adult pre-intermediate class. It was a sheer delight to get to watch people encounter this scene for the first time. Americans see this movie so much that it's been a long time since I saw anyone genuinely laugh when George and Mary fall into the pool, keep right on dancing, and inspire everyone to dive right in.

But the comments were interesting. In the class, I have a married couple who are taking the course together. The wife got to watch and had to describe to the husband. He said he had not expected it to be such an old movie based on the description his wife had given him. When she said it was a high school dance (I was amazed she picked up on that detail), he had expected the people to all be much younger and the scene to be more contemporary. But they were amazingly perceptive at seeing that the one who opened up the floor was Mary's "ex-lover".

Of Dialects and Fiddly Endings

Since I decided to come to Taiwan, I've started reading up a bit on linguistics. I suppose it's only natural I would want to learn more about how language really works when I am now responsible for teaching it to around twenty-odd people in all my various classes.

So far, I've read three books on the subject: Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word, which deals with the question of why some languages spread and become dominant and others do not; Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language, which discusses how language has evolved from the "Me-Tarzan" stage of our earliest ancestors; and John McWhorter's The Power of Babel, which goes into more depth about how linguists believe the myriad of world languages and dialects has evolved from the original tongue spoken by our ancestors in West Africa about 150,000 years ago.

One of the key ideas I've picked up from McWhorter's book is that there really is no line between languages and dialects; often, groups of people whose speech is in fact very similar will think of themselves as speaking different languages for reasons not of grammar and syntax but of politics. For instance, McWhorter points out that Norweigian, Swedish, and Danish are all basically mutually intelligible with each other. Some Norweigians might have difficulty with some aspects of Danish speech because of what linguists call "semantic shift" (when a word changes its meaning, sometimes pretty dramatically, over the centuries).

The converse is also true: people will also call "dialects" what are really mutually unintelligible separate languages. This is very much the case with Chinese, from what I gather. Officially, there are eight or so "dialects" of a language called Chinese, but these are often so mutually unintelligible that they really are separate languages. Mandarin and Cantonese, from what I'm told, are so different from each other that speakers of one cannot readily comprehend speakers of the other. They are thought of as dialects of the same language only because both are spoken within the bounds of the People's Republic of China, and because they share a writing system. This way of looking at the languages would be rather like asserting that English and French are one and the same language, because they are both written in the Roman alphabet.

To really illustrate the point, McWhorter notes that, prior to the Dayton Accords, Serbs and Croatians thought of themselves as speaking separate "languages", even though there are actually households in these countries where the husband speaks, say, Serbian, the wife speaks Croatian, and yet they are perfectly able to communicate. The only major difference between these two "languages" is that one is written in Cyrillic while the other is written in Roman script. After the Dayton Accords, grammars and dictionaries of the "Bosnian" language started to be published!

Empires of the Word notes that, popular myth to the contrary, a language is not just a dialect with an army and navy attached to it. Ostlers shows that, frequently in history, a conqueror has utterly failed to impose its language on the native people. He notes, for instance, that, in the first couple of centuries after Spain conquered Mexico, Spanish really did not catch on as the language of the common people. In fact, it became so only in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the Spanish court forbade the preaching of the gospel in the native languages of Mexico (an act actually contrary to the Council of Trent, which explicitly required that the gospel be preached in local languages rather than Latin or anything else). Ostler theorizes that a new language will be taken up to the extent that its grammar and syntax are similar to the existing language of local inhabitants.

The Unfolding of Language has, so far, been the most fascinating, because it has really made me see language in a whole new way. Deutscher starts with the question that plagued linguists in the 18th and 19th centuries--the seeming "decay" of European languages from Latin, with its high level of inflection and case endings, to its various daughter languages in Europe.

Now, this question begs an assumption that I have never really shared. Even when I studied Latin in high school, which I enjoyed, I never bought the idea that Latin's system of case endings was somehow a more "perfect" or "refined" system of communication. In fact, it often struck me as incredibly imprecise. The dative in Latin, for instance, might mean to, with, by, or for. All of these mean different things and, as you can imagine, Latin still had to rely on prepositions when more exactitude was required. I had a teacher in high school, for instance, who had the words Ex Libris (from the library) imprinted on his books. Ex means "from"; libris is the genitive (of, from, belonging to) of the word for library. Clearly Latin's "higher" case system didn't do what classically trained linguists of the 19th century wanted to believe it did.

Deutscher shows pretty convincingly that, through a process of erosion, new grammatical particles are constantly being brought into being. This can result in the loss of case endings, but it can call result in their creation. For instance, Latin's case endings most likely began as postpositions (prepositions that come before, not after, the words they govern). As speakers tried to save themselves effort (the kind of economy that has led to Y'all and I'm gonna in informal English), they slowly came to elide these postpositions with words, giving rise eventually to case endings.

I remember asking teachers in school just why European languages had lost their endings. I think they generally said something about it just being "easier" to speak without them. Well, this isn't entirely true. Hungarians and Russians still manage to use fiddly case endings. It' just that case-free nouns are what erosions has produced at this stage in French and, more to the point, English.

Deutscher also talks about how language elements grow out of thedeadening of metaphor. Prepositions for "to" in many languages, for instance, evolved originally from verbs meaning to give or to go. Modals of verbs can also evolve this way. Deutscher, for instance, goes at length into the evolution of the "going to" future construction in English.

Originally, going to constructions always involved (not surprisingly) literally going somewhere. In the 1500s, for instance, you could say, I'm going to deliver the letter, but not I'm going to sing a song. And when you said I'm going to deliver the letter, it had a more forceful meaning: it meant "I am leaving right this minute to deliver the letter", not "I have a plan to deliver the letter," as it does in modern English. Eventually, people started using going to in more metaphorical ways. By the mid-17th century, for instance, there are texts that say things like She was going to be delivered into hell. Clearly, no intention on the part of the she referred to can be inferred here. Finally, the term evolved into the form we know today. By the end of the 17th century, you could say I'm going to sing a song, or The fort is going to be attacked. The metaphor of going was fully deadened into a grammatical construction. To illustrate the point further, the informal gonna is always and exclusively a grammatical particle. No matter how poor his command of formal grammatical English, for instance, a native speaker would not say I'm gonna the store or I'm gonna the movies. But when gonna is used, it's always with an infinitive after it: I'm gonna take a sentimental journey, etc. Gonna is not simply a sloppy way of saying "going to" but an evolution of the "going to" future into a total grammatical particle.

Toto, We're Not in English Anymore

On Sunday, I was supposed to get together with my friend Jacky for my first Chinese lesson, but he got stuck in bad traffic coming back from visiting a relative somewhere in southern Taiwan and so had to take a rain check. We ended up getting together this evening. I can't say that I learned any great new words in Chinese, but at least I've made a beginning with the Chinese alphabet.

Yes, you read that right: the Chinese alphabet. Popular myth to the contrary, Chinese does have a phonetic alphabet. The reason we Westerners aren't aware of it is that it's only used in schools to teach pronunciation of very basic words. I guess you could say it's more like the Chinese version of the phonemic chart (more on that in a later post).

He started me off with a few letters in "neutral" tone. Which to me, sounds exactly like rising tone, falling done, and falling-rising tone. Chinese tones are infamous. But somehow, despite feeling as though I had absolutely no idea how to tell the difference, Jacky kept telling me I was getting them right.

I got to learn first-hand how different the meanings between tones can be. To, pronounced with a rising tone, means "to steal". Pronounced with a falling-rising tone, it means something else entirely--I don't recall what (a mere half-hour after this lesson), but nothing anywhere near as dramatic as "to steal".

Jacky also promised that at our next meeting, he will bring a Chinese-English electronic dictionary, so that I can look up some basic words and hear them pronounced.

Toto, we are most definitely not in English anymore.

EFL as Entertainment

One of the more irritating aspects of being an EFL teacher abroad is dealing with people who see EFL classes primarily as a form of entertainment.

I suspect I may have finally stumbled onto a few of those. Wednesdays and Fridays, I teach an Elementary class in the morning. The first session, two women showed up; today, a third joined our class.

Now, I admit maybe I have gone a little fast, and I am still trying to figure out how much these women know already. But we have been doing pretty basic-level stuff: "Do you work part-time or full-time?" "Is he a doctor?" That kind of thing.

Today, after class, these women all went to Eve and asked about switching to Foundation because I was "too hard" and the vocabulary was "too over their head". Now, they may need some review, which I would be glad to provide. But, based on the homework they turned in, I can't justify the idea that they aren't capable of doing an elementary-level course.

Most likely, I think they want to change levels because they were expecting entertainment and encountered a teacher who actually sees it as his job to teach the English language.

We'll see how this all turns out.

Interfly in the Sky, I Can Climb Twice as High

My last blog post, and a recent e-mail I received from my mother, have prompted this post.

Every so often, I get an e-mail from someone containing a link to a quiz that will tell me whether my speech is more "Yankee" or "Dixie". Now, I know the people who send it to me (like my mother) are good-hearted and nice people. They send this e-mail, presumably, because either they think the recipients have never seen it before--I tend to get "Yankee or Dixie" as part of a mass e-mail--or because, knowing that you've seen it before, figure you'll probably still find it amsuing the second (or twenty-second) time around.

I think it's pretty clear these kinds of e-mailings need a name. They're not spam; they always come from someone you know (possibly not someone you know in real life, but someone whose name you at least recognize in a sender line). They don't ask you to buy anything or promise you private parts the size of Idaho. They are just amusing little nothings--sometimes jokes, sometimes links to a quiz, that sort of thing.

And so, without further adieux (maestro please), a name for these e-mails.

Henceforth, this type of e-mail shall be known as an interfly.

It's a portmanteu (blended word) of Internet and butterfly. Because that's exactly what these e-mails are: the butterflies of the internet. They alight here and there for a moment, ideally giving the recipient a brief moment of pleasure but at worst causing no real harm.

So keep the interflies coming.

Florence, Y'All

Before I left New York, I had a lot of thoughts about what would and wouldn't be hard to explain in English. My experience so far isn't so much that my thoughts were wrong, as that I was focused on entirely the wrong worries and the wrong challenges.

For instance, much of my focus was on the vast array of English idioms and cultural expressions (see "So How is Everybody on Walton's Mountain?", http://fareastsideminyan.blogspot.com/2007/10/so-how-is-everybody-on-waltons-mountain.html). How, I wondered, would I convey to students what was meant by the phrase "win-win proposition"? How would I explain to my students why my mother was now a Red Hat momma? Could a non-native speaker possibly grasp that "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" have somehow come to mean the same thing?

In discussing this with a good friend, the venerable Dr. Deborah Mowshowitz of Columbia University's Biology Department and a mainstay of the West Side branch of the Far East Side Minyan (better known to family and friends as "Debby"), she told me that there was a simple solution to expressions like "win-win proposition", and this was that my job as an English teacher was to teach my students good grammatical English, so that they would be appalled by an expression like "win-win proposition", if they were ever to descent low enough into the bowels of hell to find it. Well, with all proper respect to Debby, I think this point of view ultimately grows out of snobbishness.

Because the main trouble with EFL in Taiwan, I keep finding, is that, aside from non being native speakers, the English teachers who work in Taiwan's public schools are far too focused on form rather than meaning or context. The result are legions of students who can write down the form of the future perfect ("They will have gone") but have difficulty with the rudiments of conversational English.

What this has made me realize is that what well-educated Anglophones think of when they think of The English Language is far too high-falutin', to use a none-too high-falutin' expression. Good English is not just the intricacies of can and may, or knowing not to use anxious to mean eager, or (a particular bugbear of mine) egregious to mean excessive. It's also such basic building blocks of the tongue as the personal pronouns, the words for book and chair and table and pencil case, and the kind of language you need to carry on a basic getting-to-know-you conversation with a newcomer to your church, mosque, ward, or minyan.

My overall approach to language has thus gotten a lot less snobby. I am more aware now of how little of what we think of as "good English grammar" really has anything to do with people's ability to communicate. "I have eat dinner" may not be as good grammar as "I have to eat dinner" or "I have eaten dinner," but 99 times in 100, the meaning will be clear from context, and the speaker will get his point across. I still wince at "Tomorrow I shopping," but I always know exactly what this means.

I have also become more aware that much of what we think is really essential to communication is due only to convention. Personal pronouns are a case in point. It is not inherently more natural to have gendered pronouns than not to have them. Equivalents of he and she may exist in most European languages, but is such a distinction really necessary to communication? I am coming to think it really isn't. The Chinese somehow manage without it. I have become sufficiently accustomed to Ruby's saying he to refer to our boss "Eve" that I don't generally bother to correct her. If I fail to understand her when she uses he to mean she, I've come to realize that this is a result of my fault and my prejudice. When Ruby uses he with the antecedent Eve, and I start wondering what man Ruby has talked about that I have somehow missed, this is not an innate response but a result of cultural conditioning.

This experience has even made me reconsider my opposition to y'all. Ardent Southerners will defend y'all, on the grounds that it gives English something it has not had in the centuries since thou fell out of use (at this point, even the poets avoid it): a means of distinguishing the second-person singular from the second-person plural. I used to think this was a straw-horse argument. English "naturally" did not have a second-person plural; us Yankees managed to get along without it, as did legions of Bits, Aussies, Kiwis, and South Africans. But I now realize that a distinction between one person being addressed and (potentially) a multitude being addressed is actually a more pressing, real need than distinguishing gender. Just think how many passages in the Bible would become much clearer if the Hebrew ata and atem could be properly rendered into English! But I still draw a line at all y'all. At least for now.

Outside the city of Florence, Kentucky, apparently sits a water tower with the words "Florence, Y'all." I know this because a picture of it is prominently displayed in the Wikipedia article on "Y'all (if you needed any confirmation that Wikipedia has an article on everything under the sun, this would be it). The caption to the picture indicates that the water tower was originally supposed to read Florence Mall, since it sits on land leased from a site under development as a local mall. The tower, however, was finished before the mall, and could not be labeled Florence Mall as this would violate local highway codes. And so it says, Florence Y'All!

Frankly, I would be in favor of every town in Kentucky having a water tower with such a sign. How Dantean that would be! If places like Paducah and Florence could all have a warning sign letting all of us know to abandon hope.

Building a Foundation

Two new classes opened for me today. By the end of next week, I shall have begun to teach every class I am supposed to be teaching for now (there...I knew if I waited long enough, I would have the opportunity to use the future perfect for something!).

When I contemplated the two classes I would be teaching today, I thought one would be a joy to teach, and the other would be an absolute slog. I was right...but wrong about which one was which.

The class I thought would be a joy is CEI02, the second level in our program of children's courses. I thought this would be a joy because I would be dealing with students who knew their alphabet, and I could begin doing more complex work with phonics. I was expecting two students to show up, but we ended up with five, since a couple of parents came wanting their child to try out the class.

I suppose that disaster isn't the right way to describe today's lesson. A true disaster lesson would be one in which the children were never under control for a moment and nothing was imparted to anyone in attendance. But this came pretty close. In addition to the four young charges I had been led to expect, one student brought a friend who did absolutely nothing all class and, to boot, seems to have a pretty heavy speech impediment, a problem in exercises that are heavily pronunciation-based.

You can imagine my joy, then, when I learned, at the end of the period, that this friend would not be taking the class with us. I can only imagine how horrible it would be to have to deal with this child for possibly up to a year or longer.

The class I was dreading was an adult class at what we call "foundation" level. In our program of adult classes, the very beginner classes (usually conducted by a Chinese teacher) are called "beginner". This is for adults who need to learn things like the English alphabet, and so on. "Foundation" courses assume the student knows the alphabet, and are the first course conducted by an Anglophone teacher.

I was dreading this course mainly because I expected teaching total beginners at this level would be a chore. My "elementary" students (the level above Foundation) can at least ask basic questions: "How do you spell that?" "What's it called?" "Could you repeat that, please?" At the Foundation level, you can't even depend on that.

Tonight's lesson, I thought, would be particularly hard. The very first lesson in many adult English classes, this one included, is basic introduction and greeting.: "My name's"..."Nice to meet you," and the like. This can be a real slog to teach, as I know from having watched it be taught in my CELTA training. Most of the class ends up being pointing.

But somehow, things went well tonight. One of my students is Ruby's son, who goes by the English name "John". He seems to grasp onto things pretty quickly. I managed at one point to put a chart on the board illustrating the concept of grammatical person, and he got it almost instantly.

On the other hand, this lesson has taught me how difficult pronunication can be at the beginner levels. At point, I got my students to practice, "What's his name" by putting various names on the board next to stickmen (my name for stick-figure people). You'd be amazed how hard it is for a Chinese speaker to pronounce "Henry Jones." It was probably a mistake, after Henry Jones, to put up the names of various famous people. Angelina Jolie was a particular challenge, as was Alan Greenspan.

But somehow, despite having little ability to answer direct questions, I was able to get my students to understand and use basic introduction language, and to be able to ask how names are spelled. It was a challenge, but I challenge I somehow managed to meet.

Come On On Safari with Me

Well, I had a brief conversation today with Dave Roberts at the Head Office in Taipei. It was good I caught him when I did, because he's leaving on holiday soon and I know not when he'll be back. He said very clearly that he would back me up in any confrontation with my branch over the visa situation. My branch cannot dock my salary to pay for the teacher who covered for me last Friday. He also stated unambiguously that the branch has to pay for any visa-related trips I have to make until they get their license and I apply properly for a work permit and residency visa. Thereafter, if my visa situation still is unsettled, it becomes Shane's responsibility to pay.

I haven't related all of this to Ruby and Eve, but I will, and soon. I figure it is probably best to wait, however, until they broach the subject again. It is pretty clear at this point that they don't have a leg to stand on, and it seems they need me more than I need them--they need me not to tell the authorities that they have been operating the school without a license more than I need them as employers. There are literally thousands of EFL jobs out there, all over the world--some in countries where I might even be paid better than in Taiwan.

On Monday and Thursday evenings, I have a class of two students--a boy of twelve and a girl who I believe is ten. At our first class, it became apparent that we had placed them at too low a level, and we have now corrected the error and are getting more advanced materials for them to study. While we are in the process of this, however, some of what we need for them we do not have, so tonight I found myself having to improvise a little.

Now, my feeling up until now has been that the adult classes are the ones that allow for real creativity. Adults will ask you all kinds of things, and you can kind of veer off and teach not only some interesting language that wasn't your original target language, but also, often, interesting things about American culture and society. But tonight, I found myself veering off into untargeted language with these couple of kids.

A lot of what you do in these kids' classes, I'm finding, is setting up run-and-touch or race-to-the-board games ("Everybody go touch the window" or "Everybody touch Brazil!"). Tonight, I set up such a game where I wrote a sentence on the board, the kids had to say the sentence and then race to slap the target word from the sentence with a big plastic hammer. My target language (again, this is EFL jargon for "the language you are trying to teach") was four countries--Canada, Singapore, France, and China--and various recreational activities. For fun and extra practice, I mixed in some review language from their first lesson, which was about names of subjects in school.

Well, I got a little bored, so I started writing sentences that might not mean anything in particular to the kids, but would be pop culture references to the kids: "Let's go surfing now," +"I'll take a slow boat to China", that sort of thing. At one point, I put "Blame Canada!" on the board.

Well, this gave me an opportunity to explain the word "blame". I was amazed how quickly my kids seemed to grasp the idea...although explaining why one would want to "Blame Canada" was harder. It didn't help that I've never actually seen the South Park movie, and have no real desire to. I finally just said it was the name of a song and I was trying to be funny.

I also learned, in the course of the evening, that Taiwanese people don't really go surfing. I did manage to get the concept of surfing across on the board, drawing pictures, but the kids seem a bit baffled as to why people might find this fun. As I find the whole idea kind of scary myself, I really didn't know how to answer them.

In the course of playing, however, I also go to learn the Chinese name for Chinese checkers. And, since we had so little to do tonight, without the CD or other acoutrements that usually enliven the lesson, we spent some time with a big map of the world going over countries and capitals. I got to learn some of the Chinese names as well. I don't really know why, but at some point in all of this I found myself singing "America", from West Side Story. This got me into explaining that I was from the West Side (okay, not technically true, but when you have a teaching moment, you use it). Sandy, the ten-year-old girl, likes music, so I said I would try to find the lyrics to that song for our next class. If they're good and we get through everything we have to get through, we can do the song together.

This is the Rhythm of the Night (Market)

After returning from my disaster of a trip to Hong Kong, I e-mailed my friend Jacky, of whom I have made passing mention. He had taken me to the airport and would have picked me up had I not been forced to stay abroad another day. I apologized profusely and said I hoped we would be able to get together soon.

Last night, we did. I had e-mailed him again after the kerfuffle caused by my meeting at Head Office two days ago, and said I needed someone to talk to about all of this visa nonsense. Over coffee, I told him what had happened. He basically echoed my sentiments that Eve and Ruby are dealing with the situation in a completely unprofessional way. They brought me over from America, knowing they didn't have the license to operate their school and wouldn't be able to apply for a proper residency visa. Even if I had succeeded in getting a 60-day tourist visa in New York, I would still have had to go out to Hong Kong again in December.

The more I've looked at it, I've realized that asking teachers to come on a tourist visa in more of a convenience for them than an end-run around Taiwanese immigrationl laws (though it is that as well). Dave Roberts made clear to me just how much time and money it would have taken to get a residency visa from America, and that pretty much put to rest any idea I had that Shane and other schools do things this way to save money. I agree that two months from the time an agreement is reached to the time a teacher can actually set foot in Taiwan is too long to be viable for schools. Unfortunately, Taiwanese officialdom places everybody in a bad spot.

In any event, it was good to see Jacky again. After coffee, he and I both had time--my only class today isn't until 6:00 PM, so I really didn't have to get up this morning--so we ended up taking in the night market in Jonghli, a town (city?) about 15 minutes from Taoyuan.

Night markets are a Taiwanese peculiarity. Operating from dusk until midnight or so on weeknights and until 3:00 AM or so on weekends, they sell just about every kind of cheap knock-off of anything you can imagine. But, more to the interest of a Westerner, they offer an abundance of what Jacky assures me is the authentic Taiwanese food.

Now, I have written about Taiwanese cuisine before. But last night was truly eye-opening. In the course of the evening, I saw the following for sale:

1) Duck blood cakes on sticks.

2) Cooked intenstines of every species known to man, or at least known to Chinese man.

3) Snakes. Yes, it really is true. Chinese people do eat snake. I had always assumed this was an urban legend.

4) Fruits of every description. I kept asking Jacky the name of various fruits. He didn't know what they were called. I suggested that they may not even have a name in English--they may only be known in China and, in some cases, Taiwan. We sampled one that, as far as I could tell, was an oversized orange, though Jacky insisted it was much more sour than a real orange.

The only thing I was really brave enough to sample was the Chinese version of chicken soup. Now, chicken soup may be Jewish penicillin, but we Jews have nothing compared to the Chinese. They cook the chicken broth with rice wine, which gives the soup a quality of heating you up on cold nights. This quality is especially desirable because of the weird weather patterns in Taiwan. While the island does not have winters of the kind people enjoy in say, Vermont, it can get into the 40s and 50s in the winter months. On the other hand, buildings are often built without heat, because most of the time the weather is much warmer and heaters are expensive. So the Chinese deal with cold weather through good rather than ventillators.

Jacky dropped me off home about 12:30 in the morning, and we made plans to see each other again Sunday night. He gave me a couple of children's picture books, out of which I will be getting my first lessons in Chinese. If it will get me to the point where I can read menus, and avoid the pork (and snake), it will be worth every bit of effort I spend on it.

So Where Does a Housewife Work?

I guess you could call today the eye of the storm that is my visa situation. Ruby, Eve, and I never discussed it today. Which is just as well, as I had a new class start bright and early at 9:30 in the morning. Two housewives who live in the building have enrolled in AE01, which is what we call "elementary beginners", or what in EFL-speak are known as false beginners. A false beginner is someone who had a little big of English, a long time ago, and needs to revive it before progressing.

Our lesson this morning was basic getting-to-know-you expressions: What's your name? Where are you from? Where do you work? When we got to where do you work, and an exercise asking students to match up, say, a businesswoman to an office building, and I put "Where do you work" on the white board, I could sense a bit of uneasiness. How does a housewife answer the question, "Where do you work"?

In the house, I suppose, would be the pat answer. But these days, I think the answer could just as well be, at the supermarket, at my child's school, or in the minivan. Sometimes it seems the modern housewife would be better called a chausewife--half chauffeur, half housewife--for the amount of time she spends shuttling kids between home, school, and soccer.

I suppose the question must at least be less offensive to today's housewife than "What do you do?", the answer often being, in society's misguided opinion, nothing. But it was nonetheless interesting to contemplate.

My new students found me a little fast, which I suppose is not surprising. They had so many questions! Our textbook had an illustration for "school" that was a teacher in front of a blackboard, with some multiplication tables on it. So I ended up teaching them all the basic math words I figured they might use with a child--add, subtract, multiply, divide--none of which was on the roster. But it was nice to be able to do this, finally. To do something that isn't rigidly in the book. To use my own creativity.

This is definitely the field for me.

One Can of Worms Deserves Another

This morning, I went into Taipei to meet with David Roberts, the head of Shane in Taiwan. Overall, I think the meeting went well, and he was exceptionally courteous and professional to me regarding the predicament I am currently having over my visa.

He told me that Shane would pay any further costs regarding the process of obtaining a visa and residency--that I had paid everything he expected me to pay involving this matter. That was very reassuring. What I failed to do, however, was ask him explicitly about whether this meant the head organization would pay or my branch would pay. I also failed to ask clearly whether Shane could find any way of arranging things so that I could be in a position to apply for a proper residency visa when I next have to fly out in December.

On returning to Taoyuan this evening, I had a somewhat heated conversation with Eve and Ruby, who told me they wanted me to pay for the replacement teacher they had to get in to cover my class when I was unable to come home on Friday. They also said that they will pay for only ONE flight out to Hong Kong. This could be problematic as they are unlikely to have their license to operate by then.

My contract states pretty explicitly that visa runs caused by the school's issues, as opposed to mine, are paid for by the school. I will talk to Dave about all of this; it's possible that Head Office will do whatever it takes to get me a proper visa. But if he says all responsibility for paying in future lies with Eve and Ruby, who refuse to pay for a third visa run (even though this one would be necessitated entirely by their lack of a license to operate), I will be forced to find another employer, leave the country, or both.

I say, "or both," because I also met this morning with Mitch Gordon, the head of the agency that recruited me to come to Taiwan. His agency also recruits for South Korea, and it is possible he could line me up with a position there. All of this, of course, will have to be discussed. But I have e-mailed him about the conversation Eve and Ruby had with me this evening.

The thing is, they're not really in a position to demand anything or talk about what they won't pay for. Because I could simply tell Taiwanese immigration that they are operating their school illegally, which would result in major problems for them and possibly force their branch to shut down.

For now, though, I am not going to get confrontational, except to assert that I will not pay for the replacement teachere who covered for me on Friday. We will cross the issue of a third visa run if it comes to that. But things are very much up in the air right now.

On the other hand, I at least received (most of) my paycheck today. I say most of, because I don't yet have a bank account in Taiwan, and we had not actually settled how I would be paid until I have one (which may not be until after this visa mess sorts itself out). But this evening, I came home from Taipei ravenous, with no money in my pocket and no means of getting any. When I went to Hong Kong last week, I never informed my bank back in America of my visit, because I thought I had enough cash to cover the trip (and I would have, if I hadn't had to stay another night in Hong Kong). So today, I attempted to withdraw money using my ATM card and couldn't get a transaction through. I ended up having to walk home from the Taoyuan train station--mercifully, I had purchased a return ticket in the morning--and asked Eve to pay me my wages in cash, as I had literally no money and no access to money.

She was able to pay me 20,000 NT--a bit over half my salary--because the banks were closed by the time I got back from the station and this was all she had on hand (I was impressed that she had even that much). I expect I will have the rest of it by the end of the week.

This is not a huge amount of money, but given the extreme low cost of living in Taiwan--a cheap meal out will cost about 120 NT (less than $4 U.S.) for much more than you get even from a fast-food place in America--the salary will at least allow me to save and repair some amount of the damages my finances have suffered over the past year and a half.

If I am able to stay, that is.

The Richard Simmons of EFL

A week or two ago, Ruby came into the office bearing some materials for a promotion Shane wants us to do around the holidays. Basically, around Christmas, Taiwanese malls will be decked not, as American malls are, in ersatz Santas but in green-clad Shane employees offering passers-by short assessments of their English. These assessments will take the form of a "spider graph"--a 6-sided chart that will rate shoppers on six aspects of their English.

I've thought a bit about this since, and what it says about the status of English in Taiwan. For a while, it seemed as though everyone in the country desperately wants to learn the language of Shakespeare, Dickens, and--at least between stints in rehab--Paris Hilton. But on closer inspection, I have come to realize that, in the Republic of China, improving one's English seems to occupy the same social netherworld that fitness occupies in America: it's something everyone knows they should be doing, and something everyone makes New Year's resolutions about, but rarely something that inspires any actual action. The English grammar, it would seem, has the same place in the average Taiwanese bureau that a Jane Fonda video has in the bureau of a housewife in Chillicothe, Ohio.

How else am I to explain that, despite being forced to learn English practically throughout their school years, despite the proliferation of bushibans such as the one that has brought me hither, and despite the professed interest in all things Anglophones, people on the street seem content to spend the rest of their lives saying "Tomorrow I shopping", using he to mean she, and being greatly perplexed as to how to respond when a native speaker such as your roving reporter extends his hand and says, "Nice to meet you"?

The comparison between EFL in Taiwan and Buns of Steel in America doesn't end there, however. Just as, in America, there are hardy souls (and hard bodies) who brag about how much they can bench press while everyone else is content to do the odd push-up between bites of their Sonic Double Cheeseburger, Taiwan bosts not a few people who are almost single-minded in their effort to speak and write the Queen's English. I wonder how good a goal this is, since I imagine speaking the Queen's English would actually impede one's ability to speak with real Americans, who say all y'all and think the past participle of think is thunk.

Such a soul is my friend Jacky, whom I met changing money at the Bank of Taiwan when I first got here. Jacky studied Stateside for six years in (I gather) high school and college, and worked in America for a year before his visa expired and he was forced to return to the land of Chang Kai-Shek. To me, Jacky represents about the best that an EFL teacher can hope for. He speaks fluently and coherently, if not without the occasional grammatical lapse. He communicates with real English speakers in real time--not the time it takes to play a CD listening exercise three or four times. I have never seen examples of any formal writing by Jacky, but given the general coherence of the few e-mails we have exchanged, I imagine they must be quite good, and that his occasional grammatical lapses in e-mail are due to the haste the medium inspires in all of us.

I wonder sometimes, though, whether he takes it too far. Last Wednesday night, Jacky was kind enough to take me to the airport for my run to Hong Kong. He confessed to me en route that, in addition to reading English-language novels and highlighting words he doesn't know, he keeps a book of English idioms and tries to learn ten a day. To me, this is a tad obsessive. English knows no end of idioms. We Anglophones are never content to say a car is old and brokend own; we must say it is on its last legs. We never get hungry at 3:00 AM; we get the munchies. To accompany that 3:00 AM order of waffle fries, we drink and get not merely drunk but half seas over until we lose our lunch. Each June, we do not merely marry but get hitched. If we don't marry, we shack up, and if our marriages go south, we find ourselves (if male) married to the old ball and chain and (if female) to a fellow who plays the field. All of this must be daunting to someone like Jacky.

It's hard to know how to explain to Jacky that his pursuit of perfect command of the English idiom is likely to end in nothing but frustration. I like to think that intelligent English-speakers, aware of how complex our language is, cut some slack (ech...there I go again) to those who have to learn it as a second tongue. I want to tell Jacky that it's perfectly okay if he goes through the rest of his life getting hungry instead of getting the munchies, and satisfying his hunger by eating rather than grabbing a bite. That it's enough that he's able to speak well enough to understand and be understood by native speakers.

But somehow, I find the cat has my tongue and I'm at a loss for words.

The New York of Asia? Fuhgeddaboutit!

Hong Kong is often referred to as the "New York of Asia." As with all such expressions, this can mean different things to different people, but I gather that, at the very least this refers to:

1) Hong Kong's standing as a center of international commerce, shipping, and finance
2) Hong Kong's having a similar level of overcrowding to the Big Apple
3) Hong Kong's international flavor
4) Hong Kong's general bustle and energy
5) Hong Kong's status as a "world city", similar to that of New York, London, Tokyo, or Paris

In the spirit of friendly competition, I thought I would compare Hong Kong and New York in a few categories, and see which city comes out ahead. Then, perhaps a little commentary on whether Hong Kong truly deserves the title, "New York of Asia."

1) Subways

New York: Has a poorly planned system (originally built by competing companies) about 100 years old that manages to flood every time there's a sudden downpour, delays passengers due to "police investigations" and "train traffic ahead of us," and could stand a general cleaning from the Bronx to the Battery. On the other hand, the system is the only one in the world that operates 24/7.

Hong Kong: Has a sleek, well-planned modern subway that makes suicides find ways to off themselves that don't inconvenience travellers. Trains arrive every couple of minutes during hours of peration (roughly 6:30 AM to midnight).

Winner: Hong Kong, by a long shot. I would trade 24/7 access in New York any day for a system that didn't require a crystal ball to navigate every weekend, that didn't smell of urine and rat feces, and that had announcement systems that actually gave audible accouncements.

2) Busses and Surface Transit

New York: Trolley systems in Brooklyn and Queens demolished by the mid-1950s, all replaced by busses. Each bus stops about every two feet so that passengers can wait for one little old lady to take 20 minutes getting in or out with her 20 sacks of groceries. On the other hand, maps of the system (at least for whatever borough you're in) are generally readily available from any subway clerk--if you can find one. Busses have the same base fare as the subway, or can be used with an unlimited MetroCard.

Hong Kong: Double-decker busses and trams that stop only at designated stops. I never tried the busses, but my journey by tram (admittedly at night) never involved waiting for one little old lady to get 20 sacks of groceries on board. On the other hand, no one was able to tell me where I could get a map of the whole system, because there really isn't "one system"; busses and trams are run by several different companies. Hong Kong does have an "octopus card" usable on eight different modes of transit (hence the name) but I am unsure whether this applies to all busses and trams. I paid HK$2 (about 25 cents U.S.) to ride all night.

Winner: Draw. Hong Kong's trams and busses are way cool, but the lack of good maps makes them harder for a newcomer to use.

3) Airports and Airport Access

New York: Three hectic airports at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark. No direct subway access to any of them; getting to LaGuardia requires transfer to the M60 bus, and while JFK did boast the "Train to the Plane" for a few years, this was really just a (not-very) gussied-up version of the A train that still made various stops en route. My old least favorite train line, the G, was originally planned to connect to LaGuardia, but this construction was halted by pressure from cab drivers.

Hong Kong: One massive airport, recently built. Airport is connected to the city by the Airport Express (HK$100--about US $12.50) that will take you from your plane to the central business district in 23 minutes, with only 5 stops along the way. The train is a marvel of modern comfort and convenience, featuring luggage racks, head rests, and LCD-display television sets that keep passsengers apprised of progress. Advertising along the route claimed, at least, that 72 percent of Airport Express passengers are business executives and other high-ups in the white collar world.

Winner: Again, Hong Kong. I think Hong Kong's Airport Express pretty much proves that it isn't so much that New York can't build these kinds of projects as that it won't.

4) Ferries

New York: Has the Staten Island Ferry, which has the unfortunate tendency to take passengers to Staten Island. New York Waterways seems to be mainly for tourists and Long Island businessmen with too much money.

Hong Kong: Has the Star Ferry operating between Central and Tsim Tsa Shui, as described in a previous post. The trip takes about 8 minutes. There are other ferries operating in the city, as well as TurboJet service to Macau, a gambling destination but also a good place, I'm told, to see Portugese/Spanish architecture.

Winner: Hong Kong. New York may have been built up on a port, but it is lacking in any kind of port/harbor ambience, and its lack of good ferries reflects this.

5) Taxis

New York: Medallion cabs are yellow, and medallions are expensive and difficult to come by. Drivers rarely speak English and do not abide by legal requirements to take you anywhere you want to go within the Five Boroughs. The cab companies manage to extort money from passengers by tacking on a legally mandated $1.00 "Rush Hour fee" (though why they should be entitled to this during the time their business is best is beyond me) and a $0.50 "Night Surcharge." Lights on top of cab indicate availability, but no one ever seems to remember whether lit means available or unavailable.

Hong Kong: Taxis are not limited as to number. They are two-toned, red-bodied with white roofs and doors (though doors are somtimes other colors due to advertising). Drivers speak English in addition to native Chinese (there may be some white drivers in the system, but I did not encounter any). The base fare is HK$15, with no special charges based on time of day. Though I was warned cab drivers would try to take me for all I was worth as a lofan (foreigner), the drivers I dealt with were scrupulously honest and even tried to advise me not to bother with a cab for short distances. Cabs indicate availablility with a red dot in the windshield that says "For Hire", so there's no mistaking it.

Winner: Hong Kong. I no longer have any sympathy for the "night surcharges" and other BS that attends taking a cab in New York.

6) Cleanliness

New York: Um...we won't go there. Even touristy areas like Fifth Avenue and, especially, Times Square are gritty and full of trash.

Hong Kong: Okay, admittedly I've never seen Hong Kong's version of, say, the Grand Concourse. But what I saw of it was spic and spin.

Winner: Hong Kong. Again, the case is clear: a world-class city can keep itself clean. New York just won't.

7) Attitude Toward Tourists

New York: During my CELTA training, I gave a lesson entitled "How to Bitch Like a Real New Yorker," where I asked my students, mostly tourists, whether New Yorkers were helpful. Most replied they were, but I knew this was an unscientific sample. New Yorkers treat tourists like a species of vermin. God forbid we should help the people who make the city's economic lifeblood flow.

Hong Kong: Standing around lost in Central, I was offered help several times by locals. I think this says a lot.

Winner: Hong Kong. I no longer buy the argument that New Yorkers "have to" be so rude to tourists because they are bombarded by things at every turn intruding on their time and attention. Hong Kong's citizens are equally awash in advertising, neon, and general kerfuffle, but they manage to retain their decency and their dignity.

8) Chinese Food

New York: Has a Chinese restaurant on every corner, selling what I now recognize to be wholly ersatz versions of what actual Chinese people eat.

Hong Kong: Has real Chinese food. 'Nuff said.

Winner: New York! Real Chinese food is not all it's cracked up tobe. I want my beef lo mein!


It seems clear from all of the above that Hong Kong has a lot farther to go in its claim to be the New York of Asia. How can a city claim such a title when it shows a complete ability to subject its citizens and visitors to a non-stop barrage of dirt, grime, and rudeness? When it fails miserably at ripping people off at every turn? When it provides cheap, reliable public transit manned by people who don't sound as though they flunked out of cosmetology school? Where are the nail salons? And where the heck are Junior's and the Stage Deli?

So What Happens Now?

I had a talk with Ruby and Eve this afternoon about the whole visa situation. I made my position clear: I wasn't going to lie any more about my reasons for being in Taiwan, to the Taiwanese government or anyone else. This has gotten too nervewracking. I also made clear that, if they do not have their act together for me to apply for a residency visa when I have to go out again next time, in early December, I will fly out, but to the States, not to Hong Kong.

This actually seemed to go well. They told me to talk with Dave and Mark in the head office, with whom I was in contact several times during my visa run. They supported my refusal to be dishonest but to be careful not to break whatever relationship I have with them and with Shane. After hearing my description of what happened in Hong Kong--how the man at the window told me they had been in contact with the New York visa office--Ruby at least finally seems to believe that I did actually apply in New York. We at least seem to be on the same side in this now.

The worst of it is that so much of this could have been avoided. Not just my visa problems, but the miscommunications and problems I have had with Ruby and Eve so far. I was never told that Shane operated as a franchise system before I came to Taiwan, and had I known this, I might have reconsidered taking that position. I thought that my recruiter, Richard Jones of Reach to Teach Recruiting, was in contact with Eve during the time I was dealing with him, which has proven not to be the case. I asked him specifically to forward messages from me about my visa situation to Eve after it became clear she wasn't getting them, and I assumed he had.

Really all I can do is wait for Tuesday to figure out where we go from here. I guess Evita said it best: So what happens now?

A Jolly Hour On the Trolley

Despite the hassles over my visa, I did at least get to see something of Hong Kong while I was there. After submitting my visa application on Thursday, I took the peak tram up to the Peak, the second-highest peak in all of Hong Kong. The tram itself is actually a furnicular railway that has been operating since about 1880. Once you get off, you find yourself in--you guessed it--an upscale shopping area, but one with an abundance of reasonably nice restaurants and places to take in breathtaking views of the city and the harbor.

I dined at a place called Cafe Deco, on the peak, where I had pizza for the first time since leaving home. I know, I know, I should have had dim sum or something like that, but I can get that in Taiwan. Pizza exists here, but is usually covered in shrimp or kimchi. My adventurous appetite only goes so far.

That night, I left my bags in the hostel--I had been carrying them around all day in expectation of going home with a real tourist visa--and headed out to take the Star Ferry, a delightful excursion between Central (the largest business district in Hong Kong) and Tsim Tsa Shui, an area my guidebook describes as a "tourist ghetto" and former site of Hong Kong's airport, now moved to an outlying island. At night, Hong Kong's major skyscrapers all put on light shows. If you think New York at night is something to see, you need to ride the Star Ferry.

I crossed the ferry once and then came right back. What little I saw of Tsim Tsa Shui getting off the boat did not persuade to continue further. Two or three different men approached me to hawk their services in tailoring a custom suit. This actually is a major thing to do when you come to Hong Kong--have a custom suit made, as they're far cheaper there than in the West. But I had neither the money, the time, nor the inclination. I decided to cross back and get on one of Hong Kong's famous trams.

The trams of Hong Kong really are amazing. The city is crisscrossed by a network of double-decker trams that, I gather, will take you just about everywhere. And unlike in New York, where the busses don't seem to realize that everything else on the street is scared of them, the trams of Hong Kong seem to own the street. I was fortunate enough to secure a seat at the very front of the second deck, where I could see the city come by and catch the breeze as it came in.

I got more than a little lost. I kept thinking the tram was going around in a loop--the same buildings seemed to come by every so often--but I only sighted the spot where I could get off for my hostel once. Eventually I got off and cabbed it back to the hostel. But for about three hours, I took in the Hong Kong night.

The Visa Shake-Up

Well, Hong Kong proved a disappointment. At least as far as my visa situation is concerned. I left Hong Kong last night, having failed to secure a 60-day tourist visa. This does not mean that my application was rejected; it means that the office could not give me an answer in a timely fashion, and I chose to return to Taiwan.

The best I could get out of the office was that "no reply" had been received from immigration in Taipei regarding my application. Apparently, the fact that I had applied and been turned down in New York raised red flags. Who knows how this will sort itself out?

Tuesday, on what is supposed to be my day off, I am going in to my school's head office in Taipei to talk to the two principals of Shane, Mark and Dave. I had several telephone conversations back and forth with Dave yesterday from Hong Kong; the only light he could shed on the situation was that he had never seen a case like mine, not in 11 years in the field. "Everybody" gets a visa, I'm told; sometimes not for the full 60 days, but at least more than a 30-day landing visa.

I will make clear at this meeting that I am unwilling to pay any more money for visa applications. I have already shelled out over $200 just in application fees, not to mention the costs of my plane ticket to Hong Kong and two nights in a hostel. I have done everything that is ordinarily required to obtain a visa. I will also make clear that I refuse to apply for anything other than a real residency visa going forward. Eve and Ruby still do not have their operating license, which prevented my applying for a proper residency visa this time around; if they don't have it by December, when I am supposed to go back for another visa run, I will request my wages, compensation for my flight in, and a plane ticket home. I am no longer willing to persist in lying to the Taiwanese government over something that is neither immoral nor illegal in Taiwan--teaching English.

Anyway...Ruby called my cell phone at 10:30 this morning to see what had happened and to find out where I was. I had e-mailed Eve last night that I was coming home, but either she didn't get the e-mail or she failed to communicate with Ruby. I got a little testy with her, as I had just gotten in at 1:00 that morning and was still very tired. She proceeded to ask a bunch of questions about why my application had failed again--questions to which I have no answer--and made a point of telling me to come in early Monday as I have a new class.

This is just so typical of Ruby. She just jumps all over me all the time. The day I landed in the country, having just been on airplanes for over 20 hours, she "couldn't wait" for me to meet Eve. The afternoon I returned from training in Taipei, very bedraggled and disoriented from having gotten a little lost in Taipei Main Station coming home, I stopped by the school, only to have her tell me she absolutely needed my CELTA certificate (which I had already told her three times had not been issued to me) that minute. It could have waited until Monday. Calling me about my schedule could have waited another day, until I'd had time to collect myself.

Homesickness is starting to set in. I'm starting to realize how many ESL programs there are in the States that I could get into. I could get into this field back home and not have to worry about visa applications and my legal right to be where I am.

Ah well...enough grousing. Time for a more positive post on Hong Kong.

Visa: It Keeps You Everywhere You Don't Want to Be

Hong Kong has such a romantic ring to it. That may be the reason I initially wanted to come here to teach, instead of to Taiwan. If I'd set my sites on it more clearly, I might not be in the mess I am at the moment.

Last night, I arrived in Hong Kong after a short flight--less than two hours--from Taipei, for the purpose of obtaining a 60-day tourist visa. I am staying in a cramped little hostel in Central, on Hong Kong Island. For how long, I do not know, nor do I fathom to guess.

I went to the local TECO office (what Taiwanese consulates are called in most countries, since PRC pressure ensures that most countries do not recognize Taiwan as a separate nation from China). I scrambled a bit to get some of what I needed for a visa application--most notably, evidence of the flight I was supposed to be on tonight for Taipei, and some passport photos--and headed in. I filled out my application, gave it to the lady behind the counter, and paid HK$1000 (about US $125) to apply. She took my application and told me to come back at 4:00 PM.

When I came back in the afternoon, I was told that "Taipei" hadn't made a decision about my application, and that I should come back tomorrow. So I scrambled to find a payphone from which to call my employers, the friend who is supposed to pick me up in Taipei tonight, and the hostel where I spent the night. I also managed to call the airline and change my reservation to tomorrow's flight at the same time. Not a problem, I was told.

I'm not sure whether this indicates that airlines abroad are just better than they are in the U.S., or if different rules apply when travelling internationally. Because every time I have had to change a domestic booked flight in America, it required an almight song-and-dance and ususally a fee. This required no more than a simple conversation with a booking agent. Weird.

I haven't been able to call my ride. I had great difficulty locating a payphone near the TECO office--they aren't exactly a dime a dozen in this age of cell phones, and no society, save maybe the Finns, has embraced the cell phone the way Hong Kong has--and ended up having to place an "emergency" call back to my employer after repeated attempts to pay for a call using my credit card failed. Eve took a while to understand me when I said I probably would not be back for my 4:00 class tomorrow night, but she did agree to find another teacher to cover me. I did't think I should presume too much on the phone company's "emergency" connection service, so I found a McDonald's and emailed my ride. The other calls I made from a bookshop that was kind enough to let me use its phone for local calls when I explained my situation in full.

Anyway...I suppose the title of this post isn't entirely accurate, because at least by staying here tonight, I'll get to see a little bit of Hong Kong. Maybe get some pictures from the Star Ferry to go with the ones I took from the Peak this afternoon.

More later. Someone else at the hostel needs the computer.

The Osama Anticlimax

I was a busy beaver all day today. I had three classes at a branch in Jonglhi, a town about 15 minutes from where I live in Taoyuan. They all went relatively well, though admittedly I had about the easiest students in the world to try to teach.

Little Osama was out today. But I did ask about the name, and apparently, the staff had already impressed upon his parents that this was a name that would do him no good. But poor little Osama, apparently, is stubborn and determined to stick with the name. I expect that in a few years, when he's older, he'll see reason and stop insisting on being called the same name as a terrorist.

My students really were incredibly easy today. Mostly I did review, with a couple of listening sections at the end. I'm beginning to realize that the classes have a fairly standardized format that doesn't allow for much creativity. Ah, well. At least that makes planning easier. I don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. All I really have to do is come up with games, mostly of the racing variety, for students to do in class.

It's amazing how much better behaved the students are than any set I would likely encounter in the States. For instance, in one class today, I had the boys play the girls at forming past tenses of verbs on the board (NOT an attempt to encourage sex chauvanism...this was just the way the students had chosen to seat themselves, and I look advantage of it for easier team formation). At one point, I made a mistake and accidentally awarded a point to the boys that should have gone to the girls. The boys, not the girls, were the ones to protest. I can't imagine any group of male students doing this in the States. I hate to be hard on my sex and my country, but so it is.

In any event, tomorrow I not only have a trip to Hong Kong, I have a new private student at the CE01 level--the very first elementary level. I really don't know what to do with a private student at this level. So much of what you do with the kids' classes is have them compete and run races and things of that sort. Hmm...this will require some serious thought.

Poor Little Osama

Tomorrow, as I noted in my last post, I am going to be covering for a teacher at another branch. To do this, I needed information about what the class had done in its last lesson and so forth. Eve spoke to the manager of the branch where I will be teaching and got me the handover sheet (sheets teachers prepare when they know they will be unable to teach a regular class) for the classes I will be covering, including lists of all the students' names.

After Eve handed this to me, I was casually looking through the list and found a very unusual name on one of the lists: Osama. Yes, that's right, Osama. As in, bin Laden. Naturally, I was gobsmacked.

I tried to ask if there was any possibility this child was from a Muslim family. There was not, to my knowledge, any Muslim community in Taiwan, although Wikipedia (not the most reliable source, but what's available to me) indicates that, apparently, 140,000 Taiwanese consider themselves Muslims. But this is a small number in a nation of 23,000,000 inhabitants, and, more likely, either this child or his parents chose the name simply because they liked the sound of it, not out of any Muslim religious or cultural identity.

For what it's worth, as near as I can tell from brief internet research, the name Osama is not associated with any particular religious figure in Islam, like Muhammad or Omar. It is simply an Arabic name meaning "Lion"--equivalent to the Latin Leo or Hebrew Aryeh.

Nonetheless, I remained, and remain, astonished that someone would take on this name in an effort to have a "Western" or "English" name, given its current strong ties to the leader of al-Qaeda. I felt that someone needed to explain to his parents that, if this child were to come to America (or really anywhere else in the West), this name would almost certainly be misinterpreted. I felt that the parents should be made aware of what a bad choice this is for an "English" name, and the child urged to choose another, before he becomes too attached to it.

I'm not sure that Eve and my Chinese Teaching Assistant, Cecilia, completely understood. They told me, essentially, that I was overthinking the issue--that it was just a name, just something to call someone. But I don't think I quite got across to them how much trouble this name could cause this child outside of Taiwan.

In my post about potentially being put in the role of Mr. Bumble, I noted that the Taiwanese do not seem to regard the loss of their traditional names with the same horror that, say, Kunta Kinte reacted to being rechristened Toby. But such a blasse attitude struck me as unfathomable. I thought about Purim, and how we literally blot out Haman's name every year, because it carries such horrific associations. I thought about how, almost overnight, the names Adolf, Adolphus, and Adolph disappeared from birth certificates in the 1930s, never to return. I had a hard time believing that there could be no such names in Chinese culture--no names too horrible to bestow on a child.

For the present, though, I've realized it's best to do nothing, until I know more the facts. If the child's family is Muslim and this name reflects a real cultural or religious identity, so be it. If not, I may have to ask higher-ups in Shane whether anything should be done about the situation. But tomorrow, I actually meet poor little Osama.

Opening Night on Guoji

Well, the big day has finally arrived: I have finally tought my first class as an EFL/ESL/TESOL/Whatever-the-current-jargon-is teacher. The Taoyuan 8 Branch of Shane English School, located on Guoji (National) Road in Taoyuan, is finally a real school!

Four bright young moppets showed up this afternoon for the first lesson of CEI01, the name my school gives to its "extended" program for elementary-age beginners. In the course of about two hours, mostly of repetitive drilling, I managed to get through their heads, "How are you?" and "Fine, thanks," as well as the names of the various characters in our textbook and workbooks.

The lesson didn't go quite as planned, for a couple of reasons. One is that we lacked a phonics book that we were supposed to have for today. Another is that we bought the wrong kind of markers for use on our whiteboards, and so at one point my Chinese Teaching Assistant, Cecilia, had to spend 10 minutes washing the board off before it could be used again.

But nonetheless, I think things will be okay. The kids were a little nervous because it was the first day of classes and they didn't know what to expect from me, but I think I managed to win them over in the end. When we couldn't do the phonics section, I worked on reinforcing what I had taught by playing a bowling game where students had to produce the correct language before they took their turn.

Tomorrow will be a much busier day, as I am being sent to another branch to cover for a teacher who is sick. I will have three classes back to back, from 4:30 until 9:00 PM. Then the following day, I go to Hong Kong.

And so the adventure begins!

A Hot Pot in the Old Town Tonight

My career as an ESL teacher officially begins tomorrow (Yeah...or is it yay...see my post of a few days ago). Today, Eve and I went to the local Toys R Us--yes, that's right, even in Taiwan people appreciate low-priced toys--to buy a few games and puzzles for the classroom. We came away with sets of darts, a basketball hoop, a set of bowling pins, and various other odds and ends. And yes, these are all necessary for ESL teaching.

Later, I decided to celebrate the start of my teaching career by going downtown for a nice dinner at one of the large department stores in Taoyuan. Every major department store in Taiwan seems to have chi-chi (and sometimes not-so chi-chi) dining options attached to it. And so it was that I encountered the Taiwanese gastronomical phenomenon known as the hot pot.

Hot pots are somewhat akin to fondue. A sterno is brought out and put on the table, upon which a broth is placed, containing flavoring and sometimes vegetables. Alongside the broth comes a plate of raw meat and sometimes vegetables, which are placed the broth to cook and eaten piece by piece. They are, I have discovered, a central part of Asian cooking, particularly in the winter months. The kind of weather that causes Americans to roast marshmallows on an open fire makes Asians--the dish is popular throughout Asia--to turn to hot pots.

My first experience with a hot pot was a rather messy affair, as I tried, foolishly, to remove the broth from the sterno once I felt the meat was sufficiently cooked. This is NOT a good idea...it just splatters broth. Better to let the sterno burn out on its own, the hard way. But all in all, it was ain interesting dining experience, with flavor somewhat akin to an Indian curry.

If you ever swing by Taiwan, be sure to sample a hot pot.