Little Virgin Boy Pee Eggs

Today is Chinese New Year! That means it’s time for another China story from the vault. I’ve posted quite a lot here about China, like the time I ate brains and the time I got to be Bad Santa. There was also the snake shop, and when I got pulled in Shanghai airport and some beefy security guards tried to take my cheese off me. No way, mister! Even the most mundane things, like getting a haircut, take on a whole new meaning in the Middle Kingdom.

In 2009-2010 I lived in an extremely inhospitable northern industrial city called Tianjin. Think of it as a bit like a Chinese Middlesbrough. I only went there to be closer to a girl I was dating, who then promptly dumped me for another dude leaving me alone, miserable and stuck in a job I hated. Said job was teaching English in a primary school. It wasn’t the teaching I disliked. it was the kids. There, I said it. It’s probably hard enough trying to educate children that young when you speak the same language, but at least then you can reason with them. If you don’t speak the same language, forget it. It’s like fighting a war with no weapons. Every class was anarchy.

Eventually I hit on the bright idea of rewarding the good kids with lollipops, hoping the naughty ones would see what they were missing and fall in line. It didn’t quite work out like that. Instead, every kid who didn’t get a lollipop wanted a fucking lollipop and threw an epic temper tantrum until they got one. Mostly products of the one-child policy, they were a mass of Little Emperors. They broke me. Regularly. I would cave in and give them all lollipops just to shut them up, costing myself a small fortune in sugary bribes.

One of the few things I liked about this school was the little breakfast stall stationed outside, selling a selection of traditional local food, along with some more normal fare like boiled eggs and corn on the cob. I stopped by there most mornings. It was cheap, and saved me time.

There was a lot I didn’t like about the school. But the worst thing were the toilets. Toilets in China are gruesome places at the best of times. But in this school there were no locks on the doors, apparently because the little shits would shut themselves in. That meant whenever I used it, I had a swarm of kids around me pointing and laughing at my penis. It was enough to give anyone a complex.

I noticed the boys all peed in buckets, which struck me as a bit weird. But lots of things struck me as a bit weird in China, and the buckets of piss just blended in with all the other weirdness. People would come in sporadically, carry the full buckets out, and come back with empty ones. I assumed they were emptying them down a drain somewhere. I didn’t know for certain, and frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t think much about it. Until one day, when I was talking to my teaching assistant and he told me something that first confused me, then repulsed me, then horrified me to the core.

The school was selling the pee. Those people who came in to take out the buckets of piss were actually paying the school for the privilege.

“What? Who would buy buckets of pee?”

“People.”

“What people?”

“The people at the breakfast stall where you go in the mornings.”

“Why?”

“Tong zi dan.”

“What’s that in English?”

“Not sure. Little virgin boy pee egg or something.”

“Excuse me? Little virgin boy what?”

He explained that in some regions of China, Tianjin included, urine from young boys, preferably under the age of ten, is harvested. It’s boiled, and eggs are soaked in it for a few hours. Then the shells are cracked, presumably to let more of the pissy goodness inside, and it is boiled some more. The practice has been going on for centuries, and is tied to TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). Eating little virgin boy piss eggs is said to reduce high blood pressure, stop you catching a cold, and relieve joint pain. I’d been unwittingly eating them for months.

I’ve never been able to look at a boiled egg in quite the same way since.

Trigger Warning #6

I am pleased to report that my short story, Little Dead Girl, is included in Trigger Warning #6As you can probably gather, I wrote Little Dead Girl when I was in living in China. I tried to convey some of the isolation and disassociation you feel when immersed in a different culture, and the surreal sense of  unreality that permeates everything you do. The artist who illustrated the story, John Skewes, captures the mood perfectly.

Little Dead Girl was yet another story based on one of my fucked up dreams, probably inspired by the evil Little Emperors I was teaching at the time. Believe me, some of them deserved to be kicked down a flight of stairs or three. To this day, I can still remember the dream vividly, and it still gives me chills.

You can read Little Dead Girl for free HERE

 

What’s in a Name?

This week is Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival. Confusing because in the West it’s neither New Year or Spring. Anyway, this is the Year of the Sheep. To celebrate, here is a little glimpse inside Chinese culture.

During my time as an English teacher in China I met, and tried my level best to engage with, probably a couple of thousand students, with very mixed results. The vast majority were 18 to 22 years old and had limited English capabilities, even though most had been ‘learning’ the language since they were kids.

Not many classrooms have heating. This one didn’t.

To aid their education, the students are encouraged to take English names. It is supposed to help them identify with the language and more importantly, makes things slightly easier for foreign teachers. Most of the boys named themselves after basketball players or footballers they idolise. Every class had at least one or two Bryants, Lebrons, James’ and Davids, in which case I had to give them numbers after their name to differentiate between them. Bryant 1, Bryant 2, Bryant 3, etc.

There were also the customary smattering of cutsie girls names; Amy, Janet, Mary, etc. As mundane as they are, at least these names can be considered normal. However, a fair percentage had some pretty ridiculous names. Every foreign teacher will have come across this, and could probably supply their own expansive lists.

I know its childish and immature to make fun of people’s names, but these are not ‘real’ names. More often than not, they are just random English words the student likes the sound of. Some change their new, ‘names’ regularly, while others stick doggedly to the same non-name until they realise how stupid it is then get another one. Others kept forgetting their English names and didn’t respond even if you did remember it.

Welcome to the bizarre world of Chinese student’s ‘English names.

Boys:

Aubrey, Casper, Cookie, Heaven, Blind, Black, Bing, Bet, Boss, Tail, Mars, Lemon, Wolf, Poseidon, Kite, Felix, Jonny X, Winter, Wisdom, Note

Girls:

Delete, Lenovo, Kitty, Emple, Emperor, Shiner, Five, Six, Seven, Turkey, Fairy, Darling, Momo, Panda, Canary, Funny, Flower, Volume, Crayon, Yoghurt, Soulmate, Dolly, Rainy, Sunny, Dolphin, Blossom, Nonchalant, Sin, Cipher, Bamboo, Jammy, Kamy, Lark, Oren, Oscar, Tequila, Wonderful.

The award for the most ridiculous name of all, however, goes to… Lube. The poor, confused thing. And a special mention should go to the most questionable CHINESE name I came across:

Wang Ke

Weirdly, as much as I protested, Wang Ke was one of the few that flatly refused to get an English name. Priceless.

Back to Reality

It’s six months since I came back from China. And six months since I stopped trying to be a teacher and moved to London to work for a magazine. And only now I can put things in perspective a bit. At first I suffered from a weird kind of reverse-culture shock. After the best part of six years being submersed in one of the weirdest cultures in the world, even adapting to the UK again was traumatic. One afternoon I bought a meal deal in Tesco, and got served by a robot. Surreal.

In the time I’ve been away, a lot of my friends and family have moved on with their lives, got married, had babies (some of my friends seem to have a new one every year) or got themselves divorced or dead. For more than half a decade I called different little parts of China ‘home’, eventually settling in Changsha, Hunan Province. In the meantime, in my real hometown in the Welsh valleys, which I visited for a couple of months each summer, everything changed but stayed the same. Everything of note that had happened since my last visit got jammed into two months worth of drinking time. Then I had to remember all the relevant details, file them away, and leave again.

Meanwhile, the same thing was happening in my other life in Changsha. Just because you are not there, it doesn’t mean life stops. Far from it. If anything, life moves much faster in a place where the unofficial motto is ‘Go hard or go home.’ All in all, the past six years have required a lot of adjusting. I’ve been a social chameleon. With varying degrees of success. A bit like a 21st Century Paul Young. Wherever I lay my rucksack, that’s my home. For a while.

After the shock of settling back into society wore off and I settled into the job, I got too busy to write much at home. I also spent a fair chunk of time in the pub, obviously. And a lot more time than I would like on subways and trains. When the weekend rolls around, I can’t wait to have a lie in. This 9-5 lark is pretty brutal. Especially with a 2-hour commute each way. I knew that, which is why I avoided it for as long as I could. It’s a far cry from having two classes a day followed by a five-minute walk across campus in the sunshine.

Hunan Mass Media College, Changsha

Never mind, I had a good innings out there on the edge of normal society. Time to step back in line, I suppose. This is where I belong. I’m pretty sure of that now. I think.

Some people take teaching very seriously. To some its a vocation. Good for them, but I was never one of those people. I wasn’t the worst teacher in the world. I think I got better with time. It was hard to get any worse considering that when I first started at one of the most prestigious universities in Beijing, I had no teacher training. None at all. I was just given a text book, thrown in front of a class of would-be airline pilots, and told to ‘teach something.’ As my career progressed, I would consider myself lucky to even be given a text book.

I had some pretty awful lessons. I’ve crashed and burned so many times. I almost started a classroom riot one day after making a throw-away comment about ‘the Tibet problem’ in a particularly touchy class. The funny thing is, I don’t even give much of a shit about Tibet. I said as much, in slightly different words, and that just got me in more trouble. Oh well…

I had some good lessons too. There are some students I’ve stayed in touch with for four or five years now. But you never remember the really good lessons. I like to think it’s because by the end there were so many of them, my frazzled mind couldn’t keep track of them all. But I might be wrong about that. The bad ones, however, are burned into my mind. There is no lonelier place on earth than being on a stage in front of forty pairs of expectant eyes when your lesson plan has just failed, you have absolutely nothing to say, and you still have twenty minutes of lesson time to kill.

Goodbye, class!

But you learn a lot about yourself in testing situations. If I’d wanted a safe, easy life I would never have gone.

Finding the Time

During Spring Festival 2012, which ran through January into February in China, I was an ESL teacher, which meant an extended break from class. One of the best things about being a teacher, especially at a university, is all the holidays.

Being a frustrated writer, I made it my first mission to submit everything I had lying gathering dust on my hard drive. Novels, novellas, short stories, articles, everything. As it turned out, it was a worth-while exercise. My love life might have been a perpetual mess, but writing-wise, 2012 was the most successful year of my career by far with a novel, a novella and eight short stories published in different places, along with a couple of articles and a bunch of reviews. Paradoxically, I didn’t actually write much more new material other than a new novella set in World War I called No Man’s Land, and a few short stories.

What I did do, apart from submit everything I had, was re-write the first book in my Joshua Wyrdd teenage adventure series for a publisher, who then rejected it anyway. Great start. After that I edited and re-edited the two books that did end up coming out last year, Devil’s Island (on Rainstorm Press) and Rainbow’s End (Flarefont Publishing). At the same time I worked on a screenplay for a client and a book I ghosted for a friend who recently had a stroke. I also kept up a steady stream of reviews for Morpheus Tales magazine.

I set up this blog in the summer of 2012 and set about trying to get a following, then I concentrated on trying to promote Devil’s Island. I sent out around a dozen review copies, and emailed around 50 horror magazines and websites offering review copies and/or a guest blogs, profiles, or interviews. In the interests of shameless self-promotion, I also updated my Amazon Author Central and Author’s Den pages, and did a lot of marketing on Facebook, etc. No sooner was the Devil’s Island promo stint over, then the whole thing began again with Rainbow’s End, only this time it was even harder as I was trying to break a new market, the subject matter not being what I usually write about.

No matter what else I’m doing, I always try to keep an eye open for any new markets and maintain my submission rate. That takes up a fair chunk of time. I keep other things up to date; my Duotrope tracker (when it was a free service), my professional log, where I keep notes on all my submissions, successes and failures, and various other things I have going at any one time, like my ‘Strange Communications’ file where I record some of the funnier or more bizarre verbal exchanges I have with (usually Chinese) people. Some weeks, that expands at an alarming rate. In addition, I read as widely as time allows.

I’m not complaining. I know nothing worthwhile is easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it. Also, I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that generally speaking, people are selfish bastards and do what they want most of the time. Meaning that if I didn’t really want to do these things, I wouldn’t. I’d watch TV or get drunk instead. I don’t know what drives me, that’s a whole other blog – one I intend to write after the intensive therapy sessions. Joke. I just know that wherever possible, I do what makes me happy. In the words of the great Bruce Springsteen… It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive!

But damn it, I wish there were more hours in a day. I never feel satisfied, I always feel like I could have done more. I get the feeling I’m racing against the clock. Which is exactly what I’m doing, every day, in a sense.

And so are you.

Rainbow’s End

My new novel, Rainbow’s End, is out now on FlareFont publishing and is available on Amazon, Smashwords, B & N, and all other online retailers.

 

This is my first attempt at a grown-up novel, with no ghosts, zombies, serial killers, demons, aliens or anyfink…

And I just know it’s going to get me in trouble.

Life is a journey, right? We all make our way from A to B to C.

This is my journey. At least, part of it. I made some of it up for dramatic effect.

In a nutshell it is the story of a young man who leaves rural Wales in search of gainful employment, adventure, and enlightenment. In short, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

However, on his journey of self-discovery, he gets far more than he ever bargained for…

Rainbow’s End, written in first-person narrative style, is primarily a contemporary cultural and social study. Its underlying themes include national identity and the perennial search for ‘belonging’, and asks where Wales fits into the modern world.

The story begins as a bleak assessment of modern life in the South Wales valleys. The lead character has worked in the same local factory ‘putting things in boxes’ for eight years; he is bored in his long-term relationship and yearns for the freedom to explore, both literally and figuratively. A trip abroad stirs an awakening of sorts, and on his return to the confines of work the narrator begins a torrid affair with a colleague. This quickly turns sour; he feels isolated and restricted, and only does the things he needs to do, as opposed to the things he wants to do. As the relationship, and his life, crumbles around him he turns to writing as a means of self-expression.

Before too long his writing exploits make him a focal point of attention in the village where he lives, but this success is tempered by the worsening condition of his relationship. Eventually, after a run-in with the local police, he is forced to flee to Southampton, where he wins a place on a media course at university. At last, he is free to indulge both his fascination with writing and his wanderlust, as he finally breaks free of the chains that had bound him for most of his life. Belatedly, he realizes that life can be whatever you make it.

The blinkers have finally been removed.

However, in Southampton he discovers that the grass is not always greener, as he is targeted by bigoted racists who see him as a ‘foreigner.’ There are also problems when he returns to his hometown and his small group of lifelong friends reject him because of his perceived act of disloyalty in moving to England.

Disillusioned and perpetually luckless in love, he eventually decides to start a new life in Beijing, throwing himself headlong into the search for adventure, enlightenment, and ultimately…

happiness.

For more information, please follow this link:

http://www.amazon.com/Rainbows-End-ebook/dp/B00APLQMIS/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1356686896&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=rainbows+end+cm+saunders

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas in China

Not being a Christian country, China has traditionally been quite reluctant to get the Christmas bug. This seems to have changed dramatically in recent years, with kids eager to get presents and shops and businesses all keen to make as much money as possible. It’s the perfect symbiotic relationship, and consumerism reigns here in the Far East as much as anywhere else. Communism, at least the Western perception of it, is a myth.

I’ve been teaching a couple of years now, and I often get Christmas cards, emails and messages from students, past and present. They mean well, but unfortunately too many of the season’s greetings get addressed to ‘Christ,’ instead of Chris or Christian.

To Christ, marry Christmas!

I never found out who the ‘Christmas’ chick I was supposed to marry was, but I can tell you that it’s a lot of pressure being the son of God.

Almost every educational facility in the country, from kindergartens to universities and training schools have special events to mark Christmas. These usually take the form of a student performance. Last year at Xiangtan University, Hunan province, the drama club did a Shakespeare production. Juliet came out wearing a beautiful long, white, flowing dress, promptly tripped over it, face-planted, and gave herself a nasty nosebleed. The poor girl. Romeo & Juliet never had so many laughs.

Spending Christmas away from home is always difficult. Of course, I miss people. But I have to work, and this is the life I chose, so all I can do is push those thoughts to the back of my head and get on with it. Luckily, we have a tight foreign community here in Changsha. Brits, Americans, French, Canadians, Germans, Poles, Danes, Swedes, Australians. We are all foreign to each other, but united in the fact that we are not Chinese. The Chinese rarely discriminate between nationalities (except the Japanese). To them its simple. You are either Chinese or foreign. A common Mandarin word for ‘foreigner’ is laowai. The etymology is complex, but tellingly, literally translated it means ‘outsider.’

I usually have to work Christmas day, as do most teachers. It’s not a national holiday in China. Sometimes I have to be Santa Claus. I hate it. I make a very bad Santa. A few years ago when I worked at a primary school in Tianjin, which is far too close to Russia, by the way, the school asked me to host the Christmas party. Being the only foreigner there, I had no choice but to agree. They gave me this tattered red Santa suit and a script to learn. Yes, a script. Then they sent me into a theater packed not just with hyperactive spoiled Little Emperors, but also their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and what seemed like all their friends and extended family as well. All told, there must have been several hundred people there, all waiting to see Santa Claus.

I was a bit nervous, so I drank an entire bottle of Baijiu on the bus on the way to school, and by the time I got there I was quite pissed. Irresponsible, yeah. But I would love to see you go through this ordeal stone cold sober. So there I was, in a Santa suit, drunk, on a stage in front of hundreds of people, at 8 am Christmas morning, in freezing northern China.

It couldn’t get any more surreal.

But it could certainly get worse.

I had been a good boy that year, and learned the script beforehand. So in my best Santa voice I bellowed my first line, “Ho, ho, ho, does anyone know who I am?”

To which a kid in the front row jumped up and shouted, “Yeah, I know who you are. You’re Chris. Our English teacher.”

What? That wasn’t in the script. How could I possibly follow that?

There was a deathly hush, then a ripple of laughter gradually spread through the audience members as I shriveled up in embarrassment before a sea of strangers.

Merry Christmas, you little shit.

Music Class

I teach English at a university in Changsha, Hunan province, China. Well, I say I teach English. I am the first to admit that what I really do is not actual teaching. If my students are lucky they might learn a few new words and expressions from me, but my main purpose here seems to be to facilitate a kind of culture exchange. Chinese culture is so far removed from Western culture that the students in China need some kind of preparation, especially if they plan to go abroad one day or even work closely with westerners.

One of my more popular classes has always been my near-legendary music classes. No, I don’t make them play instruments, that’s for the parents to do. Instead we talk about music a bit, and I show them videos. Music works well as a medium. Especially music videos. A picture tells a thousand words, as they say.

The problem is, how to distil half a century of music into an 80-minute ‘lesson?’

Here, I make no excuses. I play what I want, such is my right as their teacher, haha! I put a lot of thought into it, and try to choose things that are meaningful or significant. Or just… good.

For the record, here is a list of video’s I showed this week:

30 Seconds to Mars – Closer to the Edge (great video)

U2 – Bad at Live Aid (powerful stuff)

Bruce Springsteen – Born to Run

Blink 182 – All the Small things

Simple Plan ft Natasha Bedingfield – Jet Lag

Eminem – Lose Yourself (Inspirational)

Linkin Park – Bleed it Out (LP are among the few western bands that Chinese students recognize)

Pink – Blow Me

Lostprophets – Rooftops (have to get a Welsh band in there somewhere!)

Papa Roach – Scars (great song)

Green Day – Time of Your Life

Slipknot – Before I forget (Live at Download)

Enrique Inglesias – Escape (one of my guilty pleasures. It also serves to keep the girls happy!)

On the whole, I don’t think China is at all ready for Slipknot. When they go off it causes shock and awe on a grand scale. Half my students shit themselves in fear. Corey Taylor, be proud.

 

 

Back in the PRC

Back in the PRC. This will be my 6th year teaching out here. Its true what they say, the more things change the more they stay the same. It took me two weeks to figure out a way to climb the Firewall and find a shop that sold real bread.

After a gruelling 30-hour journey I arrived in my new place of residence. Hunan Agriculture University, Changsha, China. I spent part of the morning waiting for a plane in Shanghai, where the sun was shining through the departure lounge windows. But in Changsha the temperature was lower and the sky overcast. Predictably, it rained later. I have always said, I have a strange ability to take the Welsh rain with me wherever I go. Guess I won’t be needing the new Karrimor sunglasses I spunked £22 on.

When I walked through the door of my new apartment the first thing I saw was a dead cockroach, just lying on the floor near the door. It was almost as if it were an offering of some kind, or a welcome gift. My friend Aria came to visit me and help me settle in. Chinese girls are good like that. Especially if they know you have gifts for them, In Aria’s case it was a copy of Filthy Shades of Grey, a book that is undoubtedly not available in China, an I AM SHERLOCKED tee shirt and a bar of Cadbury’s Wholenut.

I woke up the next morning with a cockroach crawling through my chest hair. It was raining outside so I had chocolate and a bottle of milk tea for breakfast, watched a couple of episodes of I Shouldn’t Be Alive (Discovery Channel documentary), then went back to sleep. When I woke up again it was dark. Jet lag is a cruel mistress.

The campus of my new place of residence, Hunan Agricultural University, is absolutely huge. There are thousands upon thousands of students, and countless shops, supermarkets and restaurants. In fact, the campus is probably bigger than most fair-sized European towns and villages. It is situated on the outskirts of Changsha, a city of over 6 million (more than twice the total population of my country) and surrounded by lush green fields, rice paddies, ponds and mile after mile of farm land. Strawberries grow here.

After a couple of days I was called to the university office. I was expecting to collect my new schedule, or maybe have to hand over my passport or other documents. Instead I was given a months salary in cash, told I was going on a weekend trip to a spa in order to experience ‘rural Hunan’ the following week at the request of the local government, and that my classes didn’t actually start for over a month after that. I’ll pick up another month’s salary before I have to do any actual teaching.

Apparently I am teaching freshmen students, which means most of them will be in the 17-19 age group. The freshmen classes always start later than the others because, regardless of their major, for the first six weeks or so of their college / university lives every student, make and female, has to partake in military training. I suspect this is to teach them discipline rather than prepare them for war, but I have never been sure about that. They march and learn songs, and the kids at the nicer universities even get to shoot rifles. The poorer and/or less prestigious universities can’t afford bullets, so they just have to pretend.

My first weekend back in Changsha was eventful. On Saturday one of my friends, Martin, a Canadian, and his Chinese partner Cici got married. Chinese weddings are a blast! The next day there was Orange Island music festival. Chinese music festivals are quite bizarre. You get a very eclectic mixture of acts, from traditional singers to thrash metal and screamo, all on the same bill. I only went to see Architects who didn’t even end up playing in the end. The day after that I went on a trip to an ancient riverside town nearby called Jing Gang, which was beautiful. Strangely for China, it was almost completely deserted. Which only made the elaborate show in the evening, a re-enactment of a battle that took place on the river there 5 or 600 years ago, even more surreal!

It’s difficult sometimes, being in a strange country with limited internet and crap bread, but I wouldn’t change this life for the world.

Going Back to China.

Back to work in a few days. Bummer. Goodbye friends and family, hello unknown.

On September 1^st I have to get up at 06.30, travel to Cardiff by car, get a coach to Heathrow airport (London), take a long-haul flight to Shanghai PuDong airport, get a public bus to Shanghai Hongqiao airport, take a domestic flight to Changsha, and hopefully meet up with a representative from my new school who will then drive me to my apartment on the outskirts of the city.

All in all the journey will take around 28 hours I guess, providing I make all the connections and don’t die in a fireball somewhere.

I’ll be honest, the thought is a little daunting. Before a long journey I get apprehensive. So many things can go wrong. Adding to my trepidation is the fact that I am starting a new job in a new school in a new area. I have been doing this for 5 or 6 years now, and it seems I spend most of my life ‘settling in’ and walk around in a permanent state of mild culture shock.    

I work as an ESL teacher in China, which I will blog more about in the future (I pwomise!). I don’t pretend to be a real teacher. My job basically amounts to entertaining disinterested Chinese university students and being the token ‘foreign expert,’ that gives an educational establishment added credibility. I actually have a foreign experts certificate issued by the Chinese government which assures me that I am, indeed, an expert at being foreign.

People who pursue this pseudo-career are usually faced with three employment options:

1: Volunteer work. This, in my book, is an instant no-no and geared toward exploiting graduates who need work experience. The parents invariably pay the schools, so why should the foreign teachers be expected to work for free?

2: Private schools. These offer a higher salary, usually 10-13,000 RMB (£1000 – 1300) a month, sometimes more, but you have to work up to 40-hours a week and usually have to pay for your own apartment, transport and everything else. In short, its like having a real job.

3: State-run educational establishments (schools, colleges and universities). These offer a lower salary (on average around 5000 – 6000 RMB, or £500 – 600) but as part of a ‘package’ that also includes a fully-furnished apartment, travel expenses, visa fees, health insurance, return flights back to your country of origin, bonuses, and sometimes even phone, internet and utility bills. The main advantage is a much lower workload, and lengthy summer and winter holidays. It isn’t difficult to pick up extra part-time work to make up the difference in salary if one is so inclined.

Having experienced both sides of the coin, I decided long ago that option three suited my needs better, mainly because the general life hassles are minimized and I get a lot more free time. During the 2-month winter holiday I usually do some travelling around mainland China, and in the summer (when I often change schools, and sometimes cities) I go back to Wales to spend time with friends and family.

During the holidays is when I can apply myself fully to writing. I don’t pretend to be a professional.  I’m semi-pro at best. I don’t make much money teaching, and I make far less writing. But one thing I have learned on this epic journey is that life is about much more than money. It is a sad fact that if I made more I would undoubtedly waste it on stuff I don’t need. A truly fulfilling life should focus more on personal happiness, freedom, independence, setting and achieving goals, and making a difference.

Chris Jay of Army of Freshmen once said, “If experience can be considered a currency, then I am a rich man.”

And I agree.

Probably the worst thing about living and working in the PRC, apart from the general weirdness of it all, is the government-sanctioned internet censorship. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, You Tube and most blogging sites, including WordPress, are blocked, which makes social networking a constant game of cat n mouse. For this reason, combined with my own general laziness, my blogging over the next nine months or so may be a little sporadic, so please try to stick with me!