Krok-Ka-Deels

Kunshan, Nr Shanghai, China 2009

Temporary backpacker accommodation in Coolum took on a more permanent outlook. Alcohol abuse had forced Maureen to abandon me. When I had sobered up, she might take me back, but for now, I had no other options. 

        ‘Dry’ did not come easy. The Queensland heat squeezed my sobriety like a python. I shook my newspaper and the communal kitchen coughed dust and regret. Employment was as elusive as my abstinence. English Teachers said the ad. Jobs guaranteed in China. I looked closer. No prior experience. We teach you everything. Just $1,499. My resume lay in the darkness of a desk drawer, a cemetery of dead applications and rotting rejection letters.

              I made my decision. 

On a hot, humid Monday, six hard, studious weeks later, and $1,499 poorer, an envelope arrived. The certificate inside said I had completed a TESOL Diploma. I officially became a Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Respect inched closer and sobriety stumbled stubbornly alongside.

My flight arrived in Shanghai five days later. And on a cold, wet Friday night, another newly minted English teacher joined the expat job queue. An airport bus ferried me to the city centre; a taxi did the rest. I never imagined Shanghai would look like Manhattan. Wide roads weaved through deep valleys of glass and concrete lit by molten trails of car lights. Blazing ads the size of football pitches segued from Coke to cigarettes, SUVs to smartphones. Rain refracted the brilliance of the night onto an Asian humanity pulsing like a heaving sea as Shanghai moved closer to the Chinese New Year. Rat to Ox. A city alive. 

My driver honked as he criss-crossed the city and edged into another world. Gone were the gaudy lights. Instead, narrow, steam-filled backstreets whispered another story: hard lives hidden in shadows. The taxi arrived with a screech of tires and guttural words. We’re here, I guess the driver must have said.

The budget boarding house turned out to be very … budget. The HUNG RU HOTEL lived in a dark and dirty lane. Its neon ‘N’ and ‘G’ no longer worked: ‘HU   RU’ flickered in dull yellow lights offering a weary welcome to stray guests, but I didn’t care. I had done it. ‘HU  RU’ worked for me. 

My euphoria faded with every day that passed. I shivered through twelve days of Chinese rain and Artic cold. My room, a small monk-like cell with no heating, became a prison. A cheap mobile phone and the use of an old computer in the dingy foyer gave me freedom to search for employment. Jobs guaranteed, the ad had said.

Twelve days of endless googling; twelve days of online, real-time rejections. Each teaching position demanded a copy of my passport and a current photo. My fifty-five years creased my face in hard lines like barbed wire after an explosion. And despite being lean and fit, the photo that glared at prospective employers did not show youth or energy. Just despair. Old and beaten with eyes that screamed. 

‘No,’ said the emails with digital words colder than the weather. Polite Chinese platitudes loaded with poor English filled the refusals. Xie Xie, they wrote. Translated, it meant, don’t call us, we’ll call you. I was broke. And every failure fuelled my fear. 

Reject. Reject. Reject.

A drink would help. A drink would help a lot. 

The old fighter bobbed and weaved, backed onto the ropes and soaked up the humiliation. Until a surprise win: I was asked to attend an interview at Cri-Kee International in the nearby town of Kunshan.

The head teacher, Harry, sent me an email. Let’s catch up, he wrote, eyeball to eyeball. 

Shanghai’s super-fast bullet train shot me fifty kilometres to Kunshan in eighteen minutes. Harry and I had arranged to meet in a fast-food coffee house next to the train station at 8.30 am sharp. 

Harry was American, young, mountainous, overweight. Long hair escaped from beneath a Snoopy baseball hat turned backwards while a shirt three sizes too large hung past his knees and billowed in his wake. 

‘Hey,’ Harry said. 

I was easy to find. The coffee house exploded with harsh voices padded like sheep against the cold, shrouded in cigarette smoke and steam breath. 

We looked an odd couple. 

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, my surprise hidden in the nicotine haze. 

Harry wasted no time. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘we need a teacher. Yesterday. Pronto. What experience you got?’

‘None. But I have a TESOL diploma. And I’ve given workshops to banking employees about products and procedures.’ My voice had the sound of one hand clapping, the sound of the long-term unemployed.

‘Man,’ he said again. ‘No English-teaching experience. Shit. An Australian!’

‘English, actually.’ 

He waved his hand dismissively. ‘You speak any Mandarin?’ 

‘No.’

‘Jesus! But you do have the diploma. But hey, you look … experienced. The school’s owners, Latisha and Leo, want to meet you for lunch.’ 

‘Really?’ I said, and started to sabotage my opportunity, protesting against my skills, doubting the efficacy of my application. Fear and doubt. I could hear my weakness. 

Harry looked surprised. ‘You want the job or not?’

‘Yes.’ 

‘Good. Rock up to this address.’ Harry handed me a slip of paper. ‘Noon! Twelve on the button,’ he said. ‘Just talk crap – confident crap. You’ll be fine.’ Harry had scrawled a map on the back. He heaved his bulk out of the chair and pushed his way to the exit. The Chinese parted like a biblical sea as Harry waded his mammoth frame through clouds of cigarette smoke.

‘Tzai Jien,’ he shouted in Mandarin over his shoulder. 

I wandered the streets of Kunshan, a small village of two million people. Modern tower blocks and glitzy, cheap shops and even cheaper products lined the main roads near the station. People crammed into this town tighter than the Melbourne Cricket Ground on World Cup Final day. Aggressive gestures accompanied loud conversations. Staccato words rose and fell with an intensity that alarmed rather than welcomed. I understood nothing. People pushed. People shoved. People stared. I had seen no other Westerners other than Harry. Without warning, two teenage girls hugged onto my shoulders as they squealed with laughter. One on the left, the other on the right. Long tongues lunged towards my ears as their fingers, with black-painted nails, pushed a V towards the third girl who snapped a photo. I was the star attraction. They melted into the crowd before I could open my mouth. The girls flitted into the flock, pointing and laughing at the white-haired Western man that stared at them from their cell phone. 

Small lanes like a network of capillaries pulsed behind the facade of the main street: cigarette vendors and hawkers, cats and dogs, washing and children, garbage and food. Always food: dumplings, boiling soups, skewers of meat, vats of rice, steam and sizzle. Addictive smells of a hard life. Firecrackers exploded nearby. I jumped. The locals served firecrackers as entrees before weddings and family celebrations.

Three hours later, I found the school in a drab office tower hidden in a backstreet. A dirty elevator took me to the eighth floor where Cri-Kee International exploded in colour. Bright cartoon characters painted on every wall: Bambi, Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Donald Duck, Dumbo, Pinocchio. Young adults filled every glass-walled classroom: an even mix of girls and boys, mostly late teens and early twenties. A shy receptionist dressed in a purple Snow White dress with yellow bodice ushered me into a spacious back room. Walt Disney in the teaching area; Confucius in the owner’s private offices. A carved table peaked out from beneath a mountain of Chinese food. A fish head stared at me from a bowl of murky soup as four faces peered at me through a salty haze of cigarette smoke laced with sweet and sour

Two Chinese men slouched by the table: Leo, the owner’s husband, short and stocky, and a young Chinese teacher named Lucifer. A Chinese woman, early forties, black hair past her backside, sat at the table and smiled. ‘Please,’ she said sweeping her hand theatrically over an empty seat. ‘I am called Latisha.’ She was Leo’s wife and the school was her baby.

Harry mushroomed over a seat at the far end on the table, backside hanging over the edges, baseball cap still in reverse. Leo held out a limp hand and shook mine like he was pumping water from an empty creek. I caricatured the action until personal embarrassment and Western etiquette dictated withdrawal to be the best strategy.

‘Welcome, welcome, welcome,’ Leo said. He pushed a can of Tsingtao into my hand, while my terror hid behind my need for the job.

‘Thanks,’ I said, hoping my confident smile covered my fear.

‘Drink!’ commanded Latisha. I watched them gorge: noisy, sloppy, heads down, bowls lifted to mouths. They chatted and spat in speckled English and Mandarin. Leo piled food onto my plate and pushed beers into my hand. A ‘no, thank you’ would have translated into a Western middle finger. They did not take prisoners. I talked. I ate. And I drank.

Leo smiled, said nothing. Smoke drifted from the cigarette poised in his left hand while his right clicked chopsticks at the speed of light.  He stopped only to guzzle Tsingtao … and to press more beers into my reluctant hand with a nod that needed no interpretation: Drink up!

Latisha directed questions at me in reasonable English: ‘You have krok-ka-deels in Australia,’ she said solemnly.

‘Yes …’ I said with the gravitas. Harry’s advice nudged my narrative: Talk crap with confidence. ‘Dangerous crocodiles.’ And I told tales of life in Australia shoulder-to-shoulder with koalas, possums, wallabies and kangaroos. I scored a win with kangaroos.

‘Aaah kaang-gaaaah-roooos,’ she said stretching the syllables far enough to snap. ‘Mmmm, very, very eeeenteressing.’

‘Yes,’ I repeated, ‘very interesting.’

Leo drunkenly impersonated a bounding kangaroo, hands poised in prayer in front of his nose, body undulating in sexual rhythm, nose twitching like a mouse. Leo beamed, ecstatic he had picked up the conversation’s thread.

‘Kang-gaaah-rooo,’ he said Tsing-Tao-loud, bouncing up and down in his seat.

I was drunk, exhausted and surprised when Latisha offered me the job. I could start in the morning.

Interview over. I stood, unsteady and confused.

‘G’day,’ said Leo as he pushed two more beers into my hand. ‘Takeaway. You take,’ he said as he spat ash and food into my face, his cigarette still clinging to his lips.

‘Hey, man,’ Harry said, ‘Congratulations.’

‘Yeah, man,’ Lucifer said, his first and only words.

‘Yeah, man,’ Leo mimicked.

I stumbled to the elevator, past Snow White, crystal classrooms and a million Chinese eyes. They stared at the ageing, alcoholic addition to the school’s teaching staff. I returned a crooked smile, leaned against the wall beneath Pinocchio, and waited for the elevator.

‘Holy shit,’ I said as the lift sucked me down to the ground floor.  I staggered out of the building and stood, swaying, thinking. I pulled the ring from one can. Foam oozed over my fingers. I pulled the ring off the other and put it to my mouth, ready to gulp. I froze, then raised my arm over my head and hurled the beer across the cobbled street into the garbage. The remaining can stuck to my hand like a limpet. Shell shock. My arms fought the addiction until I raised the second can and held it high like a grenade. With the scream of a marine sergeant, I threw the frothing, explosive beer at my demons lurking in the dirty gutters across the cobbled street.

‘You bastard,’ I yelled to no-one, everyone and myself.

Tomorrow I would fight again.