Student reports: the art of euphemism

As a child I remember enjoying the beginnings of Roald Dahl's books the most. Preferring the prologue to the tale, I suppose, marked me out from earlier on as Chaucerian in my literary tastes. However, it was one book's beginning that I delighted over most, reading and re-reading it many times and marvelling at what I saw even then as its truth. It was Matilda, and the passage in question the expose on teachers' school reports: the moment at which the teachers enact their revenge by revealing just what Mummy's little darling is really like!

Perhaps it was because I considered myself to be a clever child and star pupil that I enjoyed Dahl's devious portraits of those less charming children that populate any and every school classroom. Like Matilda herself, I spent most of my time precociously reading, and could therefore think myself exempt from his, or my teacher's, opprobrium. I was in on the joke, sharing it with Dahl; I was not the butt of his jokes, surely?

Well, now I can look back and say I know better - know, in short, the whole despicably wonderful truth. For while the reports themselves, kept safe by my loving mother (like so many locks of hair, baby teeth, photographs and birthday cards), testify that I was a mature and helpful child, as a teacher myself I now understand their true nature and meaning. No, sadly, they are not oracles sent from Delphi bearing the tragic truth about your child; nor are they (to stay on the Sophocles theme) the key to the riddle of the Sphinx. They do not aim at truth, nor can they administer wise council on how precisely to turn your toad of a child into an Oxbridge-bound angel (or even, incestuous king). Far from it. As I look back simply on my younger self, I can see clearly that the appellation 'mature' - given with such alarming frequency to my six year old self - was really a mask for the whole range, surely, of less comfortable qualities spanning sensible, unsociably shy, and awkward with a sniff of superiority. What is more, as I labour through the writing of countless reports on my own students, I see the necessity for writing such spuriously glowing reports.

And it is not only I who encounter this difficulty. I was recently asked by my friend, a Spanish Tutor, how she could possibly render into nice English "she is all the time not listening." Hum, I replied, thinking for a minute. "Sophia would benefit from paying more attention in class?" "Ooh, I like it," she laughed with mischievous glee, quickly writing it down. "Tell me more." Well, just for you and any other bemused teachers out there needing a quick fix to the troublesome task of not telling the truth in their student reports, here is

The Art of Euphemism: Volume One

1. Omission: avoid comment

Remember the old adage "if you have nothing nice to say do not say anything at all"? This should be the first rule. Focus instead on Hard Facts, for example: This term was spent revising the past tense. Meaning: "Your child failed to understand it the first time, so we were forced to do it again." Vocabulary: "Christ, are you sure your child knows English?"
It does, however, leave a problem: what to put in criticism's place.

2. Embellish

Find a small detail and elaborate: Daisy participates in class. The definition of "participates" might be "to show up less than half an hour late," but it's a start. Likewise: Edgar responds well to the reading passages, meaning "he reads them aloud when forced." Then:

3. Make helpful suggestions

Daisy could benefit if she participated more actively in class: "If she just said something - anything at all! - it would at least break up the hour's silence."
Ling Ling should revise the work done in class to make effective progress: "One hour a week will never be enough to penetrate the depths of her ignorance."
Edgar should now work on putting emphasis into his spoken English: "His monotone reading frequently sends me into a coma from which I fear I will one day never emerge."

However, Daisy's case is perhaps better than the alternative,  which leads us on to the next point:

3. Give praise

Flora shows much confidence in speaking in class. In other words, "Flora can't keep her mouth shut."
Sing Sing gives insightful readings of the poetry studied: "How he arrives at these interpretations is a mystery. It cannot be from understanding the actual words."
Easter takes careful notes in class: "I am worried she has OCD. Have you seen the size of her handwriting? It takes her hours to form a sentence, and even then its so small I can't read it!"

4. Make more helpful suggestions

Flora should seek to channel her abundant thoughts into her writing i.e. "keep them to herself."
Watching English-American films could help advance Apple's vocabulary: "I really can't be the one to keep explaining the Facts of Life to her."

5. If all else fails, resort to 1.

Ah me, sad hours seem long!

It has been a particularly long and slow week, not least as I waited on news from various job interviews and for myself to finally make up my mind on that pros/cons list. But I can now reveal conclusively that [fanfare]: The List does not help one decide. No. It only makes clear what the choices are, but the difficulty of Decision remains. To demonstrate this, let me refer you to the maxim of my dear beloved mother, which is as equally unhelpful as my List(s): "Well," she will sigh wisely, "there are Two Choices: you either Do or you Don't."

Quite.

Well, I Do. Or, I Did. Or, rather, I have decided to take an offer of employment and shall, as soon as the paperwork is done, be handing in my resignation. And it cannot come too soon. For today, like yesterday and the day before that, and all those dusty days preceding, have left me weary - bored, nay, intellectually starved, but nonetheless weary. Even Queen Mab could hardly raise my spirits today: I gave up trying to explain love's illusions, telling myself he's 16, he'll find out soon enough; and even my young student's impromptu expletives held less of a shock than they used. In short: my work-life lacks lustre.

Indeed, I find myself, as I stand at the water-cooler refilling my cup (which, ostensibly, does not runneth over) for the tenth time, gazing forlornly at the packet of dried baby crabs that have been sitting for a week now on the reception desk for the benefit of peckish passers-by, and feel a strange sense of sympathy. I look at them with their little limbs cracking and breaking off like crisps at the bottom of the bag and see so many lives stopped still: no longer scuttling forward, or even sideways or backwards, they have been rendered lame, awaiting a final annihilation when they will be made a snack to a hungry student. For I too am their snack - a water trough at which they drink, quenching their thirst but draining the source - and I too feel just as lifeless, just as broken and hollow inside.

Well, I am of course, melodramatising! (Or, at least, (she sobs dramatically) I wish I was.) My students are all as delightful as ever. They have not changed: one comes in telling me of his success in Tonbridge and Oundle interviews; another laments the typhoon's failure to reek destruction on the city and give him a day off school; and they are bright, sparky and interested young things, and I shall miss them. But, ah, the chance - some days - to miss teaching them! But now that day is soon approaching. I am waiting with bated breath for the go ahead from my new employers to kiss my old ones goodbye, to hand in my resignation and enter pastures new. No longer will I be English teacher extraordinaire - tiny crusty crab to so many hungry mouths - but... Ah, no: I shall hold out on you yet. Call it superstition - call it absolute fear of everything going bosoms up and me having to remain in my halogen prison forever: glossing "If the assassination could trammel up the consequence and catch with surcease success..." til I know not where the murderous-minded Macbeth ends and I begin, or defending his lady-wife once again from the charge of monstrosity, all the while rubbing my own boss'-bloodspotted hands and fearing that any day they will uncover his dewy corpse where it lies (under his desk, covered in dried seaweed)...

Yes, call it fear, but I shall not tell. Not just yet anyway. Soon enough, this tired teacher shall be saying goodbye, escaping (hopefully, still - just about) with what is left of her sanity in tact and using her powers for good, not evil.

Though, of course, she is preparing herself for all hell to break loose the moment that she announces that she is. Eek. Better watch this space.

Public holidays and personal journeys

Yesterday saw another public holiday. In my view they are both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, Hong Kong has significantly more public holidays than the UK but, on the other, this is in an effort to compensate for longer working hours. While in England it is almost guaranteed to rain on a bank hol', here at least the sun may shine but it is the inundation of people that one has to cope with. So either way, it seems, it is best to stay indoors, safely and soundly sleeping the day away in bed. However, I generally end up working. For two reasons. First, that I never seem to know when a public holiday is coming up. This is, perhaps, due to their relative frequency. It is not, like Christmas on the Western calendar, a singular, one time event, a holiday that, coming only once a year, casts its long shadow over the over 51 weeks. Inescapable. No, public holidays in Hong Kong are rather like the esoteric minibuses that hurtle single-mindedly through the streets: identifiable only by those initiated into the meaning of their mystical numbers, while their destinations and stops remain a mystery to all else. A form of life not to be trifled with. So I feel about public holidays. They are a local phenomenon that, as an expat, I had best ignore and, as a tutor, (Reason Number Two) I can always rely on at least one eager student (or normal their eager parents) wishing to continue their studies through the holidays. (I have taught on Boxing Day before now, and let me tell you, the attempt to completely erase it from one's consciousness doesn't particularly succeed in making that drab day feel much better. Though, sunshine and 12* does!) So, when I find myself ambushed by the sudden arrival of public holiday, like a portal springing open before me into another world tingling with the promise of liberation and unknown adventure yet mixed with a mild anxiety and apathy of what to do with it and where to go, I lay down my arms. But with the promise held out that the time will come when these accumulated public holidays will be spent consecutively lounging on an empty beach in Bali on my own private hoiday with no bugger about.

It is a dream that is yet to materialise.

So, yesterday was a holiday. It was also a Saturday, so I'm not sure how that works (except that the 11 o'clock search for coffee was rendered more than usually desperate by the closure of all the Pacific Coffee shops in the area, thus forcing a caffeine-deprived teacher to trek further abroad to the nearest accommodating Starbucks - the only time in which the latter has trumped the former, in my humble opinion), and I found myself being rudely awoken by the alarm clock and taking the ferry to Central amidst groups of ecstatically happy-campers all off to start their adventures for the half-term week. I told myself not to complain: only two poor students to teach and then, come 1 o'clock, freedom. And today, as evidence that I am after all becoming a seasoned expat, I had prepared myself, knowing that this moment would come when I would step out of work and into the yawning gulf of Time Off and even looking forward to it (though, perhaps more a symptom of the ennui setting in at work, as I stare down the barrel of the coming two week inundation of returning students and think longingly of the moment - now imminent - when I shall hand in my resignation and leave my small white booth forever!). So, with a slight skip in my step, I headed straight off in the direction of the MTR to Admiralty to join the crowds in the shopping mall and cinema to see a film that I was alone among my friends of wanting to see: Elizabeth Gilbert's book turned movie Eat, Pray, Love, or as one of its detractors described it, the one in which Julia Roberts 'flounces' around Italy. Well, it was all and everything I wanted: the original Pretty Woman (still managing to get away with dating 20-somethings in films without looking like a cougar), glimpses of Europe and sumptuous, carbohydratious (which really should be a correct adjective) Italian cuisine, a lot of soul-searching and a dubious happy-romantic ending. And it got me thinking ...

Do you remember the beginning of Middlemarch? The prelude in which she talks about the young St. Theresa of Avila, walking out hand-in-hand with her brother, to seek martyrdom? Where she speaks of Theresa's "passionate, ideal nature" not being content merely with the stuff of romance novels and "social conquests" but demanding "an epic life" of its own: "..some illimitable satisfaction, some object that would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self"? Yes, I knew you'd remember it. Well, this is what the film (forgive me, I haven't read Gilbert's book) led me to think about: why the story of a woman forced on a painful (and of course, cinematically picturesque!) journey of self-discovery seems to speak (at least to other women) universal? Is it, as Eliot says, that there have been many such Theresas who have felt and wanted so much and "with dim lights and tangled circumstance tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement"? Who like Julia Roberts' character, Liz, have poured themselves into their relationships, children or work, but who despite their efforts never yet seemed to have found their object - their epic: only "a life of mistakes" in which "their struggles seem," not least to themselves, "mere inconsistency and formlessness"? I know I have witnessed this sense of failure and lack of fulfilment in the women around me: sisters, friends, myself. Is Theresa's epic longing, then, the archetype of female experience? Is the frustration and sense of loss that Eliot describes an inevitable consequence of women's desire to, in modern parlance, "have it all"? A somewhat depressing picture, but it is certainly the crisis point at which Gilbert's self/character finds herself.


When we meet Liz at the beginning of the film her friend has just had a baby and we are led to think that it is this that she wants, that her sense of dissatisfaction and her misgivings about her husband are biological and maternal: will he be a good father? does he even want children? However, it soon becomes apparent that the box that Liz keeps under her bed harbours not illicitly bought baby clothes for that anticipated happy arrival but travels books on Bali. Hers, then, is not the commonly conceived yearning of clock-ticking, broody womanhood, not the desire to participate in Life by giving birth to it, but something more abstract, something nameless and unknown - perhaps it is what Eliot refers to as a "vague ideal." An ideal perhaps of happiness, completion and fulfilment and something which many women, happy mothers or wives, may too find themselves at a loss for. For, as her friend points out, having children is like getting a tattoo on your face: "you have to be committed," for it is going to change you outwardly, and inwardly, but is not necessarily going to beautify what was already there. To have a tattoo on your face, in my experience, like piercings, you have to be pretty damn attractive in the first place to carry it off. In the absence of (certainly, children as) a solution and in her desperation to know what this unknown thing is, Liz - not unlike Theresa and, no doubt, the many other Theresas that have come after her - turns, to God and prayer. 


But, if it is not babies that women are all secretly yearning for, is the St. Theresa phenomenon - what  Eliot describes as a passion alternating between "a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood" - truly an issue of gender? I know there are men have felt lost or at some point or another have reached a point of crisis. Eliot's portrayal of the poor plight of women can after all be reasonably explained by the pre-emancipation society in which she was writing. Women, such as herself, might aspire to do good work but were circumscribed by their status as dependant daughters and wives, intellectually and morally inferior, to be only helps (or hinderances) to their men or by channelling their creativity through motherhood. In Gilbert's modern tale, meanwhile, the women are stronger, more independent; it is Liz's ex-husband who is emotionally dependent on her, and the men who are at a loss for the lack of their children. Yet, I cannot help see the single-mindedness with which the men in my life pursue their work: the cliche that men can only think of one thing at a time sometimes appears, sadly, to be only too true. And is what those men who do drift through life experience what Eliot is speaking of here: the vague yet common yearning for something cannot be attained? Is there such a thing a modern male Saint Theresa, "foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed"? Or does Eliot, and Gilbert's book/film speak of such a subject or, at least, state of experience that is essentially female?


Well, before I have Margaret Atwood screaming about a generational feminist backlash, let me say that I grew up firmly in doubt that the common yearning of womanhood existed within me, so repelled was I - and still can be - by the fact of small children and babies; and I was rather secretly scornful of those school friends that went from one relationship straight into the next as if their life depended on the daily mouth to mouth resuscitation of their boyfriends. On the contrary, I grew up on Little Women, with many quite clear and strong ideas about the rights and roles of women: that they should not be reduced to merely sexual or biological objects, but seen as the intellectual and social equals of men. Along with Eliot I would have taken exception to the suggestion that "the blundering lives," of women so described "are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women," that we are too frail-minded to know our wants and work methodically and systematically to achieve them. That we cannot even decide on what to wear, or to know without asking whether our bums look big in this! I would still argue vehemently, along with Mary Ann Evans (aka George Eliot), that (with the exception of myself, who is far and away the most indecisive specimen ever to have stood in the cereal aisle trying to decide between Fruit and Fibre and Weetabix) this is not so. We may appear by the "sameness" of our clothes and coiffure (a word not used nearly enough in modern English speech in my opinion), over which we are constantly lingering and changing our minds, to be generally silly and trifling, but (as the chivalrous Eliot leaps to our defence) women are chock full of more infinite variety than they would outwardly appear. "Feminine incompetence" cannot be gauged by testing whether or not we can count to three, damn it! But, despite our limitless variation, the indefiniteness remains: unseen - within. It is not something that can be measured - perhaps not anything rational (heaven forbid it might be!) - but, rather, it is something felt.


I myself felt - no, in feeling knew - at the tender age of 17, that far from wishing to settle down to life in a small town, I wanted out. However, here already, I can feel my adolescent militant feminism (again) coming unstuck: I wanted 'out' but what did I think I was opting 'in' to? I wanted more, I told myself, but more of what? I would have replied in frustration, something different still without precisely knowing what that meant. And so, I studied and went to university and there acquired a lot more vague ideals and a few concrete ones about what life could - and therefore necessarily would - be. However, in the years since, I admit to having Dorotheaed: to having suffered the same intensity of an abstract desire that Eliot's (and Gilbert's) protagonist does to do or make something of this Life, to participate and almost be absorbed into it, and the attendant frustrations and bitternesses of feeling that I have failed, that it is, perhaps, a task that is doomed to fail because it comes not from a place of reason but emotion. That it is something visceral, something felt, and barely expressible. And it is this fact that has led me, much against feminist ideals and popular thinking, to surmise whether this is not then the experience of the "common yearning of womanhood" - not for babies, but for something that also cries out from the centre of oneself; a place of viscera, the emotions and spirit: a whole world inside of ourselves. And whether therefore Eliot is not, despite writing 150 years ago, entirely right. Is the modern woman search to have it all failing because it is not even about jobs and children, handbags and husbands? Is it not something else entirely that we are reaching for, and in that case what is that? Can it even be found or it is a search without end: unattainable?


Elizabeth Gilbert's message may at first sight seem more optimistic than George Eliot's. However, both heroines, after a first failed marriage into which they poured all their resources of love, hope, kindness, patience, generosity..., find fulfilment first in and through themselves and then with another. Perhaps this is what that yearning desire is for: union - a sense of oneness or completion. Maybe we go wrong by thinking the answer is to love others first, something we in the West are taught is generous and selfless: to give of ourselves to others, like the sacrifice of Christ or the young Theresa of Avila setting out for martyrdom. But, martyrdom. Perhaps it is as a Chinese husband and father told me lately of his most earnest wish for his daughter, that the most important thing is not to seek to love others but to hope to be loved by them, to work to be the kind of person people love. If the lack of agency seems selfish, indulgent, arrogant, (and I confess it did to me at first) let me suggest that loving others can be a selfish act: we love them that they might love us; we say it that they will say it back. But the quest to be loved must surely start with ourselves, not in a calculated or manipulative way, but in the earnest desire to be the person you would love to be and love to love. That you do love. Perhaps it is in the self that we find the everything else that we were searching for, when we realise that we had it - it was right here - all along. It was us.


Well, that is just a little something I'm working on anyway.

Books you may or may not have read by the time you are 21

The Times' list of 'The Books You Must Read Before You're 21' arrived in the post today and as expected it was most disappointing. I mean, The Tale of Tom Kitten? Well, sure, I think most of us can hold our hands up and admit that we have (probably) read or been read this delightful story, but as a 'must read before you're 21'?!! More like, before you are old enough to be beaten up at school for reading stories of animals dressed in jerkins and petticoats and mop-caps, surely?! On the other end of the scale, of course, were great novels such as Catch 22. But while I would definitely recommend this to anyone, and currently have one of my caustic teenagers delighting in it, I would not assume to debar those of age from a thorough enjoyment of it. So why, dear The Times, the tender age of 21? Is is just to make your readers feel old and past it before their time? Well, Sebastian Faulks, that literary object of idolatry to my former adolescent self - I mean, who has read Birdsong and not wanted to go to bed with the author? (though, of course, I did not say that to my own English teacher at the time who'd recommended it to our class. No, I was still far too deeply blushed by its awakening to countenance admitting to that!) - answered for the choice when he said his entry, Orwell's essays I believe, marked an important step in his coming of to maturity. And yes, I am sure we all have books that we read at one time or another and which seemed to speak just to us, or through which we fell from innocence and grew into the wise and wonderful (bitter and bitten) beings we are today, so that we cannot but look back on those books with the fondness and gratitude of nostalgia. But why, oh why, does The Times imagine that our beloved authors' choices are going to fit with our own or should be laid down for the edification of a young Great Britain? Surely, if anything such a list shows it is the subjectivity with which we - particularly as adolescents - enter the covers of a book, as between the sheets of a some-time lover. So, while I rather hate to have to admit it, I think that Nigella Lawson (that genius of, not so much the art of cooking as of eating - or, as in her last show, of opening jars from Waitrose ...and eating) was right: the books we read before we are 21 are not books that cannot be read at any time thereafter by the common reader, but books which cannot be read again by ourselves. For then those first blushes have already faded and died - that first awakening to a new knowledge or vision of ourselves and the world already dozed off into a middle age ennui - and to go back and read it again would be, to paraphrase Larkin, to cry, lamely admitting how they had touched you then but could not now.

So, in short: no, there was no Catcher in the Rye on this list, no Little Women, Jane Eyre... I am being slightly ironic (in case it wasn't apparent), mainly at myself for these are, as far as I can remember, about all I was reading around the age of 16 - apart of course from all of Sebastian Faulks (until I saw this photograph and learnt that he had a wife and kids, which spoilt the fantasy somewhat). So, what are the stereotypical bildungsroman of Western Literature? The great formation novels in which the character moves from childhood through adversity to adulthood? David Copperfield, Wikipedia suggests. Sure. Great Expectations. Yes. Dickens would feature a lot, wouldn't he? But then there's Anne of Green Gables and Lord of the Rings? Even hobbitsies go through adversity, so Tolkein tells us; and terribly annoying little Polly Annas, though their suffering is less our own than Frodo's and Sam's as it turns out. (I tried to read Anne again recently, for a student you understand, and it managed to quite crush my nostalgic attachment to it, thus proving Nigella right.) And there are the books that in all likelihood we all made to grow up with at school, such as To Kill a Mockingbird - possibly killed by a former pupil's inane annotations or another's rebellious graffiti. But then there are truly great coming of age novels we discover some time later or by ourselves, such as - for me - Sons and Lovers, and even I would hazard to say Jacob's Room (though its less coming of age than a coming to death, without meaning to spoil it for the as yet unacquainted reader). You may, however, beg to differ, or decide that I cannot nearly have grown up enough yet with such a dearth of reading material. In which case I make a plea for you to add your own choices to the list that we may grow wonderful and wise and short-sighted through too much night-reading together.

However, when all is said and done, it must be admitted that lists - and particularly book lists, as Austen's Emma knows only too well - may be rather exciting in theory but can be pretty hopeless in practise. I am a great list maker myself: shopping lists, to do lists (I have one hideous one at the moment telling me the names of all 40 students I must write reports for and, which having diligently compiled and thoroughly depressed myself with the inauguration of the existence of The List, remains very much in the imperative), bills-to-pay lists.... and most recently pros-and-cons-in-my-continued-search-for-a-new-job-list. Pro: more money. Con: longer hours. Pro: more responsibility. Con: less freedom. Pro: swanky office. Con: commercial sell-out. Pro: nice people. Con: Americans. And so it goes on. Utterly hopeless. Or at, least, my lists are. Other people's lists, on the other hand, however objectionable at least force your opinionated (and, yes, my literarily snobbish) hand (but..): The Tale of Tom Kitten?! Why not go all out and plumb for Where's Wally?!!!

I am, though, at least grateful to my friend for sending the Saturday Review pages of The Times all the way out to Hong Kong, which is something of a critical literary, and literary critical, desert where the South China Morning Post top ten bestsellers list (comprising mainly books-to-screen) compares shamefully with the New York Times', making one wonder how they can even face to draw the comparison. Ah, sigh. No, it's no good: Sunday Review newspapers are a thing of my English past when the morning unfolded into the afternoon broadsheet and glossy supplement at a time. But in the absence of a healthy supply of reading fodder - for it is not just the Review sections that seem a distant memory but also bookshops and libraries in which people are not slumped asleep or merely picking up management self-help books between meetings - in the absence of these, the list of books to read gets happily longer and longer. And long may it do so.

How (probably not) to become an English teacher

I first came to Hong Kong four years ago, straight after finishing my undergraduate degree, and for the same reason, I suppose, that most 18-21 year olds find themselves doing so: I had no idea what else to do, and desperately wanted a break and an adventure after being cooped up in education for so long. So I signed up to teach English to kindergarten children in the New Territories. And consequently hated it.

Well, no, that is not entirely true. From this vantage I can look back with some fondness and a degree of partiality at the times spent singing, clapping and playing games with two-year olds; at living on the 27th floor of a 40 story building in a shoe box with barred windows, overlooking a fishing village turned concrete jungle; and the live frogs, fowl and seafood in the wet market below, the nonchalant butcher taking his cleaver to them with one hand while drawing on his cigarette with another. I can recall calmly the complete sense of conspicuousness and alienation at being the only gweilos (literally translated as 'white ghosts' ) in that sprawling mass of tower blocks; the first week in the kindergarten, making the children cry and being touched and stroked as if to make sure I was real, and ever after being stared at on buses and trains and misunderstood in the supermarket, or just ignored in the 7/11, while in McDonalds always being given Chicken Nuggets when asking, in your best Cantonese, for Iced Lemon Tea; and never being able to find your way back out of the shopping plaza as the increasing sense of panic sets in that, like Hansel and Gretel, you'll never find your way home out of the forest alive.

So, now when I hear people blithely speak of 'culture shock' I nod and smile and think 'you have no idea.'

Truly having had enough, I left after four months, went home, got several, various jobs and was about to embark on postgraduate studies when I realised, as so often happens, that I didn't have a penny to pay for it; and so, ironically (I guess), found myself coming all he way back to take up a job in Central, Hong Kong, teaching English Literature and Language to international school students. A far cry from my previous teaching experience, but (strangely) the same problem remained of trying to order cold lemony beverages in MacDonalds and always being given something else. Something about that drink they just don't want - or expect you to want - to have.

Now, I remember the day that I arrived in HK (again) vividly. It happened shortly after BA tried to poison me with one of their revolting breakfast omelettes, dripping with condensation and which, at 4pm local time, was never going to sit right, that I stepped off the plane and straight into a wall of August heat. But if that made it difficult to breathe, like wading through a warm bath, it was nothing compared to the slow-burning furnace of latent hostility that was awaiting me. For, apparently moments prior to my arrival, my new employers had just broken up, thus ending a four year romance and putting their business relationship too firmly on the rocks. And, as if this - obviously not quite spelled out to me by either of them until some days, or possibly weeks (I forget quite), in - as if this wasn't bad enough, I was staying with the male half of that once-upon-a-time partnership and could not for the life of me understand why I seemed to be the object of the female's jealousy and rage. Was it just me? Was I making it up? But she seems so nice and they keep saying - over the many dinners we endured together during those first few weeks as I flat hunted and settled into new life, new job -  how pleased they are to have me there.

Well, looking back it can't have been a bundle of laughs for them; but if she had her reasons to resent me sleeping every night on the sofa of her only-just ex-boyfriend, then I can't say I was too pleased about it either. Sharing a sofa with two pug dogs in hot and humid weather in a room in which the A/C is timed to go off just as jet-lag is kicking in, and waking up sweaty and covered in hair not your own is, needless to say, not much fun. But one person, I know, had real reason to be grateful for my arrival and that was my male boss, host and owner of pugs: Don Quixote, who had, up until I was drafted in, been English teacher to the poor unfortunate students in his care. And I say poor unfortunates, for The Don, you see, did - or I should say, does, for it is not a fact that has undergone much change over the years - not read. I do not doubt that he can read, though there is no actual evidence to prove this conclusively, but just that.... as he says, when there has been a film made of it, and someone's kindly Sparknoted it, why would you want to waste your time on the book? Well, as an English student who was made to read Spenser's The Faerie Queene one summer and all of Shakespeare the next, I can quite sympathise that reading takes time. Unless you're Stephen Fry, it does not happen by osmosis and usually requires slightly more than 90 minutes concentration over popcorn and diet coke. For example, if one Shakespeare play takes a company of actors three hours to enact, how long would 37 plays take one person to read? But I leave the maths to you. As to the rest...Never to have read Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House ... Not even to have heard of Marlowe? It is best not to go there. Anger boils, rage seethes....The thought of teaching a book you've never read....! Deep breaths. Well, it'll be okay. You're here now.

So I came on board, moved out of Quixote's as quickly as I could into my own apartment over-looking the sea, joined the gym and became heavily invested in all forms of yogic breathing to counter-act the daily doses of attention deficient and hyper activity to be found in our office, not to mention inanity - and that was just my boss. Favourite Donnisms, of just those first few weeks, include the day he introduced me to his gym, Fitness First, gave me a guided tour and was just about to leave me to relax over my first workout when I felt him lingering outside the female changing room doors, not quite wanting, it seemed, to move off. So I lingered too for those awkward few seconds until he must have finally summoned up the courage or found the right words to say in a leaned in whisper: "Just to warn you: There might be naked ladies in there." And with that, left me standing there speechless, hardly daring to laugh. Was he being serious? Was he joking? Was he getting off on the idea or showing real concern about an English girl's modesty? Well, I guess I will never know for sure, but evidence collated in the months and years since point to the former. But, if that was funny, it was nothing compared to the time he offered to bring into work an old pair of swimming goggles for me to use at the plush rooftop pool of the Sheraton Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. I thought it was very kind and generous of him and was looking forward greatly to getting my stroke back up to speed under the water, when I came into work to find an enormous snorkelling mask on my desk. Bright florescent green rubber and thick, barely see-through lens. I held them aloft with a loud laugh, exclaiming something along the lines of 'what the f*ck are these?' To which my female boss turned round and replied in dead-pan, matter of fact earnestness, 'Don said you wanted goggles for swimming.'  Err, well, yes, but.... did he really think they were what I'd had in mind? and was I really going to offend him by giving them back? Well, give them back I certainly did. I could not with a straight face even pretend that they were anything but ridiculous, even though I appeared to be the only one to think so. After that curious incident, I never did get around to buying proper goggles - nor have I to this date - but I do occasionally look with interest at the eyewear of those other bathers in The Sheraton pool and I can assure you I have seen some strange sights, including most recently a man in wetsuit and rubber gloves resembling Toad of Toad Hall doing aquatic exercises while perving on my sister; but never have I seen any of those fit, burnished, athletic Hong Kong species swimming breast stroke while wearing snorkelling gear. I just don't think, even amongst the most earnest of swimmers, it would be done. Enormous frog-type gloves, perhaps. Snorkelling masks, no.

But despite this, and a host of ever-increasingly bizarre and inane encounters, I found myself arriving back in Hong Kong for the third time earlier this year to, once again, take up residence at their school, but this time as English Teacher Number Two. I must say the presence of just one other quiet, book-reading, ever so slightly eye-brow raising English accomplice - a fellow conspirator, not least in detecting and drawing out irony wherever it lurks - makes life a little more bearable. But not so much so that I have not been casting about for other jobs. I tell this to you now, of course, in the strictest of secrecy: I am an English teacher on a great escape, planning a jail-break. My success or failure, however, is yet to be seen... but herein lies, in my experience, how best to be an English teacher: harbour rebellion in the bosom of your soul and nurture it in others - wherever you may find it.

An English Girl in a Chinese World??

Two objections could be made to the title of this blog. As with most titles, it is only a working title. A working title for a work in progress. But lest I be accused of being deceitful or delusion, let me be the first to raise and, I hope, answer them now.

Firstly, let me introduce where I live. I live in Discovery Bay, an expat enclave on the outlaying island of Lantau - one of the largest islands and where, as anyone who's landed here recently will know, the new airport was built to the north, directly in the sea. Well, Discovery Bay is to be found on the south east of Lantau, a mere 20-30 minute ferry ride from Central but - in all other senses - about as far away from China as you can get. Yes, I may work in, as I have heard it disparagingly referred to as, the 'ghetto' of Hong Kong (though I hardly think it qualifies as that!), but I live in its strict antithesis. Not a birdcage or temple in sight, barely even a cockroach (though when they do appear they seem all the more threatening and alien for that). No. Instead, we have electric powered golf buggies on the traffic-free roads, a beach whose sand was imported some time back in the 70s and which has since been mostly washed back to wherever it started, and Western coffee shops, bars and restaurants serving pizza, beer and frozen yoghurt. Palm trees line our streets, ghekos remain largely (though not entirely) outside, and children and very tiny dogs the size of rats (but generally as well-dressed as the children) roam free. In fact, our expat commune - a veritable Babel, it's host to so many languages! - is so child-friendly it is often referred to as Delivery Bay, the idea being that people come here to spawn and rear their darling delinquents.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like it just fine. When people ask why on earth a single young female as myself lives here I can honestly reply that the air is within World Health Organisation accepted levels; that I can see sea and mountains and sky out of my windows (and yes, I reply, as they coo in wonder, I actually have windows - floor to ceiling no less!); that I am blessed with a bath I can lie down in (rather than merely a shower over my lavatory); and what is for the impecunious teacher very important, the rent is really quite low. So I have a number of reasons to be grateful for not living totally in a Chinese world, for being allowed to come home at night to walk under the Narnia-esque street lamps lining pedestrian pavements under the (rarely in Hong Kong glimpsed) stars and watch the airplanes take off from behind the mountains as I fall asleep in bed. However, that is not to say that I have not encountered the occasional twinge of unreality that attends such a place: the Wisteria Lane-Stepford Wives-Twilight Zone effect. But, once I realised what DB (to give it its term of endearment) reminded me of, this feeling of latent anxiety magically subsided. It was that it took me back to my days as a college student working in a theme park in my home county of Staffordshire; of the long hot summer as a 17 year old when I spent day after day there without a care in the world, hanging out with friends and boyfriend, earning more money than I had time or inclination to spend, and never thinking life would ever get any more complicated than that. Well, clearly I was wrong (as just returning to A-Levels that September revealed!), but that sense of theme park wonderland is what Discovery Bay exudes: all the fun and fantasy of the fair without any of the substance. More or less.

So that, I hope, is the first disclaimer explained. The second refers not to me being English for, while my accent and intonation changes with the proverbial wind - whether I am talking to my Aussie neighbours, or HK students, or Oxford-English friends - I can assure you I am White British and have the passport to prove it. No, it refers more to that quaint use of 'girl.' For while it is most uncouth to ask a woman's age and most undignified ever to answer, I do confess that when a friend recently told me about The Times' list of 'Books you should have read before you're 21' he was quite right to point out that it is 'a bit late for you,' but rather obliging in offering to send it anyway. (Tact isn't his strongest point, but generosity I suppose is.) So, we shall see when it finally gets here just how behind in my age I really am. But, guessing from the number of times, while on holiday in the UK last year with my mother, I kept getting taken for a child and charged entrance fees accordingly (if only my mother had gone along with it quietly we could've saved a fortune!) and the fact that I still now (left to my own more dishonest devices) manage to get away with a child's ticket to work every day on the ferry (thus leaving me with some money for alcohol each month out of my measly wages), I am guessing about ten years. I mean, sure it could be to do with the fact that I am usually to be seen with GCSE textbooks or children's books tucked under my arm, or the fact that the hemline of my skirts has sufficiently shortened since moving to a warmer climate; or it could be to do with the amount of time I spend with my head somewhere between my legs - backward bends, according to my yoga teacher, being particularly good for extending one's life expectancy and youthful good looks - I don't know. But when they say that you are as old as you feel, I often think that it must be this because for better or worse, I cannot feel how old I really am, by which I mean I cannot actually believe it when I tell others. As when I first went for coffee with my new neighbour and she, clearly uncertain, asked. The silence that followed could've added a few years to both our lives before I would've been able to tell her the answer. I simply did not know off the top of my head and had to revert to calculating it. And now you will think that I am ancient - such an age as cannot be arrived at but by the most complex mathematical workings. So I shall tell you I am 25: old enough to know my age, but not quite old enough to feel it.

So maybe not exactly an English girl in a totally Chinese world, but not too far from the truth either, as I shall uncover.

Hello Missie-ah

"Hello Missie-ah," comes the welcome call from the Saint Honore bakery as I stop off on my way to, from or in between work. Since I left and, then, returned they've moved shops, from near our old office to now near to our new one. Were they following us? Perhaps. Well, lucky for me, as their raisin buns are about the only food to be had in the vacinity that an English speaking vegetarian can trust. Otherwise its a plate of green vegetables (big enough for a whole family to share), and that is rather hard to eat on the run.

I am an English teacher, or rather, tutor. And our office is a small school in a tall thin office building in, what is just about, Sheung Wan. Hong Kong. You could pretend that we were in Central, as the street name suggests, but really - by proximity to the MTR station and the presence of street hawkers, infrequency of coffee shops and number of minibus stops (whose destinations are only fathomable to those patrons of the city) - we are Sheung Wan. For that, however, I am glad. No longer are we located above McDonalds under the shadow of IFC; no longer do I have to bear with my students bringing burgers, fries and milkshakes to their lessons - or rather, having them brought up to them by their helpers. No. The only food consumed in lessons these days is the occasional piece of seaweed obligingly handed out by my sycophantic boss, Sir Don. Or Don Quixote, as I like to think of him.

So, I frequent these streets regularly, passing by the alleyways that harbour food, clothes and antique market vendors; I buy freshly squeezed juice on the street for $10, and pay $50 to get my heels fixed from frequently getting caught in the cracks in the paving. Yet I get approached by the same guys trying to sell women's tailoring, copy handbags and fake watches, and (as the other day) I get bumped by surprising hard shouldered, aged Chinese men starring accusingly at you for being in their way. Their street. Their city. And of course, they are right, so I apologise - in English, and thus do nothing to lessen their disdain.

But up in my hallogenous booth - a tiny desk in an open-sided white cube - I discourse (on a good day) on Montaigne, Orwell, Atwood and Heaney with fresh faced, open-eyed youngsters who seem more Western than I am (their accents being somewhat geographically left of UK, but where in the US it would be hard to pin down: somewhere between CSI and Hannah Montana one supposes) - and, for a short while at least, I am at home.