Final Grades and World Cup Fever

Hello whoever it is that is reading this blog:

From the comments section it seems only a few spammers from China are on the site. So I have now completed two semesters worth of teaching both Spoken English and Introductory Business at Renmin University in Beijing, China. I teach basic English to Doctoral students, which is probably the equivalent of a third-grade English class in the United States. Secondly, I teach an elective course to mostly Undergraduate Business majors that covers: Marketing, Organizational Behavior, Finance, Accounting, and Economics. Therefore, I get to at least salvage a little bit of use from the MBA Degree I recently completed at Pepperdine.

My Doctoral Students are between the ages of 25-40. For those of them who don't already have English names, I give them a list of suggestions which are equal parts ridiculous and culturally-insensitive. Most of the names I have recommended come from "bros" that I went to school with at USC, as those days of glory are still remembered fondly, even though I'm pretty sure due to over a decade of debauchery I have managed to erase a good 90% of these memories. I would bet dollars to donuts that my class is the only one on the continent where Chinese students proudly call themselves: Mauricio, Maradona, Caesar, Grouse, and the list goes on and on. Caesar Orozco you should be proud, in just one year of teaching I already have compiled five future leaders of the country who are enthusiastically calling themselves Caesar. When I say leaders of the country I am partially serious, as the university I teach at is the People's University and it is a hard-core government talent pool. I would say that 95% of my students are active party members, and many are looking to make it big in politics. Hopefully, my association with them will buy me out of any future logjams that I'm likely to find myself in if I continue living in the Orient.

My elective business course is for Undergraduates, and this last semester all of the students in my class were Freshmen who at the tender age of eighteen and nineteen were forced to deal with my reign of terror. They speak English better than some of my friends, and they eat, sleep, and drink homework. Most of them have between 25-30 hours of class a week, and spend another fifty hours doing homework. Sometimes I get up early on Saturday morning to get breakfast and will walk past the library that looks more like a line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. I don't know what I was doing at 8AM on Saturday when I was a Freshmen at USC, but I am fairly certain that I wasn't waiting for the library to open. It has been much more rewarding to teach this elective course as these students listen to everything I saw as if I was Moses.

I have also instituted an extremely effective policy for combating tardiness...I make them sing. I have been using this incredibly hilarious technique more for my own personal amusement than anything else, as there is nothing like an embarrassed bespectacled Chinese student with a teddy-bear sweater singing "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" (I have printed out a copy and keep it in my binder at all times). Speaking of teddy-bears, if Beijing is the worst dressed city in the world (and it is) then Renmin University is its epicenter of cross-dressing. "Teeny-Weeny" is a teddy-bear that a good half of the girls are wearing on their shirts on any given day, and this goes all the way up from Freshmen to Doctoral students. When I ask these girls why it is they love "Teeny-Weeny", there answers are always somewhere along the lines of: "every woman loves a teddy-bear." LOL

To make the dress code even more outlandish, Chinese women constantly walk around with umbrellas whenever it is even moderately warm. When I ask them why they do this they almost always say: "I don't want to be black." Which although culturally insensitive, is the way that women want to look around here, because dating back to the old days of China having lighter skin meant that you were upper-class as you didn't work in the fields. Some of my Chinese students literally have lighter skin than I do. Those women who don't wear "Teeny-Weeny" apparel are likely sporting some ridiculous American phrase in big block letters on their clothes that 9 out of 10 times does not make sense, as whoever is selling these foreign shirts must be even more of a sarcastic bastard than I am. My personal favorite is: "A surfer dreams is wet."

Now that the World Cup has begun I have started mingling more with the locals around here. Since I am abot as lazy as a crippled panda, I have found the very closest restaurant/bar on campus and made it my home away from home. I would much rather go to some of the classier spots around town, but I can walk to this place in five minutes and they reserve a table for me as I come in EVERY NIGHT. I love the World Cup, more than any other sporting event, and add a little bit of gambling and you have absolute magic. The "Water Stone Cafe" got themselves a slide projector; rearranged the seating chart; and now it is the place to be. Out of a good 50-100 people on any night, I am by far the loudest, most annoying, and whitest. To be as politically incorrect as humanly possible, I have chosen to root like crazy against all teams from the continent of Asia. South Koreans, North Koreans, and Japanese, all would love nothing more than to take a baseball bat to my watermelon-sized head...and I don't disagree with them for feeling the way that they do...it's a total dick move.

Nevertheless, the South Africans most definitely hate me the most. During the first match I chose to root for Mexico against South Africa, even though there was a posse of heavily-muscled Africans who let it be known that they were not a fan of my antics. After a little bit of liquid courage I became louder, and progressively more annoying, and as my friend Blake Dirickson would say I was "that guy". When Mexico finally did score I was so excited that I did some sort of a dancing jig that I combined with a fist pump, and after getting yelled at by the Africans I blasted them with the double-barrel middle finger salute. Fortunately, I managed to get out of the bar alive, but I have followed up these antics with subsequent debacles of American travel lore that give our kind a bad reputation in virtually every country we Americans step foot in. However, due to the fact that I am a paying customer and the staff that works there actually like me (I can be charming on very occasional occasions), when I walk into the bar now: a cold beer is poured for me and placed at my table without a word; a bevy of bespectacled, albino-skinned, vampire-fanged Chinese women smile and wave at me; and different crews of Africans, Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese all point and stare as if they have just locked eyes with Lucifer himself. Damn it feels good to be a gangster.

Anyways, that's it for now. I gotta finish grading Final Exams and then submit grades by tomorrow. I hate grading papers worse than, well I can't think of anything worse but I'm sure that there is something worse. Hope all is well back in the States and that USA takes down Algeria in there next World Cup. Tonight is Portugal vs. North Korea, and even though I have a date with a voluptuous Russian girl named Liliya who I managed to convince that the Waterstone Cafe is a wonderful establishment; I still plan on antagonizing all supporters of North Korea and probably everyone else.

go get em' Portugal,

"That Guy"

Return to Blogging

Hello everyone,

It has been a long time since I last blogged. There are two reasons for this:

1. The Chinese government placed a firewall on Gmail Blogger, along with Facebook, Youtube, Hulu, and other sites.
2. I am now an employee of the Chinese government and was reluctant to break protocol.
   

Nevertheless, after a long self-imposed exile I have decided to return to the wonderful world of blogging. I would like to thank the fine folks of Astrill for hooking me up with an American VPN that allows me full access of all blocked websites in order to climb the "Great Internet Wall of China".

So much has happened in the last eighteen months, so I'm not going to bore you with all the details. I graduated from B-School at Pepperdine; had knee surgery AGAIN after tearing another ligament in my knee; moved to China for what I thought would be a vacation; accepted a job at Renmin University (The third-ranked university in the capital city) teaching Business English and an elective Business course; and now I am an employee of the Chinese government and a well-respected member of the Chinese community. WTF....WTF, indeed!

I live inside the campus walls of Renmin University (The People's University), and it is the weirdest place on Earth. I think they must have messed up my housing assignment because instead of moving me into a cozy building with fellow like-minded Westerners I was placed in a building that looks like it was built one-thousand years ago. The university used to have a deal where if teachers were employed by the school for a certain number of years, then in return they would give them free housing fo' life. So all of my neighbors are ancient Chinamen whose average age is 164. In the building I am living in there is only one other apartment with younger people (not that I am that young), and nobody speaks more than a few words of English. My apartment is O.K., with a: living room, bathroom (about the size of a tiny closet), bedroom, and kitchen. However, the bathroom is designed so that the shower head and the toilet are facing each other...I HATE IT! Also, whoever lives in the apartment next to mine must has a piano; and this mystery person plays the piano all day, and all night, and is most definitely the worst piano player on the planet. It's like a blind drunk man has been forced to play piano as many hours as humanly possible or he will be eaten by a dragon, and I am the one who must face his wrath. If I ever get a chance, I'm taking a baseball bat to the piano.

There is a courtyard, where an old Chinese woman has created "Cat City". Since the old Chinese are the definition of Old Skool, they have taken over all of the areas in between apartments that in most societies would be used by the whole instead of the few. It is like I'm living on gang turf, and a tough bunch of rough senior Chinese have become the equivalent of the Crips and the Bloods combined. Anyways, this woman has taken every stray board she could find to create a shanty town for stray cats, all together there are twelve cats in "Cat City" and their numbers are growing. There are Chinese men playing Chinese checkers all day long; Chinese doing their laundry outsideby hand; Chinese playing badminton from the early morning until the night, and Chinese people who look at me as if they have seen a ghost; so in a nutshell you could say I don't exactly fit in around here.

The only group of other young people in my building are these five Archaelogy major girls who live in the apartment upstairs and dance to Lady Gaga music sometimes until late at night. This would be a lot funnier if we didn't share a common wall, and it makes life more than difficult when I hear their pit-pattering feed dancing to the beat at the midnight hour. A few nights ago a piece of the wall celing actually broke and hit me in the head while I was sleeping...not cool. One of the girls bought a rabbit about a month ago from a street peddler and it had been living in a cage not to far away from cat city in the courtyard area. Why she didn't move it into the safer confines of their apartment I still don't really understand, but the rabbit seemed to be a huge hit with the old fogie community that domintes the streets in my hood. Anyways, the girls (five of them live in the same size apartment as me) grew extremely attached to the rabbit, and for a rabbit this white furball appeared to be living a nice existence. This last Friday night I went out to dinner with some friends and around eight P.M. I walked by the rabbit cage and saw this spooky ancient Chinaman with less teeth than I have fingers staring at the rabbit like he either wanted to: make love to the rabbit, or eat the rabbit. At the time I didn't think much of it but when I woke up the next morning the rabbit was gone. I called the girls and they said that they were told by one of the neighbors at exactly 8:15 P.M. last night that the rabbit was not in the cage, and by simple process of elimination I deduced that this old Chinaman must have taken the rabbit to his room for either a one-night stand or to to take a hot bath in a boiling cauldron or water

The girls were sad at first but not manic as they had assumed that the rabbit must have escaped his cage and would come back soon. I explained to them that I was pretty sure this old Chinese fellow I had seen last night had taken the rabbit, and that he most definitely ATE the rabbit. I am such an idiot! For the last 48 hours the five girls have been crying non-stop. Their screaming, wailing, and other random extremely loud acts of sadness have made it so that I have not slept more than a few hours for the last two days. If I see that Chinaman who ate the rabbit I am going to punch him in the face.

I think that's enough blogging for now, but next time I will get into the magnificent mockery I have made of the Chinese educational system. I have taken my role of teacher and designed it around the principle that "The teacher is always right". Therefore, I've been running the show like a young dictator in his prime and have become extremely fond of the omnipotent powers that I now possess. It's way better than invisibility. The students never question me and do exactly as I say. For those students that don't already have English names, I have ruled that it is the teacher's job to also give them American names. In a tribute to many of my friends from the United States I have put together quite an exotic assortment of rather unusual named students. Some people collect stamps, I collect weird names for Chinese students, so far I have: Caesar (four times over), Mauricio, Georgie, Smokey, Grouse, Maradona, Esperanza, and many, many more. I just can't imagine that there are a lot of Chinese people these days calling themselves Mauricio. I also have developed a rather effective policy towards coming to class late...public embarrassment. I make any student who comes in late sing a song of my choosing. I love it when they tell me that they hate to sing, as this is exactly the answer I am looking for.
That's it for now, next time I'll post some pictures of my students and discuss some of the funnier stories I have experienced as a teacher/white devil. The irony is that the university thinks I am a kind and wonderful man and have already offered me a contract extension complete with more money and power.

It's good to be back,
Professor Atkinson