The Beginning of the End, Part One

It was December 27, 2012. Fashion Plate was craving another power play, she’s got a huge appetite for it. Her lust for control, on this dark and cold day was the beginning of the end of my time at the Shane English School in Li Yang, China.

She came into the office at 7:30 p.m that night, her high heels betraying her mood with their serious click, click, click on the faux wood floor. Her 5 foot 3 inch frame stood tall, showing the office staff all the might packed into her tiny body.

The lady has style, you have to give her that.

With her proudest and most defiant voice she made this proclamation:

一月份的假期被取消。我们不会关闭了五天。我希望你是一个工作的日子里，除了星期一和星期二，我们有，我会给然后作为你的新年假期前的星期日。这是符合政府的需求，你有三天假，所以不要以为抱怨。我们的春节假期从2月9日。

I watched the expressions on the faces around me, all were shocked, unhappy; trying not show any emotion to betray their distress.

We stared at one another after the door closed behind her. I wondered if someone had died.

“What did she say,” I asked, when I couldn’t wait a second longer.

“Our January vacation is canceled,” said someone from behind their cubicle.

Chinese Grandmother sat in the back of the office with his head down.

“What’s going on,” I asked him. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either,” he said, and looked away.

This man is deeply afraid of controversy and he will stop at nothing to avoid it. He is supposed to be the Academic Director. He is supposed to handle all negotiations with the staff and Fashion Plate – but he doesn’t, and he won’t.

All of the staff stared at him, but he continued averting our gaze.

This moment in time was the end of negotiations I had begun in the beginning of December in an effort to be able to travel during both holidays. All Shane School employees in China get their vacation schedule one year in advance – except us. This has been true since the school opened. It makes the Home Office in Shanghai crazy because our school will rarely listen to their instruction or follow franchise regulations.

The Home Office was to be closed for nine days during the mandatory vacation over January 1, 2013. All our employees had been asking for many days when we would be closing. About a week before this announcement, it was finally decided we would be closed for five days. It wasn’t the nine that we all hoped for, but we were pleased to know when we could finally schedule plans for our days off.

Some of the staff were visiting relatives, one was going to be a bridesmaid in a wedding. I had reservations in Suzhou to see the beautiful ancient canals and the silk museums as Suzhou is the city where silk was invented thousands of years ago. I was excited. These small trips and holidays are not only meaningful to me in terms of my love for all things historical; it means getting away from it all, adventuring, learning, relaxing in a new environment. Travel feeds me in a way that nothing else does.

The Chinese government says that all businesses must be closed for at least three days around the time of January first. Though this nation celebrates their New Year on the lunar calendar, many businesses must close their financial books as the rest of the world does on January first.

I work with many accountants in my beginners, advanced and expert Business English classes.   They had all been working six, some of them seven days a week leading up to the first of January. True to the Chinese way of thinking about personal betterment, the majority of them still attended my class even though they weren’t able to see their children while working all these hours for so many weeks in a row.

Obviously businesses could decide to be closed longer, but at least three days off is compulsory. If the government did not insist they close their doors once in a while, workers, especially in the factories would never get a holiday or a well-earned break. There are no labor unions here to speak to the needs of the workers as the government takes that role.

I have a friend from the USA who wanted to meet me in Thailand during the Spring Festival Holiday in February.   I was asking that the school let me know when the January and February holidays were scheduled so that we could purchase airline tickets. This didn’t seem an unreasonable request, but Ms. Fashion Plate has a difficult time making decisions. During the Fall holiday, Fashion Plate didn’t decide when we would be off until two days before the actual holiday closure. None of us were able to make plans.

In China, one cannot make reservations to travel until 18 days before any national holiday so that everyone has the opportunity to purchase tickets at the same time. Most airlines and all the trains are State run. With only two days before the holiday, there wasn’t an air or train reservation to be had to anywhere inside or outside China, and the only bus ticket I could purchase was to Shanghai. I had gotten the last seat on the bus.

I had only been at the school for a few weeks, so I was willing to take the ticket to Shanghai and be glad for it. Chinese Grandmother assured me that the next time I would be able to travel was in January and I could start making plans for at least a five-day holiday. The time after that would be a longer break, maybe even 14 days in February around Spring Festival during Chinese New Year.

I came to China to work and to travel, so I took his advice seriously and began looking at hotels in Suzhou. In December I had wanted to book my hotel since the same situation would arise when we were closer to the holiday and I wanted to be sure I had a room ready for me. I had barely been able to find a room in Shanghai in September and wanted to beat the rush.

Recently,Grandmother assured me that I would have a five-day holiday and I went ahead and booked the room. Negotiations continued about the Spring Holiday vacation schedule. Once again Ms. Fashion Plate couldn’t seem to make up her mind, but I was grateful to know I could travel in January.

Her value of the mighty yuan was what was in control. She thought that if we stayed open longer, the children’s lessons would run out sooner and then they would need to pay for more. She has always been very open about this fact.

The parents, though not happy, were willing to have children miss some lessons, they just wanted to know when we would be closing because they wanted to take a family vacation, like every family in China. Parents began to ask me and the other teacher in the beginning of December when the holiday would take place for the school in January, giving me even more reason to continue the discussion with those in charge.

By the end of December, having just heard when the January holiday was scheduled, they began asking about the February holiday. The date for making reservations was coming up and they wanted to get a jump on the nation, just like everyone else.

Each time they asked me, I would smile sweetly and bring them to Fashion Plate’s door where she would smile sweetly and put them off again.  I continued to ask Chinese Grandmother about the dates, but he put me off as well and suggested that I ask Fashion Plate.  It was the classic run around.

Eventually, the month of December flew by and I still didn’t have an answer about the February holiday. My friend canceled her willingness to come to visit me in Thailand on December 26^th because I couldn’t seem to get an answer on any potential dates from the school. Her deadline for applying to her job for those days off had passed. I was disappointed and told Grandmother and Fashion Plate. They smiled sweetly again in a tiny dose of empathy, but they still didn’t make up their minds.

Because Ms. Fashion Plate didn’t want to close the school longer than she deemed necessary, and Chinese Grandmother didn’t dare speak up to Fashion Plate, Grandmother began trying to come up with an alternative compromise plan. I doubt he had her blessing.

After proposing several options that the staff dismissed out of hand, he suggested that perhaps we could work six days a week for first three weeks in January and that would give us the ability to close the school on February 4 and not reopen until February 15^th. This was agreeable to Fashion Plate because she could push that many more lessons through before the holiday closing. A six-day work week was a dream come true for her.

The Chinese staff was against this idea. It didn’t seem worth it to them to work that hard for almost a full month. They knew that Ms. Fashion Plate can’t be trusted. She would likely call them in during their vacation anyway, threaten them with their jobs if they didn’t show and make them come in to school during their break. This had happened many times before. Whoa be to the employee who refused her.

I was not supporting the working a six-day week plan as it is against my contract with the school which says I must have two days off per week. The Chinese are famous for not following contracts, and so I just waited to see what would happen next.

Nick, the other foreign teacher spoke with me first, and finally went to Chinese Grandmother and told him that he would be happy to work six days a week as that was the school’s right, but if foreign teachers were not given the two days off per week, they would have to be paid time and a half per our contract.

We decided he should be the one to tell Grandmother because he hadn’t bothered him yet about asking for vacation dates. We take turns playing good cop, bad cop to assist our mutual causes.

Chinese grandmother told Ms. Fashion Plate what Nick said and she became enraged. Grandmother beat if back into our office, sat down in his chair and only minutes later she was clicking her heels coming into the room to cancel our January holiday. It was December 27^th. The holiday was to begin two days later on the 29^th.

There was a great deal of upset. No one spoke up. No one dared to confront her.

So, I decided I would do it for all of us.

Grandfather reluctantly called her back into the office and translated for me. I thought this was a mistake. Better not to have Fashion Plate lose face in front of her staff, but Grandmother seemed afraid to be alone in her office with her, so I didn’t have a choice.

I told her that the government required that we have at least three days off. She told me that our regular weekend is on Monday and Tuesday, so as a concession, she would give us Sunday off. I didn’t know at that time that she had explained this in Chinese to the staff with her original announcement. I was off to a bad start.

Translation and communication is a regular issue at our school. I believe it comes from a lack of skills on our leader’s part. Many, many times things are said to the staff, but no one thinks to translate it to the foreign teachers. Despite asking many times, no one has ever been assigned this task. It’s a systems issue.

One day I arrived at school and was handed a new text-book for a class that was going to begin in ten minutes. It didn’t have a teacher’s manual and I had no time to prepare. Apparently all the children’s parents had purchased the book, but no one had told me this was happening.

When I asked the T.A why I hadn’t known about this change she said with a bright smile, “Oh, we discussed it at the staff meeting three weeks ago. Someone was supposed to tell you.”

“Someone” never did.

This is typical of the methods of communication in our school.

Changing our January holiday was legal for Fashion Plate to do – but it certainly didn’t speak to the spirit of the national law. Sneaking just close enough to the law to be legal in its eyes is her usual course of action. This is a lesson she learned from the hands of the master – her husband, Mr. Business Man.

As the conversation continued Grandmother was obviously becoming afraid of where the words were heading and instead of standing up to her for the staff, he asked a teacher’s assistant to translate for me instead. He quietly turned heels and went to the back of the room to watch from a distance.

I was amazed at the depth of his fear.

Kylie, a brave young woman of 24 stepped up to my desk, but the conversation ended there as Fashion Plate would not budge. She left the room.

When the door closed behind her I told Grandmother how furious I was. Other staff members joined in. He became visibly upset but was still unwilling to come to our aid. Instead, he grabbed his coat and left for the night.

The next morning I found out that Fashion Plate had said something else that hadn’t been translated for Nick and I.

When she made the cancellation announcement she had also told the staff the dates of the Spring Festival holiday. We would work all the way up to New Year’s Eve of the Chinese New Year on the 9^th of February. Most businesses – even the stingy ones – close on the eighth to give their staff the entire day off on the eve of this annual holiday.

To the Chinese people, this is the most important day of the holiday season as it is the evening of the much celebrated family meal. By making us work until 5:00 p.m on that day Fashion Plate was assuring the fact that none of us would be able to get transportation to see family or to travel. Unless relatives lived close by or someone had a car, (and most still do not) few of our staff would be able to travel anywhere for the New Year’s Eve family dinner. It would be a little like making an American work on Christmas Eve until 9:00 p.m so that travel would be next to impossible.

Personally for me, this meant an impossible situation.  There was no way in God’s green earth that I’d be able to book a flight that Saturday night, and would likely have to wait until at least Monday if I would be able to leave town at all.  Prices would be high and the return flights would be even worse.

While I’d felt comfortable flexing with a lot of the shenanigans that happened in this less than well run school, I’d finally had enough. I adored my students, and I love my job. Those two facts had kept me on the job site.

But travel, that is the other fifty percent of my being here. If Fashion Plate could take away our vacations; if she could make it impossible to get tickets and visit other areas nearby, my decision was easily made. I needed to leave my job.

I decided not to reveal that fact right away in favor of having a very kind but honest conversation with Fashion Plate to see if changes were possible before I had taken the drastic step to get out of my contract.

That evening when I got home, I called Jason, a good friend, brave young man and excellent translator; a teacher’s assistant at the school. Jason has worked with us only for a couple of months. In that short amount of time, he’d come to realize that what had been promised by Fashion Plate in his interview would not be the reality of his job.

He had been promised a teaching position with me in the Business English classes as he had majored in that subject and had graduated from the University in Nanjing only six months before. I was told that he was to be a T.A and nothing more. I tried to let him team teach, but grandmother was clear that this was not what students were paying for. They expected a foreign teacher, not a Chinese man to teach their class. This was Jason’s first real job and it had been a disappointment to him from about his third day.

Jason’s father is in the hospital and in need of a new liver. He had told me recently that he was going to wait one week and then use his father’s illness as an excuse to leave Fashion Plate’s employ.

Knowing that he would be leaving anyway, and therefore not at risk for Fashion Plate’s wrath, I asked him if he would be willing to translate a meeting with our boss, Chinese Grandmother and myself. I promised him that I would say that he had nothing to do with my agenda and that I asked him to translate only so that Grandmother wouldn’t have to take this issue on by himself.

“Are you kidding,” Jason said, laughing on the phone, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

My experience had taught me that if I brought Grandmother alone into the conversation with Fashion Plate, he would not translate correctly and I would not be able to get my real points across. When I first arrived at the school and asked for his help, he told me that he admired the way I speak my mind.

“You Americans always say what is on your mind in a polite way and ask for what you want,” he had said. “We Chinese people usually show half a face. By that I mean that we ask for a little something and hide the rest. This is our culture. I think we could take a lesson from you.”

His comment had explained a great deal about how he thinks. Therefore I knew that if I went into this meeting alone, grandmother would not tell Fashion Plate everything that was said. This thought was confirmed by Nick who said it had taken him months to figure out that actually very little of what he said or suggested was ever passed on to her in translation.

Jason and I were to teach adult Business English together that evening and decided on a surprise attack a half an hour before the class started so that the meeting couldn’t last very long. This was supposed to be a happy evening since this was going to be our last class before the January holiday.  But that fact had changed with its cancellation.

At 6:30 p.m. Jason stood by my side as I asked Grandmother to join me in Fashion Plate’s office. He looked worried but said that he would come. We walked in, asked for a moment of Fashion Plate’s time, and I held nothing back. Jason translated it all, word for word.

I told her that the staff was ready to quit because of what she had done, that I come to China to travel and that it was abundantly clear that would not happen if I stayed at this school. I asked her why she canceled our holiday. Why the sudden change just two days before it was supposed to begin? Did she realize all the plans that people had to cancel because of her?

I gave the information for each member of our staff one by one; weddings, family, travel, all had been canceled and I found this unreasonable. People had lost ticket money, reservation fees, this was unfair to people who work so very hard. She smiled while I spoke, a Chinese trait to disguise how she was really feeling.

She told me very earnestly and with conviction that she did it because she was angry that Nick was not willing to work six days a week without overtime pay. She canceled the January holiday to punish the staff, she said with great ease.

I couldn’t believe my ears, and from the look on Jason’s face when he told me what she had said, he couldn’t believe it either. We knew she was heartless, but taking away a holiday as a punishment to a group of six staff members because one of them insisted on a contractual law seemed unbelievable – even for her.

I was livid and told her so. While I kept my composure and simply made my words firm, I made it clear that I had reached my limit.

I could see this worried her.

As Jason was translating my last words, the door suddenly swung open. We all looked over to see the owner of the school, Mr. Business Man standing there. He had Fashion Plate’s dinner in his hand and he was obviously shocked to see us all in her office, and clearly unhappy about what he had just heard in Chinese. He apologized for interrupting and left the room.

We all stopped and looked at one another.

Grandmother’s face turned a special shade of emerald and Fashion Plate began playing with her hair and straightening her clothing in a way that left little doubt that her husband and boss was unaware of her actions.

Grandmother was busy in his little corner figuring out that Fashion Plate hadn’t told B. Man what had happened, so he was likely in trouble for not having reported it either.

After his obvious nausea had passed and a few minutes went by, Chinese grandmother stood behind Fashion Plate smiling like a Cheshire cat.

When I asked Jason later why that was so, he said it was because I had said everything Grandfather had wished to say. Getting reamed out by B. Man was likely a small price to pay for having the opportunity to tell Fashion Plate what he thought without actually having to say the words. I had done it for him.

Fashion Plate recomposed herself and told me she was sorry that she had hurt me. Her apology seemed sincere. Seeing a stone falling away from her wall of silence, I decided to play the age card.

“You are the age of my children,” I told her with sensitivity and kindness, “I have been an Executive Director for over 18 years. You have done it for 18 months. I know that you will have serious problems with your staff because of your decision about our vacation. Please reconsider your position. I am trying to save you from your mistake.”

While she smiled sweetly as a younger person should to an older person in China, it was clear that she wasn’t going to budge. It was one thing to apologize, it was entirely another to lose face and tell the staff she had made a mistake, even if she clearly had amends to make with her husband the boss.

Everyone left the room.

Jason and I went into our classroom. On our way down the hall we saw Grandmother and Business Man in the conference room. There was some shouting. Jason told me that B. Man was yelling at Grandmother asking him what was going on and what else he hadn’t been told?

Clearly I had just started a tidal wave of issues in this office. Maybe this was a good thing? Maybe changes actually could happen here if the air was cleared?

The next day when I arrived at the school, the T.A’s were all smiles.

“What’s up?” I asked, as I hung up my coat.

Jude said, “I’ve just been in Fashion Plate’s office. We all have. Mr. Business Man told her that she had to meet with every member of the staff and apologize for taking our vacation away.”

We both laughed. It didn’t make the situation any better, but it was nice, especially for the T.A’s to have that apology. They knew how hard that must have been for Fashion Plate.

There were no classes that day because we were supposed to be on holiday. There was nothing to do. All my lesson plans had been created for after “vacation” and everyone was caught up on their work. Rumor was that Fashion Plate had decided we would be cleaning the school during this time, but since she’d been taken to task for her behavior, we figured she didn’t feel comfortable telling us to do anything that wasn’t actually our job.

We spent the time reading, trying to pretend we were working, but the truth was, most of the time we were all quietly watching movies and surfing the web. Grandmother knew this. In fact, he was in the back of the room with his ear plugs in, watching his favorite television program; a Chinese hospital drama. Despite the pleasant way we tried to spend our day, we were all seething inside that we were being forced to sit at work when we should have been on vacation.

At the end of the evening, Grandmother told us that there would be an important meeting the following day. B. Man would be coming by.  Attendance was mandatory.  After work that night, we all laughed about it.  Mandatory attendance?  Where else did we have to go, we had to work.

I was feeling optimistic about this meeting. The staff was not.

“We’ve had these meetings before one T.A told me as we were walking home. We have them every time Fashion Plate has complaints about us or when she does something wrong. If the meeting is about us, B. Man yells at us and tells us to do our jobs and to listen to her. When it’s about her, he will promise lots of things, but he won’t deliver on any of them. You should know that nothing here will ever change,” she said.

She had made this comment with casual conviction, as though she had said that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening.

Wanting to believe that things could be different, but knowing the reality of the situation, I started sending resumes out en mass. Within two days I was receiving offers for interviews and some schools were even offering me positions without an interview. Some didn’t have as good a salary as I was getting presently, and others had potential to offer more. I relaxed knowing that if changes weren’t forthcoming quickly, at least I was going to have plenty of options.

At 1:00 p.m the next day, we all silently filed into the conference table. As per Chinese custom, Mr. B. Man was sitting at the head of the table, his trusty iPad rip off carefully placed in front of him with his notes and speeches for the meeting in front of him. Fruit, nuts, and rice candy were sitting on the table in colorful bowls. Knowing that I didn’t trust Grandmother for translation from his observation from my meeting with his wife the night before, B. Man asked Kylie to sit at his right side and translate for him. That gesture offered me hope.

I am the school cash cow. In three months I have brought 40 new students to the school. B. Man was finally making money since I had arrived. Students had told him personally what good classes I was teaching, and he was pleased with my job performance. Maybe I wouldn’t need to leave after all?  This nod to a translator was surprisingly thoughtful.

Mr. Business Man welcomed us, and while reading the speech from the computer in front of him went around the table and told us one by one how much he appreciates our work. Kylie carefully translated every word. This method of communication takes a great deal of time. B. Man spoke in short dramatic sentences, Kylie translated his words. In this way, more than an hour quickly passed.

First he looked at me, and then at Nick.

“The foreign teachers in our school are the very best. I love you guys. You are making the school successful,” he said.

Nick kicked me under the table and I tried not to laugh. He loves us? Even for the dramatic individual B. Man is, this was totally over the top.

One by one, he made his way around the table.

“Phoenix,” he said to our receptionist, “I know there have been problems in the past, but I am glad that you decided to stay at our school, it was worth it wasn’t it?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

This time it was Phoenix who kicked me under the table.

Three months before this meeting, Phoenix had found out that Fashion Plate had pocketed the money she was supposed to have put into a bank account to pay for Phoenix’s insurance. When Phoenix had a doctor’s appointment and the doctor wasn’t paid she checked her account.

This revelation was brought to Mr. Business Man’s attention by Phoenix and a meeting was held with the three of them. In a tearful moment, Fashion Plate had admitted that she had “forgotten” to deposit the money. B. Man had apparently paid the requisite amount to Phoenix, but it meant that because of insurance laws, she wasn’t covered for the past three months, and she wouldn’t be covered for the next three while she waited for the insurance companies waiting period for the second time in a row. B. Man had paid her doctor’s bill, but that wasn’t the point.

Phoenix had decided to quit at that day, but B. Man promised her that nothing like this would ever happen again, so she had reluctantly stayed on at the school.

He continued on around the table, expressing praise for every employee. He told us how successful our school was becoming, and how much better we will do in the future. He promised to settle the issues, and to make changes so that this would never happen again.

When that last statement was translated by Kylie, Nick and I joined the rest of the feet under the table as each of us kicked the other and tried not to laugh out loud. Clearly the T.A’s were right. This meeting was about trying to keep us just happy enough to keep us all from quitting – nothing more.

As he continued around the table thanking each person for their work, he finally came to Fashion Plate, and referred to her as his ex-wife.

That’s when the soap opera began in earnest.

Kylie stopped him and asked if she had understood him correctly, and F. Plate started crying softly. He assured Kylie that this was indeed correct, and that it was alright to translate that word. We were shocked.

This explained so much!  As I glanced around the table, everyone was deep in thought, except Fashion Plate who was sniffling into a used tissue. I actually felt sorry for her.

About the time Phoenix found out she had lost her insurance money, other staff members were having issues with Fashion Plate and money.

On my return from Hong Kong several weeks went by and she had kept “forgetting” to pay me back the money that I had spent for my Visa, per my contract. I finally put the issue in writing and sent her husband and Grandmother a copy before she “remembered” and came into the office with my money.

Jason’s first paycheck was missing 300 yuan. Fashion Plate told him that he had remembered the wrong amount at his interview and that he would be receiving a full paycheck next month. She encouraged him to sign off for what he did receive and he refused. That meant the issue had to go to her husband. The next day B. Man arrived at the office and paid Jason himself.

The following month, I came up 300 yuan short in my own paycheck. I receive my payments in cash. I get 12,000 yuan per month. {The Chinese staff only receive 1,000 yuan per month} The first 10,000 still had the band on it from the bank.

“That came from the bank, so you don’t have to count that if you don’t want to,” she had said with a smile that day.

I counted the loose 2,000 yuan paper notes and signed off on the paperwork. When I got home that night, remembering Jason’s issue, I took the band off the 10,000 yuan pile of cash and recounted it three times. 300 yuan was missing.

I called the other staff members at home to let them know to count their own paychecks.

“I always count mine,” one T.A said to me, “why didn’t you? She has cheated one of us every single month.”

I hadn’t known.

After the meeting, we would all get together to discuss the bombshell Mr. Business Man had dropped. Our theory was that since she could feel a divorce coming, and because she had grown up very poor, Fashion Plate had likely been making a nest egg at our expense to be sure she had enough money when the inevitable happened.

While we were all still reeling from the news that his marriage of not more than six months had been terminated, Mr. Business Man made his final offer of consolation to us.

At the end of the meeting, to show his gratitude to us all, he would be making hand rolled dumplings and serving them to us for dinner to show us how much he genuinely cared about us.

We were struggling not to roll our collective eyes.

No money, no vacation, no issues settled, just……dumplings?

Then he quietly added his final thought. Ms. Fashion Plate was no longer in charge of the school, Grandmother was. She could no longer decide when vacations would take place, nor would she be allowed to make academic decisions. She was to limit herself to recruiting students for the school.

We all smiled to ourselves inside and hoped for change.

Fashion Plate had been publicly humiliated. None of us felt good about that.

The meeting went on in this formal fashion for about 90 minutes in total. I had been scheduled to do a training that afternoon for the staff, so when the official meeting ended, B. Man left the room. We all sighed loudly even Fashion Plate.

The day was running late. I was supposed to have gone to the doctor’s office to receive the results from some blood work that had been taken the previous week. Depending on the results, I was also supposed to pick up my medication from the hospital pharmacy.

Initially Jason was going to pick up the results for me that afternoon. I had planned on going with him.

“Don’t bother,” he had said, “you don’t speak Chinese, I’ll just pick up the results and bring them and the medication to the school for you.” he had said.

I had found this odd, but very typically Chinese. There is no confidentiality here. On the day I had the blood work done, I had been accompanied to the doctor by Jason, who was to act as interpreter, Fashion Plate and Mr. Business Man. I had felt uncomfortable having my personal health discussed with my employer present and had asked them both to leave the room.

Jason told me after they had left that my behavior would be considered rude. The doctor was a friend of B. Man. I figured, all the more reason not to have him there. I asked the doctor to keep my confidences and that I felt uncomfortable with my health being common knowledge. She had agreed to help me after Jason had carefully translated my words, but I wasn’t completely sure I could trust her as this concept was clearly foreign to her.

Jason’s father had been brought back to the hospital that morning, so Jason was not at school. Unbeknownst to me, he had told Fashion Plate that he would get the results upon his return.

Meanwhile, the staff looked like they’d been through a death march sitting around the table with little energy and little interest in being there. This was not a good way for me to begin a training. I decided to take advantage of the situation.

Trying to build on this idea that change was possible, I began my training by asking each member at the table to help me construct a list of everything we felt was going well at the school and everything that we thought deserved improvement. Everyone, including F. Plate and Grandmother took this exercise to heart. Ideas began to develop. Excitement, upset, creativity all began to arrive in our discussion in earnest.

By the end of the next hour I had created two lists and everyone started talking at once about what we could do to improve our school. I was excited. I could feel some hope begin to filter into the room.

We decided that we should be holding weekly staff meetings like this one at least once a week. We made another list of things that should be changed right away. Even Fashion Plate was getting into the conversation. Grandmother was enthused as well.

Suddenly, it was dinner time. An empowered and relaxed staff walked down the hall together toward our break room anticipating a delightful dinner. Tensions had eased. We were hungry. It was feeling a little like a good day.

Fashion Plate quietly left the room and went down the elevator. We figured she couldn’t face her ex husband after the humiliation at the meeting, so we quietly watched her leave.

Little did I know that Fashion Plate was not leaving.  Instead she was taking it upon herself to go to the doctor, get my blood work results and pick up my medication. Even upon reflection, I’m still not convinced she did it out of kindness. I think there was a little curiosity for her about my health, and also an opportunity to ask the doctor about my appointment.

B. Man couldn’t possibly have been true to his word. He was waiting for us in the break room with plastic cups of wine set at each place setting of paper plates and wooden chop sticks. The dumplings arrived moments later from the restaurant on the first floor. They were far too perfect to have been made by him. It was clear to us he’d been hanging around the break room drinking wine while he had told us he’d be slaving away in the kitchen downstairs.

I had just been handed a rice bowl with dumplings inside it when Fashion Plate came into the dinner and announced my blood work results to everyone at the table. Then she took my medication out of the bag and began passing it around for everyone to see.

Mr. Business Man offered a toast to my test results.  Nick was laughing out loud at this circus around my personal and private health.   I was weirded out.

“Isn’t this odd?” Fashion Plate said in broken English, “Look at all the pills she has to take.”

Within moments everyone had the boxes open and began looking at the prescription inserts to find out about my medical problems.  To his credit, Nick continued passing along one of the boxes without reading the label.

I should stop and tell you here that this wasn’t done to be mean. Chinese people take very little medication and it is all bought over the counter. In this way I was quite an oddity and she was amazed enough to want to share it with everybody.

I got up and started walking around the table and collecting my boxes of medication, politely letting everyone know that in the United States we consider this matter private, and besides, everyone’s dumplings were getting cold.

When attempting to lure a Chinese conversation from one subject to another, food is a great lure. Chinese people are meticulous about the quality and temperature of their food. A mention of cold dumplings was enough of a distraction for me to be successful in gathering back all my medication and putting it safely inside the sleeve of my coat so that no one would look for it later.

The dinner was truly strange.

I was supposed to teach one class that night that Fashion Plate had rescheduled without telling Grandmother.  {So much for not being in charge any longer.}  And yet, they were filling my cup with rice wine, even though I was just sipping it to be polite. Drinking before class was alright?  Apparently.

One by one, the Chinese staff asked me to come over to speak with them or they found an excuse to go outside the room. They each told me to keep looking for work, that since the opening of the school 18 months ago, they’d had these dinners before and that promises were made that were never kept.

I didn’t want to believe them.

I decided instead to stop looking for work and let a few weeks go by to see what would happen next. I liked living in Li Yang. I adored my students. Maybe with a vacation now scheduled for February, things at the school would improve? If I waited until August to leave, I would be eligible for a sizable bonus.

Fate had another idea.