Wow, where do I start catching up on what’s been going on in my life in China? It’s been a crazy 6 month sabbatical filled with some personal losses on the home front back in the states and with some successes here in China. Even though I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with everything going on, it’s not really an excuse for going MIA on you guys on here at CLM and I hope that by starting by filling in the blanks for everyone I can make sense of my descent into isolation.
When I left off about 6 months ago it’s was still the dog days of summer and we had just gotten 30 fresh kids out of high school going through a TESOL program that our school runs. Needless to say of the 30 only 6 are left. Most didn’t last a month in China. I guess that was to be expected because they really had never seen much outside of their small town in Alberta, Canada. Once fall began to descend on Guangzhou I was feeling great until I got some bad news about my family back home that stunned me and made me feel helpless.
I thought I would be able to forget about it since there was nothing I could do about it but I couldn’t shake it. From there it descended into a drunken nightmare for about 2 months. Luckily with a teachers schedule it didn’t affect my work but it really strained my relationship with W. She stood by me though and slowly coaxed me out of my funk. I decided that rather than drinking myself into an early grave in China, I could pour myself into my work with the school and do some good for myself.
Of course that meant accepting anything the school would through my way, but that meant putting a huge strain on my outside time. I also took on a side teaching job as a tutor which basically left me a tired irritable foreigner. Maybe that’s one of the reasons foreign teachers here tend to be on the grumpy side.
By the end October it was time for me to renew my visa in Hong Kong which turned into a fiasco from the moment I stepped foot in Hong Kong. Let’s just say from my turn and burn experiences with Hong Kong it wasn’t one of my favorite places to go anyway but then I had to go for what I thought was just a day trip to get my visa renewed. I was told by all of my co-workers that if I got my passport to the company that processes the visas in Hong Kong that I would get it back the same day as long as I got it in before 12 p.m.
That would have been true except for one thing. I am an American citizen and for us it takes at least a day. So I was stuck in Hong Kong for the day. No problem, I thought as I got a hotel. Then I saw my hotel room which was about as big as my closet back home in the states and I’m not sure but I think the bathroom in my apartment here in Guangzhou might be bigger than my hotel room in Hong Kong.
The next morning I got a terrifying phone call from the company processing my visa. They told me that the government wouldn’t process my visa because it was badly damaged, which yes I’ll even admit after being washed twice in the wash it had seen better days. The company then offered to glue it back together and try again. I agreed and crossed my figured and prayed with all my might that it was get processed this time. It was the tensest 24 hours I’ve ever had since I nearly died 5 years ago. Everything I’d achieved so far in China depended now on someone with a bottle of Elmer’s. I have to admit that having faith in something like this was no easy task, but things worked out in the end. I got the hell out of Hong Kong and swore that next time I got stuck in Hong Kong it would be on my own terms.
