
My first job interview had been going pretty well. The manager had offered me a full time contract, 28 hours a week, 20,000 Thai bhat a month. About $800. Not bad. I agreed I’d start the next Monday.
He spoke up as I was leaving.
“And one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Are you a fag?”
I blinked. “Uh. . . no. You uh. . have a problem with that?”
“Yeah, cause they don’t wanna work.”
“Well. . . don’t worry.” I tried to smile heartily.
The manager was a 40-ish American former military man with a walrus mustache stained with nicotine. He’d come to English teaching like many other men in Thailand – he’d married a Thai woman and been unable to find any other job.
He laughed out loud and turned to another teacher blearily smoking a cigarette nearby. “Heh, you should have seen the look on his face.” He lit another smoke for himself and turned back to the computer where he was busily playing “minesweeper.” “Heh heh. All right then. You can start next Monday, after the holiday. See you then.”
I nodded. I shifted uncomfortably on my new cheap buffalo leather shoes. “Big Buffalo” was the brand name. I was also wearing a new blue rayon tie that I’d spilled yogurt on while waiting for the bus to the school. It was located in a huge shopping mall on the outskirts of Bangkok that had a food court with animatronic birds and hippos and a waterfall. Somehow I’d envisioned working in a wooden shack.
“So uh, anyway. My experience has mostly been in, uh, private settings. So, as far as the classroom, uh, what should I . . . uh. . .” In fact I had no experience whatsoever. I’d spent the last three months living in a $2 a day beach hut on the island of Ko Samui, and the year before backpacking around Asia. I had contracted giardia in India and was 30 pounds underweight. And also something of a nervous wreck.
They’d seemed impressed by my BA in English Literature though. That was more than any of them had. The manager, I would later learn, had less than two years experience and no kind of teaching certificate to compliment his degree in engineering. He had become manager of this branch of one of Bangkok’s largest language schools because nobody else wanted to move to this remote area, on the opposite side of the city from the go-go bars on Sukhumvit and Patpong roads.
“Ah,” he waved his hand dismissively. “Just follow the book. Do stuff like your English teacher used to do in high school.”
I suppose I didn’t technically become English Teacher X until the next Monday, and it was several years before I really earned the title. But on that day I ceased to be a backpacker, anyway. My mom was proud.
Why Bangkok? Why English teaching?
I was running out of money and I didn’t want to go home. Many people had told me that Taiwan was a gold mine for English teaching, and that I could save thousands of dollars. I had tried to get a visa at the Taiwanese consulate in Bangkok and been refused one. “You intend to work illegally, it is obvious,” said the fat angry Chinese man behind the counter in the busy office. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn a t-shirt and shorts to the interview.
Down to my last $800, I gave a quick scan to the Bangkok Post. It revealed a lot of ads for English teaching positions. I chose one at random and they told me to come by for an interview.
Did I ever imagine I’d do it for seven years?
No fucking way.
But here I am.
I have in my adult life supported myself solely as a teacher of English as a foreign language. I have lived and worked in seven different cities in five different countries. Right now I live in provincial Russia. I am as of this writing 33 years old. I have no wife, no serious girlfriend (but a number of unstable ones) and about enough money saved to buy a 10 year old Nissan Sentra in relatively good condition, if I so desired. The most expensive thing I own is an illegally modified Sony Playstation I bought in 1999 in Thailand.
I’m here to help.
I have seen this profession change greatly since 1995. From a profession composed mainly of untrained yet freewheeling adventurers with a penchant for whoremongering and alcoholism, I have seen it develop into something resembling the migrant labor situation of the 1930’s in America. There is a huge glut of teachers, many overtrained but completely unprepared for the realities of living and working in this profession in a foreign country. Schools flaunt their professionalism by requiring ESL teaching certificates of their teachers, which they are only too happy to offer at fees which could not possibly be recouped even after several years of work. Salaries and benefits seem to creep ever downward, while the hours worked per week inch ever upward.
So am I here to discourage everyone from doing this job?
Nah
I love the lifestyle and I now enjoy the work. I want to provide a forum for honest and straightforward discussion of the glories and the problems of this kind of life.
I want to talk about having sex with students. I want to talk about how to strike back when a school screws you over. I want to talk about going to class with a horrible hangover, and about leaving a place in the early morning without saying goodbye. I want to talk about the terror and the hysteria and the vomit and the ecstasy.
It was very hot, even for Bangkok, that day – well over 100 degrees. The Thai holiday of Songkran, the Thai new year, was starting – every area with pedestrian traffic was full of people with water guns and buckets of water, splashing everyone in sight. It had something to do, originally, with washing away the sins, but has turned in recent years into a three-day water fight. (Complete with a lot of car accidents and eye infections from the filthy water.)
Coming February 15: The Deep End of the Wading Pool (My First Job)