Job Discussion Forums

[HunanForeignGuy]

[james s]

Stories like this make me happy I am leaving after the summer is done.

[cj750s]

[Anda]

Being the only foreign teacher in the city where I live I get to talk a lot with the locals. China is seeing a lot more unemployment in the cities and more than two thirds of college / university graduates are getting stuck with poor paying ordinary jobs. Currently food costs are going up fast where I live so I think we can expect more trouble ahead.

[SnoopBot]

[SnoopBot]

[cj750s]

[laska]

For new teachers: Rise in number of violent incidents could just as easily be attributed to rise in number of teachers. Comparison to Boxer Rebellion is simplistic. However, nationalism is a growing force. It wouldn't surprise me if attacks are on the rise, by objective standards. Heed consular warnings.

But if you're drunk with a girl on a bar street at 2 a.m., you could be attacked in any city in the world (for many different reasons), especially if you have racist attitudes toward the locals.

The only times I have heard of people getting beat up was when they were being stupid like this. They haven't learned the first rules of the warrior: 1) The only way you can truly watch your back is if other people watch it for you, so make sure people are fond of you. 2) You can't dodge it, so don't be where the bullet is.

Number two means staying out of bars. You'll save money and live longer. Use all that extra energy you would spend being hungover and broke cultivating your qi and your spirit.

[lychee]

Laska I totally agree. One of our FTs a few years ago was hit over the head with a bottle of beer and had to have a few stitches, in a bar and being very loud mouthed. He went on to have many more brawls in bars and boasted about breaking some guys arm, at that stage I wanted to break a magnum of champanye over his MOD EDIT

One of the posters mentioned the boxer rebellion, have you read, The Dragon Lady?
Great read

[A Token of My Extreme]

From the start, the atmosphere of this thread is ripe for catastrophe. There's something perilously off about the blend of jeffinflorida's zonked brand of superteacher noblesse oblige, and fabled upchuckles high-powered maneuvering on behalf of the the ladies and the surrounding attempts at seat-of-the-pants, grass-roots organizing. When disaster strikes -- first with Jeffinflorida's friend, and then again with upchuckles -- it's doubly excruciating because we don't see the attacks coming, but we can sense the wide spread implications. The details are so shadowy and we know we're not getting the whole story, but the harrowing context gives the deadly scene an apocalyptic stature, much like the episodes leading to the black plague;

�Perhaps superstition caused the Muslim Tartars to blame their misfortune on the Christian Genoese. Or perhaps a Christian and Muslim had become involved in a street brawl in Caffa, and the Tartars wanted revenge. In any case, the Tartars sent an army to attack Caffa, where the Genoese had fortified themselves. As the Tartars laid siege to Caffa, plague struck their army and many died. The Tartars decided to share their suffering with the Genoese. They used huge catapults to lob the infected corpses of plague victims over the walls of Caffa. As the Tartars had intended, the rotting corpses littered the streets, and the plague quickly spread throughout the besieged city. The Genoese decided they must flee; they boarded their galleys and set sail for Italy, carrying rats, fleas, and the Black Death with them."
<http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/fleas/bdeath/Path.html>

Hunanforeignguy didn't mention that the last time there was a high frequency in random street violence SARS broke out, foreigners decided they must flee, boarded their planes and carried the disease back to their countries with them.

[7969]

here's my final take on the subject of people getting beaten.

people who get beat up usually deserve it. i've been all over the world, served in the army, and one thing beatings around the globe have in common is that someone mouthed off once too often.

its got *beep* all to do with history... in today's world, it's always someone else's fault...

[lychee]

7969
I hope I got the numbers right. I have only been beaten up once in my life, not counting childhood.

Looking back, I mouthed off with the wrong people, punks, the real ones.
I said something along the lines that Margaret Thatcher is a right wing bitch. Well all hell broke loose. I was not aware that the punks were right wing, glue sniffing total dead brain *beep* with no appreciation of music.

To this day I regret that I was held back and could not even get one punch in.

I have my peace loving liberal side but i would sometimes like to exercise the other darker side.

[tw]

Question: why is this thread in the job related forum? The FT was not assaulted in the classroom, not even in a school.

[caius celestius]

Let's give the OP the benefit of our belief that he was an innocent victim; it could have been the case. And: He could have construed this story to make him appear so.

I fail to see how such an isolated incident can be linked to the Boxer Rebellion a century earlier. That was not spontaneous whereas outbreaks of raw violence against laowais are noticeable by their rarity, and the most oft-heard explanation for their outbreak nearly always is...the laowai provoked them.

SInce attempts have b een made to put this incident in a nationalistic-xenophobic reactionary context I would like to point out that the CCP doesn't condone indiscriminate violence or the spread of malicious stereotyping by anyone.
And it doesn't exhort the masses to take the law into their own hands.

The Boxer Rebellion was instigated by a clique of xenophobes and "patriots", and any western country has its share of such extremists.
To return the favour to the poster who made this slanderous observation: The Chinese were expelle4d by hook and by crook from California in the U.S>A. for the sole reason that they were foreigners a century ago.
Their forced eviction was of the robustly muscular type as well as of the psychologically arguing kind. Killer commandoes roamed freely and massacred CHinese resisting the order.
That happened because white Americans wanted to preserve rheir rights, privileges and their wealth even though they had recruited Chiense to work in the West of their country.

I don't think occasional booze-induced fist fights of Chiense against lone westerners compare to that pogrom. A white man can still reasonably hope to get police protection in this country if he so desires and needs. That kind of assistance was denied the Chinese immigrants.

[lychee]

MOD EDIT. This is converation, it goes off in tangents.
This is not the classroom. I encourage my students to go with the flow