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[klasies]

Sorry about the spelling, but it's not like we are English teachers, are we?
Not sure how they found out about school B. I would hazard an educated guess that a parent at school B was upset about something and pimped the school or more likely that the boss of school A found out and pimped her own teacher.


A

[laska]

A fellow foreigner I know who was a boss in a school spoke fluent Mandarin. When he came to China he went to the authorities to register and said, "I want to do everything right, get it all legal." The cop looked at him and laughed and said, "Buddy, do you have any idea what it would really take to get completely legal? Just take your papers and go." He had Z visa, resident permits for his family etc., but if you start going by the fine letter of the law, I guess, there was still a lot more to do.

Another story: Once a fellow expat teacher friend of mine forgot to register with the police when he came back into the country. He used to be pretty nervous every time he interacted with the police (as I am too), so when he realized he would have to go pay a fine, he asked his girlfriend (now his wife) to go with him. She was busy that day, so he had to go himself. He was kind of bitter. "If I get deported, then she'll be sorry," he kept thinking. She was like, "Can't it wait until tomorrow?" "But I have to be legal!" he replied. He couldn�t wait another day. You see, now that he had realized his mistake, he had to fix it right away. He couldn�t rest without that paper. So he went to the police station, all nervous and sweaty, rehearsing answers if they asked him about his job etc. He ended up having pay a RMB 500 fine and sign a bunch of papers acknowledging that he had committed a minor crime. He got the registration. Then he left.

When he was standing on the door to leave, a female cop that had been watching the scene unfold asked him, "What did you need the yellow paper for?" "What?" he said. "What did you need the slip for?" she asked again. "Nothing," he said," I just wanted to be completely legal." She just stared at him and said, �Well, it�s not like we would have come looking for you, or something.�

To add insult to injury, later his girlfriend said to him, "You paid RMB 500! What an idiot you are! You didn't even bargain with them? You should've called me. I've got a middle school classmate in the police. He could have gotten you out of there for free." Later I found out that you can get the little yellow slip in any hotel that allows foreigners, many of which are much less than RMB 500.

One of the things that is really interesting to me about this story is that the guy�s girlfriend just sort of took it for granted that he should have known how to deal with the whole situation, because any normal, reasonably experienced adult should. It never really occurred to her in black and white terms that their cultures would be so different.

Now that I�m done with that long preamble, what I�d like to say is this: It's all fine to be perfectly legal, and probably very advisable. But if someone who can pull some strings wants to make trouble for you, being perfectly legal might not help much. On the other hand, there are probably many people here who are not totally legal but aren't aware of it--ignorance is bliss. All and all, though I advocate legality, it's much more useful to have connections than to be legal, right?

Another way to say this (and I�ve got my tongue a little bit in my cheek) is that the peace of mind that you get from being legal is a very Western thing indeed, wouldn�t you agree?