English Teacher X - To Travel Hopelessly: Five Years of Teaching English as a Foreign Language

TO TRAVEL HOPELESSLY

FIVE YEARS OF TEACHING ENGLISH ABROAD

Copyright 2011 by English Teacher X

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Also by English Teacher X

Memoirs

TO TRAVEL HOPELESSLY

VODKABERG: NINE YEARS IN RUSSIA

REQUIEM FOR A VAGABOND

Guides

GUIDE TO TEACHING ENGLISH ABROAD

SPEAKING ACTIVITIES THAT DONT SUCK

HOW TO SURVIVE LIVING ABROAD

GRAMMAR SLAMMER

Comic Collections

COMPLETE COLLECTED COMICS

The following is, regrettably, a true story. Some of the names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the innocent. Though few of the people involved were innocent by any definition whatsoever.

CONTENTS

(January 1995 April 1996)

(April 1996 January 1997)

(August 1997 August 1998)

(September 1998 December 1999)

(January 2000 September 2000)

"Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour."

- Robert Louis Stevenson

I wish I would have a real tragic love affair and get so bummed out that I'd just quit my job and become a bum for a few years, because I was thinking about doing that anyway.

- Jack Handey

When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

- Genesis 4:12, King James Bible (Cambridge Edition)

Wherever you go, there you are.

- Confucius

PART ONE: THAILAND

January 1995 April 1996

THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH TEACHER X

Bangkok, Thailand

April 1995

My job interview had been going pretty well. The manager had offered me a full-time contract for 28 hours a week, 20,000 Thai baht a month, which was at that time about $800.

Not bad. I agreed Id 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 dont wanna work.

Well ... dont worry. I tried to smile heartily.

The manager was a 40-ish American former military man with a walrus mustache stained with nicotine. Hed come to English teaching like many other men in Thailand hed married a Thai woman and had 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 solitaire. Heh heh. All right then. You can start next Monday, after the holiday.

I nodded. I shifted uncomfortably in my new cheap buffalo leather shoes. (Big Buffalo was the brand name.) I was also wearing a new blue rayon tie that Id spilled yogurt on while waiting for the bus to the language school.

The language school, part of a large national chain, was located in a huge shopping mall on the outskirts of Bangkok; it had a food court with animatronic birds and hippos and a waterfall, although the parking lot was full of traditional Thai food stands and moto-taxi drivers.

Somehow Id 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. Theyd 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 complement his degree in engineering. He had become manager of this branch of one of Bangkoks 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.

Why Bangkok? Why English teaching?

Id been traveling for a while. I was running out of money and I didnt 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 had been refused one because they were convinced I intended to work in the country illegally.

Down to my last $800, I'd given a quick scan to the Bangkok Post . It had revealed a lot of ads for English teaching positions. I chose the largest one and called them, and they told me to come by for an interview.

After the interview, I walked somewhat dazedly around the shopping center, eventually getting some fried rice at the food court. I wasnt eager to go back outside into the suffocating heat.

Eventually, I wandered back to the bus stop, taking off my cheap rayon tie. The manager, his walrus mustache moist in the humidity, was there, meeting his stern-faced wife and bubbly 4-year-old child.

Go out with em, fuck em, but dont marry em, he said under his breath as I got on the bus and headed back to the backpacker ghetto of Banglumpu.

It was very hot, even for Bangkok, that day well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit . 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 sins, but had turned in recent years into a three-day water fight, complete with a lot of car accidents and eye infections from the filthy water. White flour paste was also tossed around, for maximum messiness.

I was thoroughly soaked by the time I got back to the tiny room I was renting in a guest house on a back alley near Khao San Road.

It was like a christening, a baptism.

I felt good. I had a job. After grabbing my super-soaker water gun from my room, I changed into swim trunks, bought a Singha beer from the lobby in the guest house, and headed out into the street.

The following Monday I became English Teacher X.

EARLIER THAT YEAR (TROPICAL DEPRESSION)

I was a mess.

From January to April of 1995, I lived in a hut on the beach in Ko Samui, Thailand.

But a year of backpacking had left me broke and 30 pounds underweight from Giardia , a stomach parasite Id contracted in India. I'd had a bad reaction to the incredibly toxic medicine I'd taken to treat it, and my usual depressions and general moodiness seemed even worse than usual.

Ko Samui, a tropical island off the east coast of Thailand, was the end of the road. Id traveled all the way around the world, from England to Spain to Greece to Turkey to India to Nepal to Thailand to Los Angeles and then back to my home city in the American south for Christmas.

I can't say the world had disappointed me exactly, but I'd disappointed myself in how little I'd seemed to get out of it. So you go to India and stay in a cheap hotel, see a sight or two, eat some local food, talk to some locals -- but not many because they're inevitably trying to rip you off by getting you to buy a carpet or something from their cousins souvenir shop.