Gainful employment

As of yesterday, I have a job. I will be a "consultant" at an upmarket EFL school here in Taichung. The money's good, the hours are flexible and the job seems relatively undemanding. On top of this, I've been asked to do some writing and editing/ proofreading for a magazine, and another EFL place has also expressed an interest. I expect to hear from them this afternoon. Before too long, I should be making enough money to feed my out-of-control cheeseburger habit. I'm also trying to see if I can get work at one of the local gyms, running a couple of classes a week in the sort of watered-down kickboxing/ aerobics I used to heap scorn upon when I was younger, but which I now see as one of those things which will continue to exist no matter how I feel about it and if someone's going to be making money out of it, it might as well be me. However, progress in this area has been somewhat limited. It's taken me several visits over the best part of a month to actually get someone at California Fitness to come straight out and say they don't have any work available at the moment. This is a very typically Taiwanese situation, and has failed to produce the kind of incandescent rage in me that it would have back when I was less experienced in the inscrutable ways of the orient, although it's equally possible that this can be put down to the medication. World Gym has yet to come out with an answer or, as far as I can tell, even to understand what my question is, but I shall persevere. This afternoon I will return and this time I've got a name. Thus, I slowly work my way through the gauntlet of their bureaucracy. It never fails to astonish me, and this is also a very typically Taiwanese observation, the number of departments, managers, sub-managers, vice-undersecretaries and so forth that can be found in an operation that appears, on cursory inspection, to have a single office about the size of my bathroom.

"Someone from the personnel department will get back to you."
"Do you mean the fellow over there in the corner? Couldn't I just wait for him to finish his banana and have a word with him myself?"

But alas, things do not work like this, and they never will. One of the things one learns very quickly about the Chinese is that they place an immense amount of value on something called "face", which is a concept the occidental is extremely ill-equipped to understand, possibly at a neurophysiological level. Losing face, or clearly being to blame for someone else losing it is one of the worst things that can happen to a Chinese person. The Japanese have taken things a step further, and if the situation is dire enough, loss of face will result in one of the little buggers cutting themselves open with a sword. I've yet to see a Taiwanese person go this far, but the contortions through which one will go in order to avoid a situation of face loss can often resemble some sort of surrealist comedy performance. One of the big things, and here I'm coming to some sort of a point, is that saying "No" directly to someone's face will cause you to lose yours, or some of it, at any rate (I believe it to be a measurable quantity, but don't quote me on that and it may well depend on the situation). Thus the month of visits to the gym before a red-faced young woman finally has to perform the awful task of informing me they have no work for me. She seems relieved as all hell when I don't react by bludgeoning her with one of the free water bottles they're giving away. She is terrified. Not only will she lose face, but she also knows that the situation is made worse by the fact that I'm a foreigner, and foreigners, so she has been told, react very badly to this sort of news. What she is not aware of is that most foreigners only freak out when they've been jerked around for weeks on end, and would react quite calmly to bad news if it were delivered upon the first asking. Why is she not aware of this? Because no one dare try it; to do so would be to lose face. Tell them you'll call them and hope they don't ever come back, and when they do, tell them someone from the personnel department will get back to them.

This would all be easy to deal with if the signals were obvious. Everyone knows how to recognise with the "We'll call you" that means "Don't expect to ever hear from us again". We are not strangers to subtext, in fact we have entire genres of film and comedy entirely devoted to the medium. However, to someone who has not had the appropriate cultural acclimatization in early childhood, or possibly, as I said before, the correct brain structure, coming from a Chinese person, the you-won't-ever-hear-from-us-again "We'll call you" and the we'll-actually-call-you "We'll call you" sound absolutely identical. I can attest to this as one who has, after three years of living in this damned country, still been taken in by the former this very week in my dealings with the globular, ungraspable entity that is California Fitness. And then, the ESL school I thought was really not interested at all called me back since I started writing this and now wants to interview me on Thursday. There really is never a dull moment here.