Job ad on tealit

Let’s ban these racist scumsuckers! Get their ad OFF ORIENTED.

So there are no laws to prevent this type of ad in Taiwan – does this mean that we here, in our own little corner of cyberspace, should condone discrimination and downright racist SHIT from pieces of filth such as IACC?

Email the administrators if you feel Oriented should not be associating its name with this kind of crap that I know affects a good number of the posters here.

I say leave the ads up in order to show the world the true mentality of the Taiwanese/Chinese culture. This culture should be exposed for what it really is rather than hiding it by having posts deleted. There are of course many Taiwanese who are “enlightened” to the world but generally the culture teaches and practices racism.

A little off-topic, but I am Chinese (born on Taiwan) and my Chinese professor from college (Williams College in Massachusetts) was white. In fact, of German extraction. He was (and still is) chair of the Asian Studies department. Although he had a slight slight accent that didn’t seem just kosher with my native ears, he was great in teaching the higher level courses, including wenyanwen.

Funny aside, when he was studying as a grad student in Taiwan, he was sent a notice and drafted into the army. He showed up, but was sent home the next day. Skinny white guy shows up… it was an administrative error. Just think, he gave up the chance to be TC Lin 20 years ago!

As for personal experience, I’ve taught English at a Japanese equivalent of a buxiban – a “juku.” I was lucky, I guess, a Japanese-American friend and I answered an ad, and were hired at $50/hour. I think this type of discrimination is even more rampant in Japan.

Iron Lady, perhaps you would be kind enough to put her explanatory email on this thread. I’d love to see how, with her wonderful choice way with words, she convinced you that she is pretty totally switched on.

As a follow-up to the IACC, they ironically sent me an ad to my personal e-mail today to recruit me. I am black. I sent them a lovely rejection letter back, similar to the one they sent me back in my dark, naive days two years ago when I applied to them thinking that agents were of any use. Only I didn’t have to be diplomatic.
When my school found out I was black they said that some parents might have some problems but they would work around it. Did I mention that my school is incredible. The secret is that the schools that care about race are not as interested in the quality of their teachers because all they are trying to do is make more money on melanin levels rather than real qualifications. The parents of my students are very pleased with me. Not one has had a problem or pulled their kid out of the school because of me. I think the ones who use race as a qualifying factor use it because their curriculum is not so hot so they have to rely on the skin color of their teachers to make people want to go to them.

quote:
Originally posted by Tai Le Meiguoren: The secret is that the schools that care about race are not as interested in the quality of their teachers because all they are trying to do is make more money on melanin levels rather than real qualifications.

Very interesting. So, we can actually use it (discrimatory hiring) to our advantage, to weed out the sh*tty schools.

Amos,
If you’re talking about the bushiban director’s letter, I don’t have it. It wasn’t by e-mail, we handled matters face-to-face, and certainly she didn’t represent that she wasn’t going to set up classes, it just “happened.” I suppose some might call that kind of passive-aggressive, or something…dunno.

Hey, there’s very little money in teaching Mandarin in Taiwan anyway, right?? Might as well go along and find myself something more lucrative.

Terry

Iron lady, I meant

quote:
I just got quite a nice e-mail reply from the lady who wrote the above ad, and in my opinion there's no need to flame her further
If you threw it out, don't worry. Cheers, Amos

Ooh, sorry.
I think I erased her. I was using a Hotmail account and it kept filling up.
She really did sound sane, though. Trust me. (Best of all, when I write e-mail, you can’t see the tics and twitchings caused by too-long Taiwan residence, or the water, or whatever it is…!)

Terry

Creztor, if everyone had your “that’s life”, “don’t worry, be happy”, “Hakuna matata” attitude, you’d still be a serf hoeing the Lord’s plot. Take my advice and rent a copy of the Lion King. What teachers who don’t like racist hiring policies can do is boycott those schools. Don’t teach there. Eventually they’ll be getting such scum white teachers that the smart Chinese parents will go elsewhere. Meanwhile schools like the one Tai Le Meiguoren teaches at will be hiring good teachers of any race and their reputation will start to change attitudes (what’s the name of your school, Tai?). As for choosing a good Chinese teacher- in any area where you don’t have experise, you have to get recommendations from people who have that experise and your trust. If a white person wanted to teach me Chinese, I would get a Chinese friend (who,say, didn’t have the time to teach me herself) to check out their speaking/writing abilities- and if they passed muster, I could evaluate them myself on their teaching ability. As for accent- I do believe that schools have the right to specify a particular accent. If I knew a person who was planning on moving to Taiwan to do business and wanted to learn Chinese, I would advise them not to get a teacher who had a heavy retroflex Mandarin accent. Per Ironlady’s study, it seems that Taiwan people are more accepting of foreigners who speak Taiwan Mandairn (and I don’t mean the Mandarin of my mother-in-law who says ‘o-o- sou’ for ‘wo-wo’shou’). Plus, most people in Taiwan don’t speak that way, so if my friend only learned retroflexed/standard Mandarin s/he would have to take time and effort to get used to Taiwan Mandarin (as I did). If the only teachers around had the heavy retroflex, it wouldn’t kill my friend to learn from them; I just don’t think it’s optimal. * If I knew a friend in Taiwan who knew they were going to study in the North Eastern US, I would advise them to find a good teacher (of any race or nationality) who had that accent (I would have to help them evaluate that since I am from that area). If they couldn’t find any good teachers with that particular accent, then I would say, go for accents from other regions of the US if the teacher with that accent was good. If none of those teachers could be found, I would advise them to go for a teacher with a British/NZ/Australian accent. * If you want to have good listening comprehension of the target accent and be easily understood while trying to speak with that accent, learning from a teacher with the accent you want is important.

Considering how shady many of these racist schools and recruiters tend to be, I say they on walking the path of the ill-fated dinosaur. Parents are learning that while it’s nice that little Johnny has a picture on the shelf with his caucasian preschool teacher, now that he’s in 4th grade with all of the other children who are learning English he’s way far behind because they thought that skin color was the sole requirement for a good English teacher. Many parents are beginning to wake up from this blind illusion and are looking beyond skin color and looking more towards actual qualifications for their children’s teachers. Soon, schools that choose attractive brochures over quality of teachers will find themselves an endangered species whose only chance of survival is to look at resumes for more than that attached photo.

As a black woman who has watched countless people: black, East Indian, and ABCs leave Taiwan because they couldn’t find steady work, I can only say that the day places like the IACC close their doors forever is when Taiwan will become a decent place to both learn and teach English as schools will represent the West in the multi-hues that it was meant to be painted with instead of the monochromatic picture these organizations encourage.

Just sayin’

ImaniOU
(Tai Le Meiguoren)

Just a few months ago I was rejected for a substitute position because I looked “too” Asian.

I am a mixed caucasian-Taiwanese American and was asked by a friend of a friend to substitue for her while she went on vacation for a month and a half. I thought this was a done deal. The school trusted her judgement and didn’t need me to come in for an interview to check me out beforehand.

So, a few days before I was suppose to start, I was taken to the school (which I won’t name…or should I?) by the original teacher so that she could show me around and introduce me to her students, etc. I walked in the door with her and was immediately introduced to the receptionist/supervisor, who greeted me with a shocked expression and a several nervous glances. She then took the teacher to the next room and began telling her that I was unacceptable. The woman who brought me started arguing with her saying, “But you said you wanted a teacher with an American accent!”

Meanwhile, I was sitting in the entrance way overhearing the entire conversation, but trying to act nonchalant. Voices got louder and finally I heard the foreign teacher say, “This is ridiculous! If you don’t want her to teach, then you have to tell her yourself, because this whole situation is very embarrassing for me!”

Not once did the supervisor look me in the eyes as she said that I was too Asian-looking and the parents would have a problem with that, so she couldn’t take me on as the sub. HOWEVER, if I REALLY wanted the job, they were WILLING to pay me at the local teacher’s rate for doing the EXACT same amount of work as a foreign English teacher. How kind of them, don’t you think?

I laughed openly at that obsurd offer and said, “No.” I thanked the teacher for her efforts, told her that even if the supervisor did change her mind, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with working in such an envorionment as that, and then left.

I found out later that the woman was so embarrassed and offended by the school’s attitute towards me and had quit her job at the school despite a fairly lengthy employment there.

I’ve had a few other similar experiences, but none as openly “racist” as that. After that particular one, though, I started picking up the “oh, no!” vibe pretty quickly when I would show up for some interviews. The interviewer would try to play it cool the whole time, but we both knew that, in the end, I would not be hired because of my looks.

But that’s when I would have fun with them by bringing up the appearance issue and asking if their school had problems hiring non-caucasian English teachers. Of course, they would emphatically reply, “Oh, no! Not OUR school!”

I would then go into a “friendly” rant about how ridiculous other schools were and how ignorant the local staff and parents were to base a native English speaking teacher on their appearance. Smiling the whole time, of course. During my monologe, the interviewer would look everywhere except my face and would spend the rest of the interview fidgeting. Probably breathing a sigh of relief when the pesky Asian girl finally left.

Might as well make the interview worth my time, right? :wink: