I don’t have such a negative view about teaching English in a place like Taiwan. I think it offers a highly attractive way of life to those who take to it with a positive mind.
When I interrupted my rapidly blossoming legal career in London to come to Taiwan to learn Chinese, I intended it as just a short interlude before returning to the lucrative world of lawyering. When I arrived, I took on a limited schedule of teaching, both as a means to cover expenses and, more importantly, as an avenue for meeting the objects of my panting desire (because then I was young, horny, and fixated on Chinese girls, whereas now I’m not so young, still horny and fixated on Chinese girls, but married).
I found myself enjoying the teaching so much, and so content with my lifestyle (teaching a dozen hours a week in the evenings, and spending the rest of my time studying Chinese, scampering about in the hills around Taipei, exercising, reading, and doing all of those pleasurable things that one has barely any time for when caught up in a hectic full-time career) that at first I kept postponing the date of my return to the law, and then I decided to abandon it completely and permanently embrace teaching as a new career.
Then, having become deeply aware of the shortcomings of the available teaching materials, I started to get more and more interested in writing materials of my own tailored to the needs of local students. I enjoyed this, and testing the materials in class and then improving them, enormously. I felt I was doing something creative, constructive, purposeful and valuable, and I loved the buzz I got from interacting with the students, making the English lessons interesting, fun and effective, and providing a good, professional service to meet the students’ diverse needs. It was far more satisfying than anything I’d done or would have done as a lawyer – even though, as a top prize-winner in the national bar exams, I’d had a high-flying career ahead of me and had already achieved notable successes in that sphere.
However, much as I loved the teaching, the writing and the schedule, I was profoundly disgusted with the set-up of English teaching here. I loathed the crooks and charlatans who ran the bushibans, and was deeply dismayed at the way in which the visa regulations bound me to their service (and the low rates of pay I received for the highly profitable classes I taught). Of course, I realized that the only way to go forward was to open my own school, but that required my marrying a local woman and opening the school in her name, and I wasn’t ready for marriage at that time, and wouldn’t have dreamt of marrying just for that purpose. Anyway, I was biding my time, and continuing to develop the teaching program which I’d then have ready for use when I finally had my own school.
After more than six years of living very contentedly in this way, a highly attractive offer of a part-time job in the government came my way, and I decided to take it up on spec while still continuing with the teaching. I took to the new job well, but found it occupying more and more of my time and energy. So then I had to make a difficult decision: if I were to apply myself wholeheartedly to the government job, which offered very appealing prospects, I would need to give up the much-loved teaching. After great agonizing, that was the decision I made. Now, a decade later, though I’m financially secure, have good status in this society, and enjoy a fairly well-balanced life, I still miss those good old days in the EFL classroom, and sometimes wonder if I made the right decision.
So I don’t agree at all that teaching EFL is necessarily a dead-end career and marks those who do it as losers. Like Mother Theresa, Hexuan, and many others, it’s something that I chose to do for a part of my life, found highly rewarding, and would quite happily still be doing if fate hadn’t led me on to something else.
Either that or I need to start taking better care of myself.
