I follow some English blogs of other people’s life in Asia. One of them
is Brainysmurf who is an American
teaching English in the U.S. Recently he posted
on some of his thoughts about trying to find a job using Chinese skills
in China. Needless to say, his thoughts were rather disappointing for
the aspiring Chinese speaker
Whereas countries like South Korea and their relatively free press employ
foreigners who know Korean to copy edit their articles (The Marmot, I
understand, is one of them), one glance at the China Daily reveals that they
don’t even bother. As for myself, I gave up long ago trying to use my
language skills to find a job in a town like Tianjin (although I likely could
in Beijing). I imagine that if one did a survey of Chinese-speaking expats
living in the Middle Kingdom 99 percent of them are somehow connected to
teaching or developing the ESL industry – a worthy pursuit but the
society’s choice of how to incorporate laowais is clear.
Life is fine if you don’t mind being an English speaker but trying to
reasonably use your Chinese skills for a job… seems to be tougher.
