Island of the Ghost Teachers!

In the late evening, the Ghost Teachers pour off the Lamma ferry, older Australians, New Zealanders and British for the most part. To the resident Chinese they are gweilo and I sometimes get the impression, in the narrow lanes of Yung Shue Wan, that we the Ghost Teachers pass through the Chinese and they through us, so much do the separate populations fail to take notice of each the other.

The spirit is then of ghostly tolerance. “Thou art a scholar: speak to it, Horatio”. Ken and Blue, the managers of the Bookworm Café (which has wireless for free and is a great little place) are well-educated and speak to us and I am trying, having struggled with the Puthongua of the Mandarins for two years, to learn Cantonese, a far more ancient language which retains the hard K: the Puthongua speaker says Jowloon but the Cantonese speaker, like an English speaker, says Kowloon.

Cantonese has influenced English, interestingly it seems in two generations of military words for approbation.

Older United States Marines are for example “gung ho” if their kit is in order, if they are physically fit, and in general can take the beach. This older word comes from Cantonese gang hei, good, on target, according to authorities.

Cantonese also say “ho-a” (with an intonation I cannot reproduce in print) for “good” and I noted in the middle of the 1990s that American guys were saying boo-yeah when they scored. At the same time, the expression hoo-hah became popular in the military: my personal theory is that these both came by way of Cantonese speakers in Los Angeles.

Let’s hear it for Lonely Planet! They not only publish guidebooks they also publish language guides geared to the traveler without a lot of money.

The ghost teachers endeavor on Hong Kong Island and on Kowloon to improve the lives of the folk of one hundred old names by improving their English, for to rise within Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, perhaps to a manager position in the UK, English is required.

I like schlocky little schools for working people who after hours swot VB or English. They are usually friendly places and one feels one is making some sort of contribution despite the lack of “prestige”. My later years of college were spent in night school which defies the social tracking of students whose parents didn’t have megabucks into dead-end jobs.

Today I arrive on time or early for a class in the crowded districts of Mong Kok or Causeway Bay as the evening falls even as thirty years ago I would squeeze on to the slow elevator (still in operation unchanged) at Roosevelt University in Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium building in Chicago.

But there are indeed problems. Prior to the 1960s, it was thought that an education at night at Hunter College or Roosevelt was mathematically the same as Princeton. But years of classist propaganda (including vicious satires on Saturday Night Live, such as Eddie Murphy’s foul little sketch, “I Wanna Be a Ho”) have taught self-hatred to the night school student, which causes him or her to insist that all he or she wants (deserves) is “practical” information.

The teacher is hounded by the student and administration to never rise above a certain level lest he “waste time”. Thus, in computer training, the students wind up knowing client server and VB only to be asked in an interview if they know Java and Web development.

This is for a position in which they do…client-server and VB, but the employer asks for Java and the Web in addition to sort the poorer students out.

In English training, my readings from Confucius (translated into simple English) are probably not a good idea. For Confucius’ adepts had the shih-gentleman’s leisure to pursue knowledge for its own sake.

But if knowledge is pusued for any other purpose, my experience is that it turns into nonsense, Fundamentalism, dogma.

The English speakers considered promotable at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank will be precisely those English speakers without the Chinese homophobia that causes my students to reject the Beijing classical opera for the same reason American students hate western Opera: its blurring of gender boundaries, where the social position of the opera goer relieves him of the class anxiety, that makes an ordinary guy loth to betray any interest in opera.

My guess is that Sir John Bond, the chairman of the Honkers and Shankers Bank, is not only blessed with a fortunate name as opposed to Adolf O'Reilly or Willie Wonka. My guess is that Sir John can squire Lady Bond to the opera and not retire to the saloon bar midway through La Traviata.

But, the trick is, you have to really like the opera and Shakespeare, and this takes work. In Shenzen, I sat through some Beijing operas on TV and was duly impressed with the singing (sounding as it did like some cats fighting in a tin can) and dancing, because my studies in ballet, Western opera and acting had made me appreciate the hard work it takes to perform in any classical genre.

To appreciate ballet better (which I initially liked because I like watching pretty girls, this being the reason ballet was popular at its 19th century zenith) I took a class in classical ballet. There were two other guys in the class and we made quite a team, the Three Stooges a half beat behind the music.

In both computer and English training I do see how students will interpret their being held back on the job as a lack of computer or English skills, but not to shyness and low self-esteem. As a language teacher I have to encourage the students to first get into how they feel about something and then put this feeling into words, while many students want magic bullets and formulaic expressions (such as you might put without thought on a resume) with no relation to what they feel.

The problem is (as Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, puts it, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed) that the first feeling of someone working hard for peanuts is an anger against the whole structure of technology, business and culture which Bertolt Brecht put into words: “culture is dogshit”. The well-dressed teacher (I wear a suit and tie despite the tropical heat) becomes representative of the System.

My job becomes to Connect at all costs, like Clinton, and there is (like Clinton) a certain insincerity in this. My boss at Catapult thought me very caring of the slow students, and this is because at one point in my schooling I was misdiagnosed as slow. At the same time, as a teacher, my relationship has to be arms-length.

A buddy of mine back at Roosevelt, Ken, was of Polish background. He was very smart, had excellent grades. When Ken and I would check out women in the cafeteria, Ken thought my favorites were “too skinny”. Ken said in false dialect, like his grandfather, “me want woman can pull plow”.

Ken was qualified for law school but became discouraged when he examined the LSAT, for the LSAT at the time had questions about general culture which they did not teach at St. Rita’s High School.

Just as Java is used to excess by companies as an interview requirement when they need VB programmers to merely maintain legacy code, opera and art become an excess used to sort students by class. This is done under the table, for officially, anti-culture is spread in America in a shell game, the old three-card Monte.

Everyone deserves a maximal education. Programmers need to be taught computer science including Turing’s Magic Machine. In general, everyone deserves to learn both about the dominant culture, and their own.

In one of my classes, a Chinese CEO told me that he felt that my training was while of high quality (of course: my personal arete is always acknowledged wherever I go, usually as a preliminary to my being told to chill) not what the canaille, the ordinary person, Old Hundred Names, Zhou Blow, “wants”.

I bit my tongue and did not say, not what you want, for you cannot have your employees reading Master Kong on break: give ‘em ideas.

But all the young dudes carry the news, and the news today is that in China the homes don’t want to learn English; they want to learn Puthongua (the standard dialect of Han Chinese) as, through an unprecedented failure on the part of Bush and Blair, China becomes a dominant power in these parts with a shot at becoming the next superpower.

India may overtake China because India has a genuine common language, that being English. Chinese actually is a Baskin Robbins which comes in 51 dialects, some mutually incomprehensible. It is true that the written script is standardized (with the significant problem that Taiwan and Hong Kong use the fearsomely complex Traditional script while the rest of China uses the simplified script introduced by the Communists). But China lacks India's linguistic unity...while being free, we have to acknowledge, of its Hindu-vs-Moslem-vs-Sikh issues.

My country has significantly dropped the ball on China if I can know more than a Congressional aide about the place. The Republic in fact totters when an ordinary person reflects honestly that he could do a better job as President or a member of the Cabinet. Some of my Socialist party friends back in Chicago thought I could be the Socialist candidate because I look the part in a nice suit, as did Warren Harding and because my heart is in the right place.

If I were to do so, I'd be in the tradition of Norman Thomas, who graduated from Princeton in 1905 and wanted to bring democratic socialism to America. He last seriously ran in 1964 and was lampooned by Lenny Bruce in a form of Bruce's self hatred: in Bruce's sketch, Thomas is elected, and yells upstairs to his wife, "hey, Mother, I am the President!" "Yeah, I said bullshit too, but I'm in!"

A spiritual mentor in fact feels that the only way for Social Democracy of the elementarily decent sort available in France would be as the programme of the Republican party, for he felt that the "natural leaders" of the USA were people like Nelson Rockefeller and Norman Thomas. They had enough self-esteem to negotiate the needs of capital and labor.

But, as my mentor relates, their children became Sixties seekers some of whom now are Ghost Teachers on Lamma Island. The worst of my generation mastered the game like Karl Rove, all too well, but none had the moral imagination of Clinton, who was able to wink, pat you on the back, and relieve you of your wallet while retaining some dignity and integrity.

I remind myself that "through Adam's Fall, we sinned All". That is, we're flawed beings who deserve NEITHER the nadir as represented by Bush NOR some sort of Utopia. My favorite President remains Abraham Lincoln who could see the humor of it all.

But back to Monkey Boy...

Bush could have, but did not, hire an intelligent academic economist or Wall Street rocket scientist as Treasury Secretary, a crucial Cabinet position, more important than secretary of defense. Instead, Bush hired a relatively nondescript CEO, Paul O’Neill of Alcoa, but found that O’Neill has ordinary intelligence and integrity. O’Neill was pushed around as he tried to develop policy without any guidance from Bush (one cannot imagine Monkey Boy mentoring a troop of Girl Guides). He developed a plan for African development, only to be undercut; O’Neill developed a plan for global warming in 2001 only to be undercut by an announcement by Condi Rice that the Bush administration didn’t believe the science.

Like Robert McNamara, O’Neill worked his way through school and up the corporate hierarchy. He didn’t have his Daddy to make his way for him as did the President. Thus, it was completely out of the question that Bush could advise or coach O’Neill.

However, in the past, many Presidents (like Harry Truman) have had the humility to learn from the help: Bush, the nadir of a generation, learns nothing.

O’Neill says (in The Price of Loyalty, an account of his tenure written by Ron Suskind) that the Inner Ring subscribed more cleanly to the Bush “ideology”. The problem is that if an ideology is something that can be described, there is none, only a nihilistic vacuum, a destructive cyclone, at the center of which is the negative energy of mere grabbing for advantage while the Republic goes to hell. This Heart of Darkness centers around Rove. O’Neill, as an ordinary good man who rose from poverty to head Alcoa by hard work, as Alan Greenspan rose within the Federal Reserve from the lowly position of Cobol programmer to the chairmanship, just lacks the moral imagination to see that over time, American business has become nihilistic.

If you focus on the measure exclusively, then you become such a gamesman that nothing matters except an abstract success. In particular, the contributions of your programmers become meaningless because guess what? You don't care about "reality" even in the form of correspondence of code and specs.

The result was that O’Neill was replaced by a far more nondescript businessman, the CEO of a railroad, who was sure unlike O’Neill not to speak his mind and was more concerned, when hired, about arranging his pay packet (which was obscenely generous compared to what the average American, even many CEOs, make).

John Snow then “focused” on short term projects exclusively such as getting the Chinese to agree to the recent small revaluation of the Yuan, which will benefit only a few American manufacturers so foolish as to make shoes and shirts using American workers. The change will also drive interest rates up as China loses interest in American debt and could well undercut the housing boom.

China has been permitted to grow in an unmanaged way and no realistic pressure has been brought to bear on its Leninist government, with the result that today the South China Morning Post, long based in Hong Kong, has to carry with a straight face articles one would expect to find in Pravda. Today we are solemnly warned by Beijing to be ware of spies in our midst, Western technicians and Ghost Teachers who are swiping Chinese technical secrets.

Yeah, right. I found no special secrets in China software. It took me 15 minutes to get on the internet on the mainland because outside of Hong Kong, perl scripts (I suppose) “sniff” my content for naughty words such as Falun Gong and Chiang Kai Shek.

The Bush administration’s “pressure” has consisted of unrealistic lectures which have nothing to do with China’s experience. Pressure on China to become a more open society (which I personally define as one where women are in high positions while also being mothers as in France: one in which obviously gay men are out of the closet) has to take into account the Century of Humiliation and the chaos caused by the 1840 Tai-ping rebellion, which showed the danger of spreading ideas amongst millions and today billions of the folk.

China needs a Way, China needs a Tao, for recognizing Zhou Blow without galvanizing him into a destructive crowd. Data systems might provide this Way as long as his right to privacy can be respected. But as a gweilo I have little enough to say on this matter, only that there is a dangerous apolitical sense in China, an alienation from the very idea that one has any rights other than the right to work six days a week.

But even my rudimentary knowledge is missing in the Bush admin and in the Republican Congress. A recent study discovered that among Congressional aides claiming China expertise, only 5% could even identify China’s premiere Wen JuBao or its president Hu Juntao. We’re like, Hu? Wen? Whu?

These aides are “the best and the brightest”. They are not underachieving schmoes like me with a degree from Roosevelt who had to drop out of MSCS and who learns as the wild sheep defecate, at random. They went to Princeton and to Yale.

However, they were selected for ideological purity, mostly adherence to the Republican programme, and knowledge of simple geopolitics is today considered, as it was in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a sign that one is entirely too big for one’s britches.

According to O'Neill, Karl Rove's mantra is "nobody knows anything". To Rove, politics is merely manipulating the destructive emotions of the voters, the base, who will always vote for you. As long as you get these morons to actually vote, nothing further need be considered.

As a result, on The Island of the Ghost Teachers, I get the feeling that even as my British colleagues are one with Nineveh and Tyre insofar as they represent the British Empire, so too am I as on dune and headland sinks the American fire.

Nice going, Monkey Boy. Thanks for nothing. As it is, I can spend all my savings on a one-way flight back to America and (after refreshing my technical skills, in particular by getting up to speed on C# as opposed to VB) hunt for a development job, while working at a stopgap such as part-time computer teaching.

Or, running for President on the Socialist ticket. Har!

Or, I can loll on the beach on Lamma while teaching English (which I do enjoy), perhaps VB and compsci topics. But guess what! The standard work week here is six days.

Life goes on. Certainly, chilling on Lamma is preferable to driving from Evanston, Illinois, to Lombard, Illinois in freezing rain to convert a POS system from VB-6 to .Net, working (as I did at NewsAmerica Marketing) 18 hours straight to Get It Done On Time. And owing to the long commute from Lamma Island to Hong Kong, by way of a ferry (HMS Nearer My God to Thee) I can develop spinoza, my new language and paradigm with one hand on the keyboard and another on the mizzenmast as we bound over the wave.

It is in fine the life for a roaring boy:

O ‘tis the life for a roaring boy
To sail so far over the wave
With her affections so to toy
In many a city oh so brave

For I am just old enough to have read Stout Hearted Stories for Boys, in which young Jack, having gotten (in the part they don’t tell you about) fair Jill in the family way, lights out for the horizon.

Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.