Suddenly, there was a Chinese woman in my church. In the midst of a sea of German surnames, half-strangers repeating their Sunday routines of sleepy sermons, handshakes with ho-hum greetings, coffee and juice and cookies and bars over featureless pleasant talk of football games and school holidays and college majors and soup suppers, and me having the same words on the Ten Commandments and free grace being shuffled through the same worn paths in my mind while my heart ached like young Joseph in Egypt as a slave, seemingly denied his grand dreams, or Moses in Egypt as a young man yearning to flee the glut of sensual opulence for a humble place out past the wilderness with the children of God- there, in the midst of this rut we were all ready to customarily cycle through again, sitting in a pew beside the 90-year old former school teacher whose slowed speech and movement belied her keen wit, sat a middle-aged Chinese woman, whom I vaguely dreamed of but never expected to find, in my church.
Of course, that first week, I was too meek and shy to approach her, and I could think of no excuse to broach a conversation besides my teeming curiosity. But all the traditional church routines repeat themselves without variance- week after week, no questions brooked- and this Chinese woman seemed to be getting along quite well with the oldest member of our church. Strangely, it seemed as if she would be returning next week and becoming part of the pattern. And maybe, just maybe, I thought within my timid soul, I would meet her, and I would have my stepping stone, or my bridge, to something new.
Me with Caili
A year before, I had made a desperate attempt to escape my inertia. I could find no social or business chain to link me to my dreams, but a thought had been growing in me since college that my way out to a new world, where I would have the chance to work and pursue the life I believed in, where I would have the chance to be someone, where I could experience the far-off lands I was secretly infatuated with, was through teaching English overseas.
While this daydream grew and I nurtured it by scouring websites and forums online, I stumbled in that I had no outside experience to justify taking the giant leap from my local part-time job at a failing small business to a teaching position at a school in the Eastern Hemisphere.
At first, I thought I could only justify such a venture by going to graduate school. I had studied English in college, which was a good fit for teaching English as a second language (ESL), but I avoided any teaching classes at the time, thinking that becoming an average public school teacher meant becoming an average person. It would mean a trade-off from aspiring to advance my own work and beliefs in whatever adventurous frontier I might find myself, towards subordinating myself to the soft ultimatums of my conforming, contemporary society. Teaching in America would mean a respectable job, yes, and insurance and health benefits, job security and a strong résumé, the chance to be an upstanding member of the community and form a social network and start a family and buy a house and get fat and have vacations and plan a retirement and live a middle-class life with conventional middle-class opinions and aspirations and all that. But at what cost? Live a predictable life because I knew it would be safe and insulated from risk or challenge or isolation or failure? And let my greater beliefs quietly cool and die? Live and die the easy way? No, that was not what life was meant for.
Except, now that I had reached the conclusion that overseas English jobs were my best gateway to opportunity, the value of teaching training had become so much more sensible. I began to have regrets and considered that the only way to rectify the situation and prepare myself for a life abroad would be a master’s degree.
I went so far as to complete an application at my local university and alma mater when a chance meeting with an old acquaintance changed my course. He advised me from personal experience that grad school for teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) was, like all master’s degree programs, time-consuming and very expensive, and considering all the overseas schools that were hiring American teachers with any and all undergraduate degrees, largely unnecessary.
“Don’t be like me,” he said playfully, “because then you’ll have a lot of student loan and credit card debt, and you’ll feel stressed, and you won’t be happy.”
To be happy, he suggested, take a 4-week intensive ESL teaching course instead, one that is nuts and bolts in scope, and comes from an internationally well-respected school. Or, just apply directly to the English program for public schools in South Korea.
Since Korea had already been on my mind and my friendly adviser assured me about it from his own experience, I thought why not? What is there holding me back now?
I let my acceptance letter to grad school sit unanswered, and right thereafter I began filling out forms online, working through the months long, fastidious process of gathering documents like letters of recommendation, a federal background check, and a notary-stamped diploma.
I wavered along the way, still without any teaching training or classroom experience yet to prepare me for the looming test of being stood in front of a group of Korean students and occupying their attention for forty minutes in a foreign language. And each week, and each drawn-out task of document collecting, seemed to chip away at my initial enthusiasm. I had a struggle to raise my confidence to explain this foreign quest I was up to whenever anyone asked about my work plans and why I was biding my time at a hole-in-the-wall retail shop. This adventure seemed to be receding further away into fantasyland, more and more remote in possibility.
It certainly lost urgency for my then manager, who took weeks of diffident prodding to finally sit down and write me a recommendation letter. In fact, he took so long that I missed out on entering Korea’s national program- the number of applicants was already full.
As consolation, I was informed that I could switch my application to a similar program for the province outside Seoul.
At this point, I was faced with another unexpected choice. Immediately after I heard that I had missed the initial intake, a friend from my gym started talking to me about a job referral at the the company where he worked. By this time, my doubts were beginning to eclipse my eagerness to teach overseas. My original prayer was that God would pull me out of the forgotten pit I was in, set me up with respectable work and a clear mission in life, and make a real man out of me. So, when I went to go have a look at my friend’s local company and saw fast-talking adults dressed in business wear, shuttling around the smart expanses of a new building, busying themselves on their computers, and calling owners and managers across the country with seemingly urgent business, I felt the pull. The chance to be a respectable adult looked so immediately before me. And when the hiring manager told me a good first year would mean $50,000, I reasoned that not only would the experience give me the chance to prove myself, the money I made would allow me to travel Asia however I wanted- self-sufficient.
I turned the pending job offer in Korea down.
It would prove a mistake I had to live with.
The next nine months I spent tenuously hanging onto a hated job that my friend summed up as “glorified telemarketing.” The dirty business was all about breaking through the defensive lines of secretaries and middle men, then pressuring the checkbook holder at whichever car dealership was being called to sign up for a junk mail campaign designed by our company. I look on the whole enterprise now with complete revulsion, and also I react with disbelief that I could have been so naive and weak to think my continued employment there meant I had a no-quit attitude like a real man should, when I see clearly in hindsight that since making pushy cold calls was so loudly against my conscience it would only have been in keeping with my integrity to have walked into my manager’s cubicle as early as I sensed so and quit on the spot.
And while I state this with indignation, to my shame I followed my managers’ and co-workers’ aggressive advice as best as my unsure, awkward self could. I harried many weary secretaries, and in the off-chance I didn’t end up in voicemail, I made modest and embarrassed pushes to follow my boss’s instructions to harass the dealership managers into buying until they either did so or I “made them hang up on me.”
Midway through my futile struggle to maintain employment is when I was introduced to Ma Caili, or following Western conventions of family name last, Caili Ma. Sure enough, as I had predicted, she was back in the church pew the next week with her elderly friend, Ann. And my hope to meet her did not go unfulfilled. Caili Ma was spirited enough in her pursuit of learning English and meeting Americans that she had already met with the church pastor for language exchange and Bible study. He told me all about it when he suggested to me that, given my background as an English major and interest in teaching overseas, I might be the best person to meet with Caili.
So, I happily did, albeit nervously and without a clear idea of how I should proceed.
Our first Sunday afternoon meeting, I struck out after attempting to have Caili read a Dr. Seuss book aloud while I critiqued her pronunciation. She must have been less than impressed with my lesson (I feel embarrassed looking back on it) since from then on she initiated teaching Chinese lessons to me. This arrangement worked itself out naturally for the rest of the Sunday afternoons that summer. I was very curious to begin a language study of Chinese, and come to find out, Caili had been a Chinese language teacher over the past six years when she had been living in South Korea, so she already had a methodology worked out to teach me. She thought I was a clever student, I felt very lucky to have her tutor me, and so we progressed through the basics of Chinese until I could have back-and-forth conversations with her by speaking the simplest of phrases like “Who is he?” and “He is a man.”
Meanwhile, I helped Caili out with favors like rides to the supermarket, taking her around used-car shopping, and eventually, giving her driving lessons. In all her years living in China and South Korea, Caili had either relied on public transportation or her rich Korean boyfriend’s chauffeur. Living in America, without owning a car, meant Caili was dependent on others for not just simple errands around town, but also in determining what work she could do and where she could live.
Caili had told me that she wanted to live permanently in the United States. She assured me it was a better country to live in than China by far, it would give her the grounds to sponsor her teenage daughter and bring her to America for college, and now that Caili was a baptized Christian, she would no longer be welcome to resume her professorship back in China among the officially Communist faculty.
But life in Iowa didn’t have enough to offer to keep Caili in place. Sure, she had her close friends like Ann and me that she would have to make her tearful goodbyes to, but her student visa at the local university was about to expire, and she needed to find work and a home of her own.The obvious choice to Caili was to join up with one of her friends in Los Angeles and find work among the network of people she was bound to meet in Chinatown.
And although her friends in town rightly told her she was crazy for the idea, Caili was determined to drive herself in her new (used) car all the way out to the West Coast. So, I mapped out the tamest route of six-hour driving days I could find for her, booked six nights of hotel stays along the way, and just like that, after only a couple months of driving experience and a couple seasons of brief but bright friendship, Caili was off to California.
Our quiet college town couldn’t keep her in place, and I couldn’t say it had much attraction left for me either. My time at my sales job was clearly coming to a close- I was at the point where it was obvious not only to myself in the dejected way I dialed the receptionists I knew would mechanically send me off to a voice mailbox without any confrontation, but also to my formerly friendly manager who had lost sympathy for me as the not even lukewarm leads I used to bring him dried up. I was making neither progress nor money for a company whose lifeblood, vision, and creed were all money and its making.
The only things keeping me in my place were my inability to muster the courage to outright quit and my lack of another job to transition to, so I can’t say it came as a surprise when my manager called me in for a late Friday afternoon meeting, accompanied by the Human Resources lady.
After drying my tears in the bathroom, I went out to the empty sales floor to shamefully clear off my desk as upbeat pop music softly echoed from the speaker system, then drove home with the familiar gray horizon of unemployment before me.
In my doldrums again, I had no thought for another job or career track- nothing I could realistically approach- and I suppose I would have been left to my own listless devices if it had not been for another unlikely meeting just a few weeks prior.
A gray horizon and a mysteriously winding path.
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