Rent Free: The Futility of the Power We Give People

Every morning, my colleagues and I stand at the front gate of our preschool and welcome the children to school. We all stand there for one hour and chit-chat, commiserate, joke, and scheme.

Each morning around 8:10 am, the principal snaps a picture of us.

This is my first year at this kindergarten, and from the moment I started, I kept hearing the same name over and over.

We will call her “L.”

She was the informal leader of the foreign teachers at the other campus and, by extension, our campus.

Her rank was a battlefield promotion more than a merit-based one.

She simply did not quit as fast as everyone else.

One day, I noticed a message in the leading group chat for every campus.

“Please ensure that you do not have your hands in your pockets when you greet the children in the morning.”

She posted this in a group of hundreds of employees, including the CEO of the company and all the administrators, before she thought to message anyone of the “perps” who salaciously had their hands in their pockets.

Many of the silly hoops we have to jump through at work are the product of unnecessary implementations she has added to our workload.

The government requires a handwritten assessment of each day’s lesson.

Nobody reads it.

I used it as an emotional vent during my most stressful days last semester.

I am the only person that speaks English at this English school.

I am alone in the classroom, and the students are falling behind.

I can’t manage 17 three-year-olds and teach them simultaneously.

We have above-average pictures of below-average students.

Nobody reads them. They just need to go to a stack for some bureaucrat to check they are done.

I am convinced my school will one day collapse in on itself due to the weight of unnecessary paperwork.

At the other campus, she makes them write in English, translates them into Mandarin, and include all appropriate learning objectives from the IEYC curriculum.

My colleagues and I perched in front of the school for months and complained about her.

My Canadian coworker went to blows with her over the first aid course.

He never received the login information and, due to the excessive workload, forgot about it until the last week it was due. He finally received his information a day before it was due and missed the deadline.

It wasn’t a hard, fast deadline.

She set an arbitrary deadline to use us as show ponies at the company picnic.

She publicly shamed him for missing the group deadline.

The text drama that ensued was the highlight of last semester.

One day in December, a message rang out over the group chat.

“Congratulations, L welcome aboard the administrative staff. Everyone, please welcome the new Vice Principal of Foreign Teachers L”

A collective “Oh Shit” Descended over us.

The internal battles with the archetype of a shitty boss swelled in numbers in all of our heads.

There were talks of her spending three days a week at our campus.

She started training seminars, and in them, she condescendingly assumed we were all failures at our jobs. She didn’t know me; she had never seen my classroom, and she didn’t know my teaching style, but she assumed I needed her to save me.

My pride, sense of accomplishment, and goals all dissolved into the fear and frustration of trying to survive my new boss.

The semester ended, but the group messages and unnecessary expectations never stopped. I ignored my group chat for the entire month.

On my return to China, after the holiday, I decided to check the group messages.

“L” was gone!

It turns out the CEO didn’t know about her promotion. The CEO was fine with giving her the title, but she was not fine with a foreigner working outside of the classroom.

At the end of the day, we are dancing monkeys. Outside of the classroom, we serve no value here in China. They can pay a Chinese administrator one-quarter of what they have to pay a foreign teacher.

“L” had turned herself into Iccarus and tried to soar with the gods, only to melt her wings and crash back to earth.

Her pride would not accept the “demotion,” and she promptly quit.

For months, my coworkers and I let “L” live in our minds as a future adversary — an enemy waiting to pour over the walls of our tranquil little preschool kingdom.

I gave her so much of my mental peace.

And then she was gone.

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