Forbidden Voices: The ALEX BARTEAU ASIAN QUARTET, #1

By Charles Justus Garard

Alex Barteau is teaching in a small urban college in Atlanta, Gerogia, when the situation, despite his having tenture, starts looking bleak. Accreditation for the school and its financial viability appear to be endangered. When Alex discusses this with a Chinese colleague, the latter suggests that he apply to teach at a university in China.  After some hesitation, he applies to a particular university in northeast China and is accepted.

This is a definitive change-of-life situation for him as this requires adapting to an entire different system of education, including standards that Alex finds questionable. Some students find him to be too strict, but most parents appreciate his high standards. 

Eventually, he meets a lovely Chinese teacher from south China and they drift into an affair.

He also meets teaching colleagues from Austrailia, Canada, England, and Ireland -- several of whom remain his friends for years.

His main problems stem from student ccomplaints and requests/demands from administrators that he change grades, inflating them to make the school and the students look better.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Justus Garard
• Release date: Apr 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393162919

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All Rights Reserved

Copyright

Copyright by Charles Justus Garard 2016

With thanks to all the foreign experts like Shila, Mel, and Dave

As well as the anchors Mien, Kevin,

Tom, Sam

And special thanks to

Shenglian Luo and Zhang Yuhua

_____________________________________________________________

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What I discovered when I first went to China to teach was that many of us were misfits, like volunteers in the Foreign Legion. We all had different reasons for coming to China, and not all of us, I soon realized, were really teachers. We were called Foreign Experts, which really meant nothing other than that we were native speakers of English. We were regarded as freaks, we were spied on, we were exploited, we were glared and even elbowed by Chinese males when they saw us with their women. We were sometimes cheated, and, occasionally, by students’ mothers, we were even admired.   

Alex, the American

___________________________

Not everyone admires foreigners who come to China to find a good job merely because they are native speakers of English. Many with no degrees or community college degrees find an easy living here.  Yet some Chinese wonder why foreign experts come to a strange country so far from their homeland, cutting themselves off from relationships and connections back home.   

Dawn, Alex’s Chinese girl friend

___________________________

"Ahhh, those funny days when laowai ex-pats engaged in titanic, vicious struggles to achieve phantasmagorical leadership roles in their puny little outposts of their vapid minds in foreign lands by trying to establish a Hollywood image they could never have achieved in their homeland. It's more than a virus, which some laowai, particularly but not solely the female kind, are prone to suffer from, it's a veritable disease of egocentricity coupled with dictatorial predilections. Been there & suffered enough through the machinations of those addled wet brains. I had my fill of those razor clawed vixens and their male counterparts.

Claude, Alex’s Canadian colleague

___________________________

Chapter One

~

August 2003

"When I heard that an American PhD was coming to our university, I wondered why. Why was he coming here and not to a level-one university in Beijing or Shanghai?  Most of the foreigners we saw teaching here were strange to us – strange in appearance, strange in behavior. 

"The first time I saw the American was at the banquet for the Foreign Languages Department held in the International Hotel. He sat there at the round table two tables away from me, staring forward most of the time. He didn’t say much to the loud Canadian who sat next to him on his left, or to the Chinese teacher on his right.  He did not stand when the Dean of Foreign Languages introduced him as the new English professor. He did not even stand up to shake hands when the Dean introduced him directly to our president.

"After that, I didn’t pay much attention. I sang songs with the Japanese instructor while the others played some kind of guessing games.

"The second time I saw him was at the special lecture in the large classroom. This was in the middle of October. I went, as one of the Chinese teachers of English in the department, because I wanted to hear what a professor sounded like. The sign outside the building said his name was Alex Barteau PhD and that he would lecture about archetypes in literature. He drew images of a house on the blackboard, which was supposed to represent the human mind. When one of the masters-level instructors asked if he wanted to use a microphone, he said that he wouldn’t need it. The room was full of students, and many of them, attending only because they were graduating, were unable to understand his English very well. However, because he walked around the large room as he spoke and because he had a voice that sounded like an actor on a stage, they could certainly hear him.

"I noticed that he sweat a lot. The back of his shirt was wet throughout his talk. I guess it is good that he did not know it.

"He called on me one time when I raised my hand. He didn’t say my answer was right, but he didn’t say it was wrong either. It had to do with red as one of the symbols he was talking about.

"I couldn’t tell his age exactly. He wasn’t young. He had wavy light-colored hair that was long in the back, and he was overweight. He didn’t wear his shirt like any of the Chinese men his age; the first two or three buttons were unfastened, and this caused some of the girl students and Chinese women teachers to stare at him. Not many Chinese men had hair on their chests like this man did.

If anyone had told me at that moment that I would have a relationship with him that would last even after he moved on from here to another university down south below Shanghai, I would have shaken my head. I had my plans all mapped out. I had no interest, like some of the Chinese women, in getting involved with these strange foreigners.

Dawn [Zhu Yang]

*

Chapter Two

~

August 2004

The Chinese waitress’ hips as she walked away from their table rolled gently under her tight black pants.

Alex watched her from their booth as he jabbed his chopsticks into the broccoli and processed chicken dish, which the kitchen had prepared specially for my diet. As he did, he raised his eyes to the buffet table beyond her and saw Rina grinning at him. She stood next to the steam table where all of the offered items were fried foods.

I saw that, she said. She lowered her chin and stared over her glasses like she sometimes did in mock disapprobation.

Hey, I didn’t do anything. Did I, Darryl? I didn’t tell her to lean on my shoulder while she was looking at my chopsticks.

Darryl Burns stabbed at the fried fish cake on his messy plate with his fork and ducked forward slightly as he lowered his voice. No, he said barely above a whisper, but you kinda started things when you were using your chopstick to bat at her dangling strand of hair.

In the current fashion of wearing one strand of hair down in front of one’s forehead, the waitress had hung her own single strand over Alex’s plate as she tried to read the ideogram inscription on the ivory chopsticks he had brought with him.

Alex brought his own chopsticks into most of the Chinese restaurants in Atlanta, as he did this Chinese buffet every Thursday night, not because of health reasons. He did so because he liked the feel of them in his grip, as opposed to the small throwaway, break-apart wooden chopsticks that the restaurant furnished with the meal. These sticks were a gift from a friend he had known since graduate school, someone who knew how he liked things Asian.

He shrugged at his colleague. Oh, well. She’s wearing her blouse open a little, so getting her to lean over a little more was not a bad thing.

Darryl produced his biggest grin. No, Alex.

Darryl’s wife was Japanese.

At that moment, Rina spoke with the manager of the restaurant, pointing to something in one of the buffet trays.

Rina’s not gonna miss you when you’re in China?

She hasn’t said, Alex told him.

She will.

Been very helpful with getting the Visa and the airline tickets through the Chinese travel agency.

Darryl tilted his head slightly from one side to the other. No talk about marriage?

You think so? A lot of couples live together without tying the knot.

Yeah. . .

If we get married, we’ll both probably want a divorce in a short time.

You think so?

It’s happened three times already. Too quickly a woman becomes like my mother – controlling and possessive. Rina already had those controlling tendencies.

Hmmph. Darryl kept his head lowered.

This way, he said, Rina is still in my life. Still my friend.

A look of admiration crept into Darryl’s face. I can see that. My wife and I are probably the ones who are unusual – staying married for twenty-five years.

Not really. My two sisters have stayed married to the same man for about that long.

You think China will resolve some problems for you?

Alex snickered and dipped the ends of his sticks into the low-salt sauce in the shallow they had prepared for him on the side. Yeah. Being unemployed.

Darryl smiled. Well. I didn’t mean that.

I’ve looked at articles about people teaching overseas. People go to teach English in China or somewhere else because they have problems at home. Doesn’t solve anything, from what I’ve read. If you’ve got a problem here, going abroad is not going to make it better.

Might make it worse.

Alex nodded.

Yeah. But you didn’t apply at many colleges here, did you?

A few. No luck.

What about community colleges?

I went to jail working for a community college.

Darryl’s mouth gaped. He studied Alex’s face for a moment, squinting. When was that?

1980. I thought I told you.

Where? Here in Georgia?

Back in Illinois. I was a part-time faculty member walking the picket line, and the police hauled us away for blocking access to the campus.

What was the reason?

They wanted to meddle with our contracts – issue individual contracts. In other words, break our union.

Bad luck seems to dog you like a curse. You go to jail in Illinois. Here, you’re front row center in Atlanta to see Manfred Green go down the drain. If you take Xing Hao’s advice and head across the ocean, you might take the curse with you.

How many times, Alex asked himself, had he considered writing an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about what was going on at Manfred Green College? He had tried to convince his office mate, Edward Smithers, who often spouted complaints in the privacy of their office, to pen an article with him. Since their office was practically hidden at the end of the corridor beyond the classrooms used by the art department, they could rant about anything that wanted to. Even their colleague from the art department, Darryl Burns, often came into their office and threatened to spill information to an attorney about the practices of the current administration. Neither of them, however, wanted to submit an article to the number one national publication dedicated to issues involving colleges and universities.

They won’t print it, said Edward. He was a southern-born academic who had grown up in southwest Georgia and expressed his opinions in a heavy drawl. Because of his long gray hair, some of the students referred to him as a confederate Civil War soldier.

You were a newspaperman, Darryl interjected. You know how certain things don’t get published. He was a mid-westerner like Alex and often chuckled when Alex referred to Edward as Stonewall or the Colonel. He was portlier than either of them, but when he was growing his reddish beard and Alex was letting his blondish-red beard flourish, students said they resembled each other.

Yeah, but I worked for an advertising newspaper, guys. Most of our news was just filler stuff. Our purpose was to make money from ads, not fight any causes.

Plus, said Darryl. How would it look if three professors like us complained in print?

The same as its going to look when a non-minority dude files a law suit against a minority college. The same as it looks when we raise any complaint about students being graduated even though they fail our classes. The same as it looks if we mention that the administrators earn above the national average while the faculty are paid below the average – particularly English teachers and art teachers.

Alex and Darryl had arrived at Manfred Green College during the same school year: Alex had been hired to teach English composition and World Literature, and Darryl had come to organize a new architecture program. Edward had joined the Humanities Department three years later, and Xing Hao, their Chinese colleague who had earned his PhD at Emory University, arrived three years after that.

Edward had been the first to leave; he had taken a position at a high school in North Atlanta. When he realized that he had made a mistake by quitting, Alex and others in his department tried to get him rehired. Their efforts turned out to be fruitless. Many teachers and administrators resented Edward’s departure, despite warnings from his colleagues, and were not about to be forgiving.

Sixteen years after Alex and Darryl had arrived, the college began downsizing its faculty and staff because of the possibility that it might be stripped of its membership in the Southern Association of Colleges Schools. When the darkest event that could ever befall a college did actually happen, and Manfred Green, situated next to other historically black colleges just west of downtown Atlanta, finally and officially lost its accreditation, the administrators became desperate. One step was to find other organizations that would accept the college as a member, but even membership in lesser academic organizations was denied.  The students were the first to flee the sinking ship.

Unfortunately, both Darryl and Xing Hao had been dismissed the year before the down-sizing. Hao, even with his PhD, had only been able to find two part-time positions at area community colleges, and Darryl, with his terminal degree in architecture, had been hired at a proprietary school. Alex had remained at Manfred Green one more year, joining a skeletal crew of instructors while the college struggled along with an enrollment barely reaching one hundred and fifty students.

Xing Hao was the colleague who had suggested, since Alex didn’t have a family at home as he did, that he consider teaching in China. He even forwarded a web site to his email address – twice, because he had lost it the first time.

A van with a noisy rattle nuzzled its way into a narrow space in front of the restaurant’s picture window. Alex pulled myself around in the padded booth to stare outside. The sky was a dark blue and purple as the sun sank into the west, and it created a wallpaper-like backdrop for the Afro-American couple emerging from the vehicle.

But . . . this last year, he said as he watched the couple enter the Chinese restaurant, teaching with only two or three students in each class was just a way of watching Manfred Green die an agonizing death.

If only they could retire the debt.

How? Alex made a face at him. They want to be forgiven the debt. They know they will never be able to get enough donations to cover it. What’s the old saying: ‘Pouring good money after bad’?

You’re lucky they pay you.

The checks clear. Alex looked at the window as the sky darkened, and in the glass he saw a reflection of the two perpendicular buffet tables. And that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes faculty checks didn’t clear.

Rina was pointing toward him.

The Chinese-Malaysian manager looked toward Alex and nodded. He grinned and waved.

Alex swung around to look at the buffet lines. He waved back.

Evidently Rina was explaining how Alex would be teaching in the manager’s home country.

When she dismissed herself from his presence, he watched her as she returned to their booth.

I’ll talk to my attorney, Darryl told him. Go talk to the newspaper. You still carry your press card?

Alex felt for the wallet in his back pocket. Yeah, I have it. I even still pay my dues. But we’re running out of time.

Rina pulled back the chair, which she had added to the end of the booth table and sat gracefully. He told me, she said,  to tell you that the Chinese food in northern China is not like the Chinese food here in America.

Alex nodded at her and smiled. I’ve heard that. He returned his attention to Darryl.

Well, Darryl continued, the minute you get a . . . see . . . that’s why I told you it was important that you get a renewal.  A contract. You know, at least an offer. Without that, you don’t have anything to stand on.

No one has.

If they don’t offer you a contract, you definitely should talk to my attorney.

Alex exhaled loudly.

Darryl was sounding like a recorded tape that someone kept rewinding.

Maybe. I wrote that deposition for you, didn’t I?  We had it notarized at the bank, didn’t we?

I appreciate it.

Also, I talked to TIAA. They said the school was doing the same thing with them: playing shuffling games. The school will go for a long time without sending in anything, and then they’ll send in three payments at once. I told this to Gail in Human Resources, and she said: ‘Oh, no. No. . . .’

"She’s told to say that, Alex. And the administrators can lie without blinking an eye. What about our health plan – our HMOs and PPOs?"

I talked to the provided rep. The guy said, ‘Hold on. I have to do some research.’ And he dug into the files.

Uh-huh.

’Cause I want to find out what I should do while I’m overseas. And I found that they hadn’t been sending the payments in to them either. And they’re erratic when they do.

I’m sure that’s a state insurance violation. I mean, that’s insurance fraud, really.

So I told Gail: ‘I talked to them on the phone.’ She shut up then.

I’ll bet.

Alex gripped his chopstick that his imagination had suddenly metamorphosed into a dagger. That’s not even their money. It’s ours. I don’t think they can use our backs to balance their budget. There aren’t enough of us.

Darryl hunched over his plate. You paid for that insurance policy. You paid for it in good faith. And if they haven’t been sending the money in . . . that’s fraud.

What about . . . in my department . . . Ed Bailey? He went to the dentist in pain, and they wouldn’t take him because the college had not sent in our payments. So he went out into the parking lot and cried to himself.

He what?

"That’s the story our secretary tells that story over and over again. He cried because he was