Go with Henry: Teaching English in 'Shoe city'

Thursday, 11 August 2005

Teaching English in 'Shoe city' - Houjie

English teacher in China

Houjie

Southern China

March 2005 – August 2005

The story…

During my first 8 months in Mainland China, in 2005, I taught ESL (English as a Second language) in Guangdong province.

I left South Africa in June of 2003 to go and teach ESL in Taiwan. I stayed for 18 months in Taiwan and then decided to also experience mainland China. I stayed for a period of 19 months in China.

After two months of working for the Bond Institute in Zhongshan, I decided to accept a position with Skyline English. They placed me at the Oxford Bi-lingual school in Houjie, near Dongguan, where I taught Kindergarten. I shared an apartment with two other South Africans, Andrew, and Dylan. It was during this time that I took extra part-time jobs to make a little extra cash.

One day I took a taxi from Dongguan, where I had morning lessons for extra money, back to Houjie to teach employees at a shoe company. There was a heavy rain shower and the road was flooded. We could go no further. I saw some people wading through the river of water towards the other side, and as I wanted to keep my appointment, I decided to follow suit. As I was about halfway through, I stepped into something....I’m not sure what it was....but it cut a deep gash into my ankle, nearly amputating my foot.

A Chinese guy saw what took place and carried me on his back to the other side. They hailed a taxi and got me to a hospital in Houjie, where they stitched me back together again. I had to spend 3 days in the hospital. The company paid for all the expenses. A young Chinese doctor had pity on me and bought me three meals a day....as hospitals in China don’t prepare meals.

During my stay in Houjie, I took a 5 day trip to Beijing. I got to see the Great Wall of China near Beijing and took the most beautiful pictures.

I also explored the Houjie area quite extensively by bicycle. At the end of my term at Houjie, we did a summer camp for kids at coincidentally the exact same school in Zhongshan I initially taught at when I arrived in China.

In August of 2005, I accepted an ESL position with Delter Telfort in Nanjing, teaching English to college students.

Downtown Houjie during a rain shower

About China

China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia. It’s the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion. The state is governed by the Communist Party of China and its capital is Beijing.

It exercises jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing) and two mostly self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau). It also claims sovereignty over Taiwan.

The country's major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, and Hong Kong.

It covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometers. China is the world's second-largest state by land area and either the third - or fourth-largest by total area, depending on the method of measurement.

China has a vast and diverse landscape, ranging from the Gobi and Taklimakan Deserts in the arid north to subtropical forests in the wetter south. The Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir, and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from much of South and Central Asia.

The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third- and sixth-longest in the world, respectively, run from the Tibetan Plateau to the densely populated eastern seaboard. China's coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometers long (Wikipedia).

View from my apartment in Houjie

About Houjie

Houjie is a town under the jurisdiction of Dongguan, a prefecture-level city in Guangdong province, in Southern China. Houjie Town is located at the east bank of the Pearl River Delta, the middle section of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen economic corridor.

In the south, it borders Humen Port, and in the north, it links to the Dongguan city proper. There is a total area of 126.15 square kilometers under its jurisdiction, with a permanent population of 93,000, and more than 400,000 as a temporary population.

It is a town of old and prosperous business and trade, rich in products like Guancao (Dongguan Grass) and sausages renowned both home and abroad. Its industrial, commercial and trading enterprises were all set up and developed from traditional lines and are thriving and deeply rooted in Houjie Town.

Throughout 30 years of reform and opening up, rural industrialization and urbanization were achieved, making the town a new modernized industrial town of the Pearl River Delta region. Houjie town is famous for her shoes design and manufacturing center, and mainly in branded shoes (Wikipedia).