“After my intense stomachache incident today, I decided to have a c-section in the future instead of giving natural birth. I know it’s RANDOM, but who have thought of that too??”

“You can’t escape pain: I had two natural births and felt fantastic afterwards. Several friends of mine have had planned c-sections and felt like they’d been run over by a truck for 6 weeks. Babies are meant to come out your vagina, that’s what its made for xxx”

“Not my vag!”

“2 posh 2 push”

“You’re a woman, you’re supposed to be strong”

…

Stay tuned for the next riveting installment.

Probably because I was in denial over being uni-bound the next day (and probably because I ate too much spanikopita at the Sydney Road Street Party), I didn’t check my university email or do anything vaguely preparatory before my first official day at Melbourne Uni. Not that it mattered, really, except I was late for my first lecture and everybody there seemed to actually know what the “media and communications” part of our Media and Communications course means. Huhn. Well, I still stand by my “enrol in things randomly and it will probably work out” method of life advancement.

Also, they used a lot of big words. Sure, I knew what all the words were; I’d just never heard anyone say them aloud before.

Lunch

Didn’t meet anyone from my course. Ate lunch near (not actually on) the South Lawn, trying to work out how many people gathered around the Young Liberal BBQ were actually young Liberals and how many were just there for free sausages.

Japanese Lecture

Met some nice international students from Malaysia and China while waiting for the lecturer to arrive. Determined not to f**** up my brain by speaking Mandarin minutes before I started learning Japanese, so we chatted in English. Not that it made any difference. The Chinese students sitting in the row behind me spoke Mandarin throughout the entire lecture until I could barely control myself from turning around, grabbing a fistful of their glossy salon hair and screaming 闭嘴!!!! at them and other assorted Chinese curse words, if I knew any beyond “pighead” (which made me sad I didn’t learn any swear words in Shanghainese while I had the chance). This spectacle was avoided when the lecturer announced that we were expected to have learnt all forty-something hiragana (Japanese phonetic script) by the end of the week. Shit.

Language and Power in Asian Societies

Signing up for this seemed like a no-brainer, considering I’m currently learning two Asian languages. And it actually looks good. Really good. Especially once I get over the ferris wheel-like shift of lecturers and the fact that the subject has no textbook or reader or anything resembling hardcopy background reading material.

Tuesday

Tutorials don’t start until next week, so I actually had a day off. Finished reading Turnskin. Cleaned room. Taught my ESL kids how to structure an essay for one and a half hours, at least to those that managed to resist the doubtless temptations of the school swimming carnival and actually turned up.

Got home and stared at Finder no Shinjitsu scanlations until my eyes started bleeding, both from its incredible brilliance and borderline porno-ness.

Didn’t sleep until 1am. Woke up at 2am and wrote down first line of fourth novel. Double shit.

Wednesday

First Japanese tutorial. Discovered that several of my classmates already knew hiragana from primary school. Bah. Otherwise enjoyed Japanese’s omission of pronouns and articles. It makes life easier.

Chinese 2E

Which is apparently the level I’m at, at least according to the course coordinator and the one sentence of Chinese he heard me speak during the previous week’s paltry excuse for a placement test. The problem is my level is a lot higher than the textbook, or at least my vocabulary and reading comprehension is, but then I still struggle with the use of  extremely basic grammatical particles like ‘了’ and ‘过’. Urgh. Do I stay or do I go?

Thursday

Double Chinese today. With a four hour gap in between, of course.

Wowed the listening comprehension teacher by knowing what 混血 meant (mixed blood) without having any myself. Managed to work Taiwanese idol dramas into the class conversation.

Was blown out of the water with the difficulty of our listening pre-test after half an hour of my classmates (some of whom have only been learning Mandarin for two years compared to my seven!) mumble out their names and occupations. Listening test speakers sounded like they’d had an all night bender at a sake bar.

Spent four hour lunch break eating cheap pizza and copying my scrawled lecture notes into crisp Korean cat-patterned workbooks I bought in Shanghai.

Chinese Writing Class

I got to do some translations, which were fun until one of my new “I liked Chinese in High School but what on earth possessed me to enrol for this” friends informed me that I couldn’t use my electronic dictionary on our end of semester exam. Not even a print dictionary. In fact, we are allowed NO DICTIONARIES. Hmmm. Must start practising how to write 电影 from memory again. And every other word I’m supposed to know.

Friday

Japanese writing class in the morning, which was fun and relaxing once our tutor had finished her requisite “this course is too big: if your email us, we won’t answer you” speech. She is excellent, though, in the way that all tough-but-fair teachers are. And I met a girl called Ember. Yes, Ember. I want a noun for a name too.

Had lunch with bff at Tiamo on Lygon street. Ate pumpkin pizza and bitched endlessly and cathartically about life and whatnot. As you do. Then we laughed ourselves silly in Borders’ Romance section and then I went back to Northcote High to once again expunge the benefits of good essay structure to an ESL student with impending exams.

Something tells me I’m going to start having nightmares about body paragraphs.

I really enjoyed dipping my tow back into the arena of young adult writing and publishing after over half a year of disconnect in Shanghai’s barren wasteland of uncensored book blogs, but the problem was I was also inspired. Inspired to write fiction. Now. And this is bad, because:

a) University of Melbourne Orientation Week starts tomorrow, and next week I start university, and university does not hold back its punches (4 hours of lectures on a Monday, anyone? Starting at 9am!!!)**

b) I have to prepare work and lesson plans for my 2-hour after-school ESL (English as a Second Language) class and my Year 12 student, who now wants four hours of tuition a week. And something tells me they won’t have done their homework from last week…

c) Reminding people of my existence. Yes, this is still going on even though I’ve been back in Melbourne for almost a month (!)***. And the only way to remedy this sad state of affairs is by regularly dragging people off for lunch or, failing actual contact, writing on their FaceBook wall. All of this takes time, and the lunch side of the equation is eating through my tuition money like a verbal phrase high on fairy sprinkles.

d) I’m supposed to be editing the last book before I start writing the next one, and

e) I still haven’t finished my latest zine, the Extremely Essentialized Chinese Pocket Phrasebook for Foreign Interlopers, and the bits I have finished haven’t been re-translated into Chinese yet. And I’m also volunteering at Sticky every Saturday for five hours. Bloody addictive, but it does tend to disappear my Saturday.

And then there’s this blog, which I insist on keeping up despite its current appalling stats in the hope that one day someone besides my mother and best friend will actually read it. *flicks away tear*

And if all of those reasons don’t convince you why I don’t have time for writing prose, I’ve still somehow been roped into acting out my ongoing role as Northcote High School’s one-woman propaganda machine. My latest act: coming up with a (non-disparaging) quote for some brochure aimed at reminding parents of prospective Year 7 students that their children’s education does not actually end at Year 7 and may, in fact, continue into Year 8, but only if they show particularly promising signs of delinquency.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

“Studying at NHS from Year 7 to Year 12 felt like a journey taken with good friends. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard, but it was never boring, and even now I can’t shake off the sense of community I feel every time I come back.”

At the time I thought it did a pretty good job of being relatively positive without saying “My years at Northcote High School were the best of my life”, which was what the Assistant Principal suggested, even after I pointed out to him that that would be faint praise seeing as a third of my life has been spent at Northcote High.

But some further deconstruction:

• going through high school did feel like a journey, as do most linearly progressive years spent doing the same thing.
• I lie, sometimes it was boring. Which I thought would have been pretty obvious to anyone wondering why I had the time or the patience to write a novel when I was fifteen. The answer: Geography. I swear I wrote the entire thing during Year 9 Geography, after our teacher had finished her rants about last night’s episode of the Bold and the Beautiful.
• Yes, there is a sense of community at NHS. Just as I’m sure they’d be among battery hens and enclaves of necromancers (one of whom came along to yesterday’s Garth Nix talk wanting to compare notes about reanimating dead corpses with the author himself).

But whatever. Busy is better than being bored, and with the power of Procrastination on my side, I’ll have probably finished the new book by next week.

*The answer, you ask with baited breath? A mandarin.

**Which is the middle of the night according to my current sleeping pattern.

***Oh, Taiwan, how I pine for thee. Ye and yer great preponderance of cheap manga.

V: *feels self-satisfied*

Head of Media and Communications: “…of course, this just means you’ll all be competing fiercely against each other for good marks in your subjects.”

V: “shit.”

***

So I’m finally back home after five extremely excellent months living and travelling through Asia, which also means I’m currently in the throes of mild but everpresent reverse culture shock. Nothing’s upset or pissed me off too much so far, but I haven’t exactly re-integrated into society yet either. But seeing as it’s just a day after Australia Day** (which I only remembered after queueing behind some lobster-complexioned lasses in Australian flag dresses at the airport), I thought I’d share with you all my thoughts on being back in Melbourne.

1.  Where did all these pale, hairy, large-limbed and extremely loud people come from, and why are they speaking English?

2. Giving the trams a new exterior paint job does not make them any less infrequent and slow.

3. Ravioli! Ravioli! And the pizza…OMG, it actually tastes like food! *slobbers some*

4. $2.50 water? That’s so cheap! *mentally multiplies this by six* …or maybe not so cheap. But there’s something about overpriced Mount Franklin water that soothes the soul (and then you remember it’s owned by Coca-Cola).

5. People here read books in the wrong direction.

6. Melbourne’s skyscrapers are numerous enough to fit inside a petri dish.

7. I haz balcony. Hawr hawr hawr.

8. What do you mean I can’t have a 20 minute shower!?

9. People actually care when you accidentally bump into them.

10. Cats! I have cats again! *squeezes them both and consequently discovers a large deposit of fur on t-shirt* Cats…I have cats again…

Ah, Melbourne.***

*Paraphrased. It’s too early in the year to be taking notes.

**Referred to by me and mine more commonly as Invasion Day.

***I swear that’s not patriotism. It’s irony, or cynicism, or nostalgia. Or something.

Since then we’ve had one or two warmish days where I’ve managed to go outside in my cat t-shirt with the laser beams coming out of its eyes, but yesterday it started raining. Besides the long, guilt-free showers I can now have, one of the best parts about being in a country without water supply issues is that I can complain about the f***ing rain and not have to put the “at least it’ll be good for the garden/farmers/continued ability to survive” spin on it. That’s right rain, I hate you! Go away! Just dare to come down on my parade.*

I suppose one good thing about cold, wet weather is that it (kind of) gives me a justification for why I didn’t go outside and spent virtually all of yesterday in bed watching CSI: Miami and Star Trek. Usually I would fall upon my trusty “I was desperate to procrastinate from writing the manuscript” excuse, except I’d already written my scene for the day, and therefore had nothing to procrastinate from besides getting help on my next Green a Week translation.** So instead I can claim that I wanted to see images of warmer weather, and who doesn’t think of Miami crime procedurals when they’re in that situation? Also, David Caruso is hilarious. It took me a while to work out that the show wasn’t a comedy, and it’s all his fault.

As for Star Trek, what can I say? My brain’s rotted.

*The parade being the fifteen minute walk to the nearest karaoke parlour.

**Stupid sodagreen and their big words.

Those cars aren’t hurtling towards me. No, no, it must be the pollution creating an optical illusion. Just like this oncoming horde of tuk-tuks.

2. Anger

Get out of my way you f****ing cyclist! I HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY GODAMNIT!!!!

3. Bargaining

OK, Mr Bus. Now, we both know you’re not supposed to run the red light, but we both know you’re going to anyway. So I’m just going to stand in the middle of the road here nicely, and you swerve on two wheels, OK?

4. Depression

Why did I have to come to this stupid city? What kind of civilised nation can’t even regulate its transport? WHY ME? Why am I but a poor, wheel-less pedestrian?

5. Acceptance

[I'll tell you when I get that far].

Apparently I have the flu and a throat infection, which would be just dandy except for the fact that I have the flu and a throat infection and the right side of my face is in a constant state of *drip* (eyes, nose, mouth if I look down too long) and my uncommonly plentiful ration of tissues (accrued over many trips to China on the off chance I’d have to use their plumbing) is running out. That’s right, soon I will be obliged to *drip* onto towels and sleeves and pillows and anyone I manage to latch onto and drag over to my sick bed (which bears a striking resemblance to my usual bed, just unmade. VERY unmade). And now even the cats are ignoring me. Bloody fish-eating traitors.

Usually this wouldn’t be so bad. Usually this would be the perfect way of getting out of school and the perfect excuse to crawl into my parents’ bed, turn the electric blanket on and watch DVDs ad infinitum. Unfortunately I no longer have classes to get out of and yesterday’s Boston Legal marathon made me slightly delirious to point where I thought teams of attractive Bostonian litigators were gathered round my bed discussing the best way to sue my throat infection.

So today I’m trying to be practical. No more TV, no more infuriatingly slow trips to the Chinese consulate on the tram followed by a somewhat flu-aggravating march down the length of Chapel St against a steady wind in search of a first edition of Swordspoint, no more cinnamon and philadelphia bagels…

OK, maybe just one. And maybe just a few hours of TV, because no one can seriously expect me to absorb a book as rationally-written as Pride and Prejudice in this condition (or in any condition, really). After all, I’m in a sad state of being where I know I’m sick, but I don’t know if it’s swine flu. Really. Because if I have to have the flu anyway, I at least want a trendy flu. Who’s with me?

Amid all this fun though I’ve also been reading a slew of random dogeared novels from the library, including Ellen Kushner’s extremely excellent fantasy melodrama, Swordspoint. Now I know a book is good when I find myself reading it during daylight hours (as opposed to using it to force my brain into tiny print-induced shutdown before going to sleep), and this book was so good I devoted all of Monday to finishing it, finally staggering out of bed at 4pm feeling slightly cramped but very satisfied. Ah, the life of an unemployed gap year student *sighs wistfully*. Now, Swordspoint has two sequels and a bunch of related short stories, some of which I’ve read, others I’ve heard described. Usually this would make me unwholesomely happy, because who doesn’t love an extension of their current obsession? It’s like ordering a bowl of cheese at a café, and then the waiter coming up and offering you free cheesecake for dessert. Fabulous! But unfortunately, as much as you want it to be good, as much as you may dream about it at night and think about it when you’re pretending to listen to other people, sometimes too much cheese can kill you. Probably. But stretching this analogy back to where it began, my point is that sometimes authors and movie makers and martians and what-have-yous can give you too much information, at which point we enter overkill mode and the safe little haven you’d created for their work in your head is thusly destroyed.

My problem with Swordspoint’s sequel, The Fall of the Kings, is that it’s set 60 years after the original and chronicles what happened to its predecessor’s protagonists in ways I don’t agree with. OK, so I’m mostly pissed off the two main characters didn’t live together, forever, happily ever after etc like the ending of the first book allowed you to believe, however unrealistic it would have been. Heartbroken! Also, one of the short stories is about one of the aforementioned protags carking it, and it just felt kind of indulgent to me. And I admit I didn’t like seeing this character old and disease-ridden so soon after finishing Swordspoint, where he’s barely of age. In this way I’m reminded of my reaction to Catherine Jinks’ Pagan’s Scribe, which in my opinion was an unnecessary and detrimental addition to an otherwise brilliant trilogy I’ve enjoyed reading since primary school (the common link between the examples being that various characters I love like crazy grow old and die). I mean, I know these characters aren’t real — I know that even if they were real they’d grow old and die* like everyone else, but I’d rather imagine it in my own way, if at all. And then there’re instances where the canon is just shoved directly into your face leaving no room for doubt or personal interpretation, like the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.**

I suppose ranting about this is probably immature, and the exact reason why fanfiction exists in the first place, but there’s something very persuasive about canon and the knowledge that this is how the author and creator intended it, perhaps all along. Either way, I guess I’ll have to live with it, and also now be open to all of the above criticism when I start writing sequels that fans don’t agree with. Though I doubt this will stop me from puffing out my chest and declaring it my right to do whatever the bloody hell I like with my own characters, even if all those giant carnivorous egg timers devouring everyone at the end is kind of incongruous in a realist novel.

*Except for you, D! Dhampirs forever!

**Which I haven’t actually read, but the whole plot was recounted to me on one balmy December evening in Guangzhou after my roommate and I’d stopped perving on the boys in the dormitory opposite. I mean, after we’d spent all night studying, of course. Ahem.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not a failure of the TESOL course so much as the failure of anyone I’ve dealt with at ATA and anyone else in this process warning me that my age, my lack of university qualifications, and only wanting a 6 month contract, would virtually dry up job possibilities. Most schools in China and the recruiters they hire to find people to fill their positions are looking for native English speakers over the age of twenty. I turn 19 in 22 days, but that doesn’t mend the fact that I’m still 18 years old, a recent high school graduate with no university qualifications beyond the Art History course I did at Melbourne Uni last year as part of the VCE extension program. But I thought the fact that I’ve had a book published, that I was dux (valedictorian) of my school and won the subject prizes for Literature and English Language (and Chinese), and my experience travelling and studying in China in 2006 and 2007 would be enough to circumvent the failings in other parts of my resume.

It turns out, and I was only told this halfway through the job hunt, that in many larger cities in China it is now illegal to hire foreign teachers who do not have a BA or other college qualification. My dreams of teaching in Shanghai died right there, but I hoped I’d still be able to find work in other provinces and smaller cities with “looser” visa restrictions. One of the first recruiters to contact me directly (like almost all the China-based recruiters, she found my contact information on a site called “e-job fair” that I’d never heard of or given information to — the wonders of the internet) was from Huizhou City in Guangdong province. Not only did the middle school hoping to hire me not mind if I only worked until December, they assured me that the transport to Guangzhou (Guangdong’s Province’s capital) was “very convenient” — only two hours away. As well-meaning as the Huizhou school seemed, though, I wasn’t exactly falling over myself to return to a Cantonese-speaking province to improve my Mandarin, so I put them on the back burner.

In the meantime I went through dozens of recruiters looking for work. Now, there are several problems in dealing with recruiters as opposed to contacting schools directly. There is always a language barrier, although I assume one of the major reasons Chinese-run English language schools use recruiters is because of their language proficiency. Though sometimes you have to wonder if apparent English proficiency is undercut by a complete lack of comprehension:

Mary on July 2nd: “Hi Aviva Kidd, you are so young !There just a elementary school in LianYungang, Jiangsu ,do you want to go there?”

LianYungang! I could take the ferry to Tokyo on weekends. I replied the next day:

“Hi Mary, yes I am interested in Lianyungang. But first I have some questions:

1. What is the name of the elementary school in Lianyungang?

2. How many hours a week would I be teaching (and do I get weekends off?)

3. Will the school sponsor me for a Z (working) visa?

4. Will I be provided with free accommodation near the school (including modern facilities like shower, bed, TV, sofa, kitchen etc?)

5. Will the school pay for my air ticket to China?

6. What salary would I receive?

7. When will the job start, and can I finish by December 2009?”

These are all standard questions and most of these perks, in fact, were offered by her recruiting agency in the introductory email she sent me. But when I hadn’t heard back three days later I fired off an email inquiring about progress, and received this reply a few hours later:

“Sorry Aviva Kidd, I want to konw where  are you now ?? The  school  are in  urgent, they will beginning  the school tomorrow!”

Clearly she’d forgotten I was still in Australia, and had decided that knowing nothing about the school beyond the city it was located in should be no barrier to magically appearing for work. I reminded her I was still in Australia and would not be flying to China until she could answer my original questions, which I reiterated. That was 5 days ago, and there’s been no response. I feel jaded enough at this point not to expect one.

Sadly this is pretty much the way the recruiters all seem to operate. If I get any kind of reply at all, which is becoming increasingly rare no matter what stage of the negotiations, it is always vague and rarely answers key questions that would allow me to actually evaluate the possibility of accepting the job — if I ever get to the point where I see a contract. Probably the most stressful and heartbreaking moment of the process so far was when I found a job I really wanted — at English First in Jinan city — and was told the director would be ringing me for a phone interview when it was convenient, they were “very interested” in hiring me. I said Wednesday or Thursday. After sitting housebound by the phone for those two days I emailed Marita, the recruiter, on Friday asking what had happened. She said the director didn’t come into the school on Wednesdays or Thursdays (thanks for telling me!!), but the director hoped to ring by Sunday. On Monday I emailed Marita again asking what was wrong. She said the school hadn’t been able to get a Z (working) visa for me, but would I be willing to work on an F (business) visa? I was desperate enough to say yes. Another week by the phone and no new email in my inbox and I was exhausted, stressed out and angry. I emailed Marita one last time, and got this in reply:

“Hello, Aviva. I have to say sorry. The school told me it is troubled if you work with a F visa. Recently, the exit and entry department is very strickt in checking foreign teacher’s visa.”

I was crushed. I’d sidelined other job opportunities for the sake of this one, and after three weeks of negotiations and waiting, the recruiter didn’t have the courtesy to tell me the school had said no until I demanded an answer. God knows how much longer I would have waited for nothing had I been more patient. But the problem is I can understand the school’s rationale and why they didn’t want to hire me on the wrong visa. What hurt the most was being screwed around, hearing everything secondhand on delay, and waiting with absolutely no control over the situation. I can only let go for so long before I have to do something proactive just to keep my sanity.

After a few more situations like this (though none that went so far), I emailed the recruiter for the school in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, and asked if there was still a job opening. She said yes, wanted to know what salary and type of accommodation I’d accept, I replied, and we finally seemed to be making progress. I found out my Mandarin teacher from high school has a friend who lives in Huizhou who could help me if I moved there, and things finally seemed to be working out. Then, out of the blue, after another a week of waiting, the Huizhou recruiter said that the school’s dean had read through my documents (presumably my resume, references, TESOL certificates) and had decided I was a “little too young” for the position after all. Never mind that they’d been courting me since May, and it was now July, but there you have it. I was beyond crying, and just felt hopeless.

But that’s not all she wrote. The next day, Huizhou emailed me to say that they’d “gone through” my papers again and they’d like me to join them after all, and this was the new offer: come teach their Summer course for two weeks, which would be my probation, and if the feedback after the course was satisfactory they’d offer me a contract for the rest of the semester. I don’t know what the logical reaction should be in this situation, but I was furious, not thankful. I’d been offered everything I know the other teacher they’re hiring has been offered, and now it’s been yanked back, and part of it spat out again. Moreover, I’d have to pay for my own flight over there for the probationary period. So I emailed the Huizhou recruiter and said if I accepted their offer and passed the probation, does that mean my flight would be reimbursed, the apartment made available, and the salary we agreed on be reinstated for the rest of the semester — as per the original offer? In the meantime I talked to Nare who encouraged me to accept the job teaching the summer course, because it was the most realistic chance of “getting over there” at the moment, and more than anything was a way for the school to realise I’m not just some surfboard-toting Aussie kid looking for a free ticket to China to go boozing at rice wine joints. The next day I provisionally accepted the offer, but said if they really wanted me, to hurry up with the visa papers because the summer course starts on July 20. That’s 8 days away today, and I’m still waiting for a response.

Experience tells me that if I get one after this long a silence, the reply won’t be positive. Right now I’m pretty much ready to throw in the towel and enrol at Fudan University in Shanghai for a semester. I love Shanghai. It’s where I wanted to go in the first place, but this symmetry is little consolation for what feels like two month’s of wasted time, just waiting.

1st thought: yay.

2nd thought: who gives a shit?

3rd thought: I have to go near JOHN BRUMBY?

4th thought: the awards ceremony starts at 10.30? Do they mean am? WHO’S EVEN AWAKE THEN???

5th thought: what do you mean I can’t wear jeans? I wore jeans studying NatPols all year, I wore jeans during the exam, I was wearing jeans when I found out my mark (this is a lie: I was in my pyjamas), so why the f*** can’t I wear jeans to the stupid ceremony? Stupid *♣&®X!% snobby #%!X®&♣* pri**** school people. Instead they suggested I could wear my school (prison) uniform. I was going to laugh at the idea when I realised my old school uniform technically allows jeans. Yes, I do thumb my nose at youse.

All of this and the fact that the ceremony will be 8 months after my actual National Politics exam and couldn’t feel more irrelevant to my life right now doesn’t make me particularly keen on going. Plus I’m doing my best to get out of the country by then. But otherwise, count me in (in a “I’m not coming go screw yourselves hahahaha” RSVP kind of way). But here’s hoping they still send me a prize. Personally I’m holding out for a blank cheque with my name on it, or an assortment of imported cheeses. Odds on though it’ll be some plasticy medal thing or yet another book (someone seriously needs to tell these people I only read subtitles and books with big pictures with a page count under forty). Or considering our dire economic times, I’ll probably wind up with an embossed certificate care of several Tasmanian rainforests that shall otherwise be useless until the giraffe flu apocalypse at which point it can be used for kindling.

So. Anyone fancy a spot of fraud and feel like going in my place?