I am a public Chinese language teacher, and I am now teaching at the Confucius University in Malawi, Africa. This is my third year in Africa and my sixth year abroad. Influenced by Ms. Mengwei, I started reading and learning to write this year, and followed her to become a better person for her efforts.
I remember three years ago, my best friend asked me a question and she said, "What kind of person do you want to be."
I remember my answer from that year very clearly, "I don't know what kind of person I'll be, but I want to live my life on my own terms and choose what I want to do on my own terms."
I think this idea of life is obvious when I was eighteen, right? At that time, high school graduation parents arranged for me to enroll in the Northwest Normal University, I promised on the mouth after, behind the back of the college entrance examination first volunteer to change to a university in Sanya. I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to do this, but I'm sure I'll be able to do it.
With the results of a major university, read a third-rate secondary institutions, that time from Lanzhou to Sanya, I have to take the bus, take the train, transfer to the ferry, and then take the train, the road to sit 62 hours of train, plus transit waiting time, I need nearly 75 hours of time to the university.
My parents are both hardworking farmers, working from sunrise to sunset. Before I went to college, I was at home every summer, following my mom and dad to farm, planting cabbages and eggplants, picking strawberries, breaking corn, and applying fertilizer, and I used to always tell my mom, "If I don't go to college, I'm sure I'll be a good farmer who's able to work and make money."
Because the family's income is from the field, so there is no money for me to buy a plane ticket, summer and winter vacations home often can not buy a sleeper, hard seat back to the whole person thin three or four pounds, once to buy a seatless, that is my memory of the most difficult journey home.
Every time I go home, my mom asks me if I regret going so far to study. I said on my lips that I would never regret it, but in my heart I said, "But it's so damn far away.
I started saving money from college, I want to take my parents on a trip to Sanya, I want to fly home. So by tutoring, I was able to support myself in college, and I had more than 10,000 dollars in savings when I was a senior.
The year of my senior year I bought tickets for my parents and my brother, realizing the small wish to take my parents on a trip, the end of the trip to send them to the airport on the way, my mother said that this is the first time in her life to leave Lanzhou, she was very happy that I could see the outside world.
In this way, I have bounced all the way through the university, and my mom wants me to go home and take the civil service exam. I promised her that I would go back as soon as I graduated, but two months before graduation I stepped on a plane to Thailand. I took the national unified open recruitment examination and became a Chinese language volunteer. I was also the first person from my village to go abroad.
Looking back, I think my three years in Thailand had a big impact on my life. In 2013, I was working as a Chinese language teacher in a key high school in Songkhla province in southern Thailand. I was 23 years old at the time, and my students were all 15 and 16 year old high school students.
It was my first job after graduating from university, and six months later I had paid off my student loans, was debt-free, and had my own savings. For the first time, I realized how happy I was to have a job.
I was very busy working in Thailand. My school is the Southern Chinese Language Center, and I am the only Chinese teacher and three native Thai Chinese teachers. We were responsible for organizing and notifying Chinese language activities throughout the south, and assisting the Confucius Institute at Prince of Songkla University with Chinese language activities.
It felt like we were both organizers and participants in the endless activities at that time. When there were activities, we had classes during the day, trained students after work, and worked on activity programs and forms at home at night until 11:00 or 12:00 at night, with no lunch break, and we were exhausted every day.
In my first year, I woke up at 6:00am every morning, packed up and went to work, and then got off work at 4:00pm and trained students at the school until 6:00pm. I tutored students for the HSK exam when there were no activities and rehearsed when there were activities.
In order to teach, I learned paper-cutting, Chinese knotting, calligraphy, flower face painting, rehearsing skits, storytelling, and teaching students how to speak and sing....... I feel like I'm all-powerful.
Sometimes I wonder why I have so much work every day and why I have to tutor these kids for free. Until I took the senior class, there are three students I tutored successfully passed the exam, applying for a place to study in BeiJing, Shang Wai, Sichuan University, watching the students holding flowers kneeling in front of me to thank, I think I may have found a reason to persist.
The first, second, and third years of high school all have my Chinese class, because the first year of high school students, I stayed in Thailand for three years, is to take them to graduation, I take their three years, from the beginning of the Hanyu Pinyin to the examination of HSK level 5.
In order to tutor them to study, I myself learned to hear Thai, stumbling every day to translate the text into Thai will be to them to listen. By the time I left for graduation, 11 of the 85 students in the two classes were studying in China, and more than half of the students chose to study Chinese as a major in a Thai university.
01 Attention to image
We all know that Thailand is a country that pays much attention to rituals, so the school is very strict for the teacher's requirements, requiring the teacher to wear a skirt to work every day, shirts with collars and sleeves, ironed every day. Skirts are below the knee in length and dresses must have sleeves and not be low necked. Makeup was required to be worn to work every day, and young teachers were required to wear high heels. Clothing colors are required every day, yellow on Monday, pink on Tuesday, green on Wednesday, purple on Thursday, and blue on Friday.
Because of these reasons, I also became a very conscious of their own image of the people, clear and clear know, what occasions to wear what kind of clothes, but also so that I get into the habit of wearing a light makeup every day to go out. Every weekend will be ready to work next week's clothes, shirt and skirt with a good color ironing flat.
I think focusing on your outward appearance is the first step for a woman to start loving herself. It's not about how much money you have to spend on clothes and makeup, but how you look in the mirror every day you're out and about and feel like you're looking presentable today.
Speaking of a small episode, once the king's birthday to wear a month of yellow Department of clothing, just as the holiday I did not receive notice, the results of Monday, the whole school are wearing yellow clothes, including the cafeteria aunt and cleaning aunts, and only I am a person in a pink dress, was ridiculed a morning, and finally at noon lunch break colleagues to send me home to change clothes
02 Adhere to the movement
Because the work is too busy, too much pressure, I am about to run out of time, choose to go to the gym and learn yoga, every day after working twelve hours to go to the gym alone, and then eat dinner on the side of the road.
Because of this experience, let me develop a good habit of exercise, and now still adhere to the pressure is very frustrated, with my yoga teacher to teach me the way to relieve.
By now, this habit has persisted for six years, and the benefits it has brought to me are really very obvious. I have been in Africa for the past three years, and I have basically not been sick, and I have not gained weight, and my weight has been around 45 kilograms. I am now in Africa for three years, but adhere to the habit of exercise has never changed, four or five days a week to go to the gym.
03 Cultivating the heart
When I was in Thailand, my teacher had a great influence on me. She was a 60-year-old woman with a very positive outlook on things, and she had been engaged in Chinese language teaching for her whole life, saying that her father was Chinese, she was Chinese, and Chinese language teaching was her lifelong dream.
She always told me that we have to teach for the sake of the Chinese language, not because of anything else.
She always told me that we should teach Chinese for the sake of teaching Chinese, not because of anything else. On weekends, when I was tutoring students at the school, she would stay with me, and she would buy food for me and my students out of her own pocket.
During the three years I was in Thailand, she took me to all the good restaurants in my city. On weekends when she wasn't busy, she would confiscate my cell phone and take me to temples to meditate, listen to monks chanting and ringing bells, scrub the Buddha Hall, eat vegetarian food, and over time I felt my mind slowing down and not being as restless as I used to be. I also seldom lose my temper in these years.
In Thailand, I learned paper cutting, Chinese knotting, calligraphy, dancing, rehearsing dances and skits, training students to give speeches, and most importantly, I learned to accept my own impatience, cultivate my own mind and temper, and smile when I see strangers on the road, even if I am now in China or Africa.
I have seen in the event scene once the ocean war veterans, more than eighty years old, sitting in a wheelchair, but the venue when the national anthem, determined to stand up, salute and sing the national anthem, do not want us to help, I once watched a whole table of eighty to ninety-year-old veterans singing the national anthem while tears, I think this is the spirit of the country.
Possibly I went to Africa this matter, my colleagues, friends and relatives around me can not understand it.
The second year in Thailand, because of the ability to work and performance ability I became the backbone of the southern teachers, directly exempt from the push to get the outstanding Chinese volunteer certificate and awards.
In the third year, the Hanban office in Thailand notified me to participate in the interview for the volunteer management teacher in Thailand, but I refused, and at that time, I only thought of a different place to go to see other countries.
Maybe I read too many books by San Mao at that time, I was thinking about the Sahara Desert, Kenya Safari, Cape of Good Hope, Victoria Falls, Kilimanjaro, and I also wanted to help African children to learn Chinese through my own ability.
So I applied to leave the company directly. At that time, many people persuaded me not to leave because the future was bright and I could stay in the Thailand headquarters to work in a legitimate way. However, since I had my own idea, I wanted to try, even if I failed the exam.
I left my job in Thailand in March 2016, and in April I applied for the National Recruitment Examination for Publicly Accredited Chinese Language Teachers, and the interview teacher laughed at my spoken English, which was a mixture of Chinese and Thai, during the interview.
In May, I got the acceptance notice, in July, I trained for one month in Zhejiang Normal University, and in August, I officially started to work in Africa, and I felt that everything was too smooth, like a dream.
However, my mom was angry and ignored me for two weeks because I promised her that I would go back to the civil service and get married when I left Thailand.
Until she knew that I was going to Africa, the whole person was blinded, Dad persuaded a few days. Although I was angry, but when I was leaving, or to pack my bags, to bring all the can be stuffed into the suitcase for me.
Honestly, when I first arrived in Africa, I was shocked. I know that this place is poor, but I don't know that it can be poor like this, the capital of a country, the city construction is like a small town in the country.
The people here are really black, like black chargers, all of a sudden I was a little bit unable to adapt, the hardest thing is that I have a psychological cleanliness of food and drink, I imagined that their black hands to do the meal, I can not eat, although I know that it is only because of the different skin color.
I didn't know that there would be frequent power and water cuts, that there are no buses, no subway, no shopping malls, the biggest shopping centers are supermarkets, hospitals are not equipped, there is no medicine, the mortality rate of babies and pregnant women is high, and there are a lot of people infected with HIV.
When I first started going to work at the school, the principal of the local school told me that if I had a cut on my skin that was exposed to the outside of my clothes while I was at work, I had to bandage it.
She said that many of the students were carrying HIV from birth, and my first reaction was to feel so sorry for them.
In the three years I have been here, maybe I have seen too much life and death, and seen poverty that I never imagined, I feel that my life is easier to be happy instead, because it is easier to be satisfied with what I have experienced, and a small thing can make me very happy.
The African concept of life has had a great impact on me, in their sense, as long as they are alive, they should be happy. No matter how poor they are, they go to church on weekends to pray, and at the end of the day they listen to music and dance as a group and watch soccer matches.
I seldom see anyone who is down in the dumps every day. Even the security guard at the gate, who earns 300 RMB a month, is happy, listening to music and humming a little tune at the gate, but the Chinese, who earn tens of thousands of dollars, still can't be happy.
There is also something I am very surprised that I got a pay rise in Africa, working here for two and a half years, plus the previous savings in Thailand, at the age of 29, I saved enough for the first million dollars of my life.
My mom had said that she might not have a chance to live in a building in her life, and because she felt that she owed her parents too much for their company in the past few years, she bought them a house in town in their name.
Starting from the first year of work, the parents saved a pension fund card, and now the card also has large tens of thousands of dollars. Mom always said that I have not seen much in the past few years, seven years have not accompanied my parents to spend any holiday.
Life is like this, it's hard to have it both ways, I pursued the dream there is no way to stay with them, I can only do my best to let them spend their old age in peace.
The parents have a home, and children who have a home will feel at ease no matter how far they go.
The best way to fulfill your filial piety is to do it before it's too late, and there's no way to predict life and death. The first thing you need to do is to do everything you can to make sure that you don't have any regrets.
Since I started working in Africa, I have taken my parents on vacation every year.
Traveling to a city every year is something I can do now and something I want to keep doing in the future.
These six years of living alone in a foreign country have given me a different life experience. Even when I am old, I will look at the photos and words now, and I will be touched by my own once, and I have not wasted my youth.
Life is like a journey, the journey there are moving moments, there are difficult roads, there is the joy of success, there is also the loneliness of the dead of night.
The taste, only they know, but I want to say, once the loneliness and tribulations, but also created the present calm and steady self.
Having said that, the above is my life and work experience in the first half of my life, and the second half of my life starts from 2019, I now start to read every day, and it's no exaggeration to say that learning to write and writing a handbook are all because of the influence of Mr. Mengwei.
In the past, I felt that I just need to work well and can make money, now I feel that my previous ideas are very naive, a person's real improvement is not to see how much wealth she has, but in the ability to make money at the same time there are worthy of letting other people praise the connotation and learning.
A person's life is very short, I can pursue their own life in the young time I am very happy, at least life does not have regrets, although the future back to the country, everything to start from scratch, but at that time I am still young, I can start from scratch.
Now every day of my life is going to work, reading, studying and writing, and I feel that my life is very full, and I'm making progress little by little, and I'm getting to know more, and I'm developing more good habits. I hope that life is more than the immediate good, there are poems and faraway places.
For the rest of my life, I hope that my life, every day there is reading and writing, at least when I am 50 years old, I am still a grandma who likes to read, rather than just gossip parents, square dancing mom.
If you have your own dream, then I hope you can try, even if you do something you have never done before is also a kind of self-transcendence.
For the rest of my life. I want to live according to my own wishes. Be a young woman with a story.