This is brilliant! First, they are right 'don't teach english in the far east'. I did it for a three months in Hong Kong in the 80's. The school was a mess a

This is brilliant! First, they are right 'don't teach english in the far east'. I did it for a three months in Hong Kong in the 80's. The school was a mess and I quickly became freelance. That only sucked slightly less, so I started my own school. My Chinese business partner later blew all of our money playing Mahjong and we closed the company. A year later I started the second Internet company in Hong Kong and have never had to even think about teaching english again. Ten years later I moved to Japan, started an animation studio. Since then I've lived and worked in Beijing, Shenzen, Thailand, Laos and for the last five years in Cambodia. English teachers in the far east are about as low on the totem pole as you could imagine. For expats it's sort of like flipping burgers or being a Walmart greeter. I loved Japan, but it is a difficult place for most foreigners. Everything in Japan is boxes within boxes within boxes. You will always be an outsider there, you will never be accepted. But then this is true even for Japanese people who move to other parts of Japan. I liked the part about drinking -- it's a favorite pass time in Asia to see how much booze you can get a foreigner to consume before they fall down. It's a rite of passage. This guy didn't understand how this works. You are always under the microscope, especially when you are off work and drinking with co-workers. No matter how small you screw up, people will notice and they will never forget. Even today in Cambodia I get this all the time (but mostly in a good way :). You just learn to keep upright and keep from doing or saying anything stupid. All of the accusations that happened afterwards is how things go pair-shaped in Japan. You need a thick skin and work out the subtext of what is really going on. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. If you've built up enough relationships with people in and out of work you'll have people who can help you sort it out. But working as an english teacher places you so low in the social order that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. I don't think this guy will do much better in China. It can be even more brutal in some respects. His expectations are so... American. I remember in Hong Kong, the domestic helpers from the Philipines would often say that they prefered Chinese bosses than American because the Chinese just wanted them to get the job done. But Americans demanded that they get things done the way /they/ did things back in America. And often the way things work in America don't work outside of America. When you meet these guys out here... some are english teachers, others are working for NGOs and then the others that end up in a never ending Hunter Thompson story of drugs, sex, poverty and cluelessness, and don't get me started about the retired bozos who come out on holiday and end up with a young wife and that their money justifies treating people like shit.... I /almost/ feel sorry for them. But they don't deserve it.