CC#7 – going back into ‘The Matrix’

For my interview I reached out to someone (acquaintance of friend kind of deal) who, like me, used to work in an offshore school in China. What interested me was that after some time back in Canada he’d moved back abroad and had eventually risen to admin-level while still holding down a part time teaching schedule. This kind of opportunity exists for me, or some future version of me, so off my email went.

I arranged a quick video call with him, and things went off mostly hitch-free from a tech perspective; in the past I got pretty good at time zone math, and the challenge (if I call it that) was trying to get around to my questions in a logical way while still ‘chatting shop’ about working abroad a bit. The nostalgia was fun, as nostalgia tends to be.

I was most interested in the cultural (expat and local) re-immersion/re-ejecting aspect of going back abroad, as well as the practicalities (district leaves and the minutiae associated with that) and other surprises that a person might meet if they went back to the expat life. There was also the elevated role to discuss, and how that came to be (battlefield promotion, essentially). It was a nice and short-feeling chat as far as I could tell, helped by our common basis in the 2010’s-era Chinese education-sphere: whether good or bad, that era was always a ‘vibe’.

(better believe we discussed the bbq – here’s the style from my old city in Shandong province)

A thing that stuck out was a point we kind of came to about the difference in eras…beyond the advances of technology and change in curriculum from then to now there was the temporal part. We’d both missed weddings of friends, for example, in 2013 or so, but some time later the things you miss are different if you’re overseas: he’d lost a family member unexpectedly, and been unable to deal with some attendant business due to being ‘off at work’. It kind of highlighted some of the knock-on effects of aging (which as everyone knows are ‘super-hype’), which is something I might not have considered from my perch here in BC.

I’d say getting to reach out over video was demonstrably better for me in this kind of informal setup, as I could gauge his reactions to questions or stories more easily/fluidly than I could do in text-chat/correspondence. While this wasn’t me reaching super far out of my box (teacher talks to … teacher?!?), I’m still glad I got some inside info on something I’d been considering. Gambei to that.