I work as an English teacher in Shanghai. Here are two students I distinctly remember:
1) A year ago I went on a company retreat for two weeks with about 100 children to teach them English, paintball with them, etc. We had one boy who managed to become infamous within a single day and was given the staff nickname of "The Problem Boy"; in English among the Chinese staff, no less. This problem boy was a half-mix of Aussie and Shanghai, raised in quite a rich family, and we would discover later that he more or less lived alone as both parents would work rather than raise him, and they often sent him on things like this to get him out of their way. All very sad, but didn't help in the immediate.
Firstly, he was hugely disrespectful, not just to other students, but would openly insult teachers. As the only male teacher on staff for the first week, he knew damn well not to insult me, but whenever I wasn't around, he would ask our black teacher why she was so dirty, he would tell other teachers they were fat or ugly, he would throw a tantrum, he would sneak into the rooms of girls and throw things at them, he sexually assaulted girls and one case that will always give me shivers, he held down a special needs child in the showers (where the teachers generally don't go) and took photos of the naked boy with his phone for nothing more than pleasure.
Due to head office being friends with the boy's mother, there was basically fuck all we could do about it. Didn't stop me from taking his phone and wiping the memory clean before shouting in his face for half an hour, the little shit still had a shit-eating grin on his face. Thankfully I didn't get in trouble for it later. We ended up putting him into isolation with a newly arrived physical education teacher who was ex-Chinese military, and a nice guy but didn't take shit (I still had classes to teach). He cried when we sent him home after two weeks (when he had managed to not only piss off every staff member of the teaching staff, but also assaulted and insulted several members of the camp staff) and his mother screamed at him over the phone, but when you've been that much of an arsehole, we were little disposed to help him. When I found out they had signed him up to the second trip later that year, I quietly removed myself from it. I learned later he sexually assaulted several teachers during that trip and the wrong teenage girl, who promptly beat the shit out of him while the teachers were mysteriously long in arriving to stop the fight.
2) On my birthday, I agreed to take a client for a friend. So I went, on my birthday, to this house with was an hour away commute, and the child was a rich spoilt thing. Look up "Little Emperor Syndrome" if you want to know more about this in China. Over the course of an hour, he screamed two inches from my face, shouted, threw toys at me and the kicker was when he spat in my face. This was an 8 year old boy. He was also the last boy I ever taught. I got up, informed the mother what had happened, and left. The mother immediately denied what had happened and said her boy was perfectly behaved and he would never do that. Shanghai mothers are the worst for this. I immediately moved all my young boy clients to other teachers, and found out from the previous teacher he had done the same to him, and the mother still denied it.
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In order to try and add a bit of kindness to this thread, I'll tell you my latest trend. I have begun to have to phone companies a bit more, and when something goes wrong, I've finally developed enough of a backbone to start asking for it to be fixed. But I don't shout, and whenever someone does help me, I have always asked for the manager. And every time, I have told the manager that so and so has helped me today and has been wonderful and that the manager should pay them more money.
I like to think it comes up when they next get a raise. Or at least let's people know they're appreciated for helping me. I know their work is pretty shitty otherwise.
