Livin’ large in China?.. pt 5
Instead of bragging all the time about how cool it is to be a privileged White-boy in Red China, this kid quit teaching English and took a job here in a local barbershop. Why? He wanted to see for himself what the lives of the Chinese people are really like. Bravo! I now step down from my yellowed ivory tower to present:
BEN, a Midwesterner in the middle Kingdom. http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56
He crunches some numbers and makes some interesting comparisons:
Teaching English in China: 919 hours per year (230 work days)
American job: 1936 hours per year (242 work days)
Job in Chinese barbershop: 3542 hours per year (322 work days)
So there you have it. My job in the barbershop requires me to put in almost twice the hours I would put in had I been working in the US and nearly 4 times the amount of hours I would have put in as an English teacher in China, not to mention that it also requires nearly 100 more work days per year as well.
If I were to work at the barbershop for one year, making 600 RMB per month and accounting for the first month going unpaid, my hourly rate would be 1.86 RMB per hour. That comes out to a walloping 24.47 cents per hour.
http://www.benross.net/wordpress/?p=56
October 23rd, 2007 at 4:10 am
Oh and how good is that “teaching English” job?
see my initial posting.
http://www.stinkfight.com/2007/08/25/why-you-should-move-to-china/
Skip LuncH, China Correspondent.
October 23rd, 2007 at 4:54 am
But BEN cant top Chery Bomb, aka Zheng Qi, on this one.
Most poignant, and from a previous post:
I know a woman who used to work her ass of in the field all day for 30 bucks a month. When she found a job in the city to work 10 hours per day, 6 days a week, she found her salary doubled. On her day off she’d be sitting at home thinking, “If I go to work today, I can make 2 more bucks.” Things are improving here, maybe not for everyone, maybe not so fast, but they are.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:18 am
Skip, you’re posting to yourself.
Are you becoming schizophrenic?
October 25th, 2007 at 2:20 am
I’m glad you posted about some negative stuff. It’s hard to brag non-stop about a place, no matter how great, where YouTube is blocked. (Not that I couldn’t live without YouTube, but I hate the idea of ANYTHING being blocked on the Internet.
Incidentally, there’s a bill in Italy right now that will require anyone who runs ANY blog or other website to get a license, and pay a fee to the government. It would be issued by the same people who issue licenses to TV and radio stations.
October 26th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
I’m kinda surprised that the U.S. government hasn’t tried to collect license fees for websites. Guess the genie’s been out of the bottle for too long here.
October 27th, 2007 at 1:19 am
http://www.myfeedz.com/feed/10862?pageNum_rsPosts=1&totalRows_rsPosts=471
October 27th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
>I’m kinda surprised that the U.S. government hasn’t tried to collect license fees for websites. Guess the genie’s been out of the bottle for too long here.
—
There was a (false) rumor that the US Post Office was going to collect a few cents on each e-mail sent.
The e-mail warning Internet users is still circulating as a mass forward. Once in a while some worried newbie sends it to me. I reply “Welcome to the Internet!” and send them to the Snopes article on this:
http://www.snopes.com/business/taxes/bill602p.asp
November 6th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Here’s a piece on the very spineless Jerry Yang, internet trailblazer : http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2206252,00.html Basically, the thing that operates in China now and calls itself Yahoo is no more American than the things that call themselves macDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, Kodak ..