Before I start telling this story, a few things need to be made clear.
What follows is only my experience. It does not stand for all teachers across the country, or even all teachers in my province. At most, it reflects the reality faced by some secondary-school teachers in the city where I worked. I was in a secondary vocational school—a technical high school, essentially—so what I went through cannot be used to explain the situation of teachers at every level. But from what I later saw, vocational schools in different places often shared the same basic atmosphere.
I also need to say this plainly: people who have never taught often think they understand teaching when they really only know its outer shell, and some do not even know that. Whenever news about teachers appears online, the comments underneath it are often enough to make you feel cold. So if you read what I write, do not compare it with some imagined version of teaching elsewhere, and do not use someone else’s case to deny mine. My life was my own, and the place where I worked was the place where I worked.
What I record here will not cover everything. Some tasks were so repetitive that I may mention them once and then move on, or pass over them in a sentence, but that does not mean they did not occupy my days. The story also moves across stretches of time and different settings. This is not polished fiction, and I am not trying to write like a novelist. I am simply trying to remember as honestly as I can.
Names are changed. Some sensitive events will be described with restraint. And on one point, I do not intend to argue: in handling the matters I encountered, I did what I could, and often more than I was really capable of. Whether a problem can be solved depends not only on the person dealing with it, but on the surrounding conditions as well. People who were not there do not fully know what happened; even bystanders rarely see the whole thing.
Another thing: do not try to turn these fragments into a neatly packaged “teacher image” or “student image.” A general picture is made up of many individual moments, but no single anecdote can completely define a group, let alone a person. If there is anything meaningful to say about those groups, it should come from someone who actually lived inside that environment.
Teachers are human beings. They are not livestock, and not clowns put there to be toyed with. They cannot read minds. Yes, some teachers lack professional ethics and damage the reputation of the profession. But many others live very low to the ground, unable to stand straight before students, administrators, or parents, sometimes not even able to preserve the basic dignity a person ought to have. If I have any hope in writing this, it is a simple one: that teachers might at least be allowed to live with the dignity that should belong to them.
A final limitation: a year contains too many events, and I have not remembered all of them. Some things are gone from memory; some survive only vaguely. Dialogue is especially hard to reconstruct word for word. Where memory fails, I can only avoid false precision and write what I still remember. That is one of the saddest parts of writing about the past.
Now, the story itself.
Part One
The city where I ended up working was small. It had a long history and plenty of cultural weight behind it, but that had not translated into rapid development. The place had one particularly memorable trait: low wages and high prices. In some cases, prices were even higher than in the provincial capital.
Take something as ordinary as vegetables. Tomatoes grown locally and sold locally averaged 3 yuan per jin. Potatoes, also produced there, averaged 2.5 yuan per jin. If you bought in bulk—more than 100 jin at a time—you might get them for 1.8 yuan per jin. And by jin, I mean the traditional half-kilogram unit, 500 grams, not a full kilogram.
I only noticed all this after I arrived. Before that, I knew almost nothing about the place.
In 2016, I was about to graduate. My strongest concern at the time was to find a job before graduation. If I went back home first, information would become much harder to access, and looking for work would only become more difficult. Even the basic cost of job-hunting—transportation, for example—would rise.
My home was in a small village. It was not especially remote, only about three kilometers from the township center, but information there really was limited. People say that in the internet age, information should be everywhere. That sounds reasonable until you look at actual conditions.
Our village only officially got mobile 4G service from China Mobile at a little after 7 a.m. on the eighth day of the first lunar month in 2015. China Unicom did not have even a faint 4G signal there until the summer of 2017, and for a long time there had not even been 3G coverage. As for wired broadband, the only option was Unicom. The annual package had once cost 600 yuan, later reduced to 480, but you had to sign up for at least two years. The speed was just 4M. It came bundled with a low-end smartphone and a new phone number that you were required to use. The minimum monthly spending was 66 yuan, and after two years it rose to 96. If you already had a Unicom number, you could not use it for the package—you had to take a new one.
For people who had spent their lives farming, that was not a small expense. It was enough to make many families step back immediately. It was not until the second half of 2016 that the local mobile company began selling CPE service, effectively wireless home broadband. The original price was 48 yuan a month for 150 GB of data, with a little over 20 yuan of phone credit returned to the subscriber’s mobile account each month—I no longer remember the exact amount. Only then did my family finally have workable internet access at home. That was what “poor access to information” meant before the second half of 2016.
At the same time, I wanted a job that was at least somewhat formal and stable. I was not demanding a high salary. I simply wanted steady income—the kind that would let me support myself and, with some dignity, do something for my parents. If you drift from one job to another, making decent money one day and changing jobs the next, never knowing what will happen after that, the instability never leaves your mind. You cannot build a stable life on unstable income.
In my hometown, that kind of job was hard to find.
Take bank jobs as an example. A certain bank had recruitment openings a couple of years earlier, but even if I had wanted to get in, it would have been extremely difficult. First, your written exam score had to be high enough to reach the next round. That part, perhaps, could still be achieved through effort. But after that, you needed connections—and more than 200,000 yuan. A friend who successfully entered that bank told me that applicants without the right backing were eliminated across the board at the interview stage.
Another bank operated much the same way. The daughter of a local business owner entered that bank through the same sort of arrangement. Then, only a few years after she started working there, the old branch president retired. The new one dismissed the existing employees and started recruiting again. To put it bluntly, it meant giving a new set of people the chance to pay their way in.
Other relatively formal jobs were not much different. Teaching was no exception.
My family did not have 200,000 yuan. To be honest, we did not even have 20,000 to spare. So if I wanted work, I had to look outside.
All of that is why I was so anxious to find a job.
Becoming a teacher had long been one of my ambitions. That idea had taken root back when I worked as an externally hired instructor, paid only by the class hour. I had taken teacher recruitment exams in other places and failed them. Then I took the exam in this small city.
That time, I passed.