Thoughts about Being Further Furloughed, and other random thoughts.

• One of my first thoughts upon receiving word that I was to be further furloughed, after the initial urge to swear and scream, was to have a staff meeting with management, in order to basically vent, ask questions and air thoughts. My request was granted but others didn't think it was a good idea, so I decided to withdraw it. I still have thoughts about it, so I will compose them here:

• Why were our school and its competitors further furloughed (FF) by the authorities? Could it be that they want to squeeze out the English teaching industry? The way this FF was announced to us couldn't, if it had been done with planned spite, have been a better way to get ESL teachers to want to leave China. (I did hear on a podcast, an expatriate living in China, say that Xi Jing Ping's approach to teaching Chinese English has been to say that the Chinese don't need foreign help anymore.) Could it be that my school don't have guanxi? It seems arbitrary the way some businesses have been allowed to operate and others have not. For instance, the morning after getting the FF email, I read that Shanghai Disneyland was to re-open. (And I have already commented on how I have witnessed Starbucks seemingly back to normal operation.)

• My position here in the PRC is becoming more and more tenuous. By law, I am not allowed to pursue any other ways of earning income except by working for my school. The isolation I had from the expatriate community, while not having actually been made worse by the furlough (because it was almost absolute before the furlough), has now become irrevocable. Besides Tony & my wife Jenny (when she is not talking divorce), I have no one in Wuxi that I can deal for whom I feel nothing but suspicion. There is no way I could be friends with any locals. I don't have any thing in common with any of them. My life has been one when I realized too late the importance of social bonds. I am stuck in my own world.

• When and if I do teach at my school, it may be hard for me to do so without an undercurrent of rage. While there are a few locals I like, there are far too many who bore me and I would find it hard to be grateful to see them again for more than five minutes.

• Chinese driving habits are more a menace to the lives of people than is this virus. Driving to Tony to school the day after receiving the FF notice, I witnessed a driver cutting off a car on its left by making a left turn from the right lane. Brilliant stuff

• Returning to work will be a mixed-blessing. I feel I am going to have a lot of unpleasant classes and that the sensation of wanting the classes to be done as soon as possible will be hard for me to suppress, no matter how much Christian love I can summon up before I do encounter some students.

• The FF email was so disheartening that I have decided to stop posting on WeChat. No more jokes, no more comments, no more memes. This may not be such a bad thing if I can find better ways to focus my energy. I really am going to have to look into other ways of earning income.

• It was the morning after the FF notice. I was sitting in the car, which was at its parking spot, and I had just dropped off Tony at school, I wondered what I would do for the rest of the day. The things I had been doing to occupy my time seemed so hollow and pointless. Only prayer and a sense of a duty to my son are keep me going now. I finished off praying the rosary. I then went straight back to the apartment. I didn't bother going for a walk as I would have done if I had been in better spirits. I was feeling so glum that I didn't see the point of finding someone I could complain to on social media. I couldn't see them being able to cheer me up. The only thing to fall back on is Christ and his Mother.

• My day currently consists of getting up to get Tony to school and then sitting around the apartment till the late afternoon when it is time for me to pick up Tony from school. I sit in the car at Tony's school for a while because I get there early to get a good parking spot. When Tony & I get home, I sit around the apartment till it is time for us to go to bed.

• "Haters got to hate!" say the hate-haters.

• Whose side are you: the haters or the hate-haters? I am with the haters because the very concept of being a hate-hater is illogical and dishonest.