Published October 5, 2007
One of my fellow teachers, who is in the same English-language teaching company as I am in Japan, had just come back from an English-language-teaching stint in the Czech Republic for adult students. Another fellow teacher had already taught English language to fifth-graders in Honduras, where she lived on a salary of $500 a month and was once nearly mugged in broad daylight. The teacher whom I shadowed for a week had already taught English in Bolivia and was already looking for another teaching job in Central America.
I have freshly entered the global subculture of the vagabond English-language teacher.
However different our upbringings and backgrounds, we all more or less fit a very similar profile. We have wanderlust. We probably don't have much money. We are somewhat fresh out of college and have absolutely no idea what to do for our careers - or we do, and we don't want to confront it quite yet. We want to buy ourselves a year or two or three before we inevitably confront the economic reality of even more formal schooling - or moving back home to our parents.
In Japan, I imagine that such a Western sentiment would be considered indulgent and ridiculous. Once you graduate from college in Japan, it is rather formulaic: work for a big company, get married, and extra bonus points if you make a lot of babies to reverse the country's declining birth rate.
Japanese college graduates may be more efficient than we are in immediately joining the workforce with a financially feasible job. The country fails miserably, though, in providing an educational infrastructure that actually teaches their students decent, conversational English. And this is where the native-English speaking, unemployed vagabond with the useless college degree steps right in.
Vagabonds like me.
It's not a bad life, to be an English-language teacher in Japan. I will only be working 25 to 30 hours a week, which allows me adequate free time to pursue other activities, such as traveling and writing. I am paid a decent salary that allows me to send substantial money back home.
For some people, this lifestyle becomes addictive. They were only planning on teaching for a year, but then it stretched to three. Or they get promoted into higher positions within the company and stay even longer. In extreme cases, they end up marrying a Japanese person and have half-Japanese kids.
I am living now with my relatives, in the house where my mother grew up in. She lived here until at the age of 24, she went on a trip to America and decided that she had fallen in love with California's mild, Mediterranean climate.
She ended up never coming home.
Earlier today, I had a video-chat session with my mother while my grandmother sat next to me. Grandmother, mother and daughter - three generations of women all framed within a tiny window on my Macbook monitor. It was a rather surreal experience.
"Of course you don't have to worry about her for the next year while she's with us," my grandmother told my mother. "And maybe even another year if she wants ..."
"One year," my mother interrupted. "She's only there for one year." Thousands of miles away and 16 hours into the past, I could hear in my mother's voice an underlying command to squelch further ideas of working abroad or country-hopping for an even longer period of time. I wondered if she was afraid I would do the same thing that she did decades before, but in reverse migration.
The three of us laughed. Of course I was going to come home a year from now. Or was I?
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