Tokyo, 6-3-16

Dear All,

I can't believe that this school from hell has managed to crawl through on its belly like a slime cockroach.

I read all the new posts since my last post about one year ago and I recognize two things : many of the posts have been posted by the (drunken) FAO Yang with the help of his proxy friends and the other posts have been posted by a schizophrenic teacher who worked there when I did..indeed she was koo-koo-land.

Anyway, my friends in Huludao tell me that in terms of the school, nothing has changed. It is a miserable place with miserable weather and miserable small-town rednecked people who hate foreigners. The foreign teachers are ripped off every way possible by this Mr. Yang (or should I call him Mr. Beer?). The apartments are right out of a slum in the middle of some third world sum. Every year this Yang promised the teachers better apartments but it was just one lie among all the other lies. The salaries in this HELLHOLE have gone DOWN, yes, DOWN. Last year they paid this pot-smoking Dutch hippie, who was there only teacher, RMB 10,000 per year. Now they will only pay RMB 7,000 pear year and they have increased the workload by four hours per week. And of course they expect Oxford level quality for that amount of money.

Anyone dumb enough to work there has to expect that he or she will face total loneliness -- Yang and the teachers at the school don't engage; the natives, save precious few, don't engage. The Internet, when IT WORKS, is brutally censored. The weather is freeze-ass, like -30 C. or -30 F., they are both the same at that level of cold, five months of year.

If you want to know what a labour camp or a reeducation camp is like, then Huludao and this school are perfect for you.

I knew a guy that stayed there for five years -- everyone but everyone thought that he was a Yank but he confessed to me, after an evening of drinking, that he was a Russian from Moscow (I also speak good but not perfect Russian), highly trained at this university in Moscow that trains KGB cadres, spoke something like 10 foreign languages, most with no accent. I saw the docs to prove all of this. He was Yang's fall guy but he didn't care because he had a purpose to being there (in that city). He faked it that he was from New York -- papers and all. He helped me escape Huludao one night and played dumb about it to all. Got me a flight to South Korea first class on a Russian airline with no problem but I didn't care where the kindness came from and helped me get through exit procedures at Beijing airport because Yang wanted me blocked at the border.

Anyway, his gig was up last year and he returned to Moscow. Outside of him and this really cool English bloke, really cool, no one but one ever survived more than three months.

So avoid the place unless you like drunken FAO's, vicious and unfriendly co-workers, miserable, miserable, miserable weather, Siberia but worse, and an air pollution level that is off the charts.

And Yang was so so spy crazy. Huludao is essentially still a "closed city" that allows only token foreigners. The secret police used to come to visit the foreign teachers' apartments around 22h00, unexpectedly, on any pretext as often as they wanted. Apparently, there has been a rash of Canadian, then American, then Taiwanese,, then New Zealand, twice New Zealand spies arrested in Huludao, some of whom had actually worked in his school. That was common knowledge. Now, if you do a search on google about Huludao, and read carefully, you will see why. But the Russians, no, never, there was never any Ruccki hankey-pankey....well, maybe not that it...

I have been having a grand time in Tokyo since I left but my blood curls and freezes still when I think of Yang and that school.

Donald J. Webber, III
National University of Japan
Tokyo, Japan

世界で最悪の学校。世界で最悪の都市。世界で単語外交マネージャー。