Surviving the Ya’an earthquake and soul searching in the foothills of the Tibetan Plateau
It began as a low rumble in the distance. I was trying to make the most of the trickle of hot water coming out of the showerhead in my temporary home, a guesthouse in Anren old town; my suit jacket was laid out flat on the bed. It was a Saturday, but the school was holding an important event, so foreign teachers had to be on display in their Sunday best. Very quickly the rumble got louder and the floor started to shake left and right, almost in perfect simple harmonic motion, with an amplitude of almost a foot. Dust started to fall from the ceiling. I had barely managed to turn off the tap, throw a towel around myself and start contemplating my options when it stopped as suddenly as it started.
Outside on the street, people who had reacted faster than I did were already making phone calls, half-dressed or with make-up half-finished. There was no obvious damage to any buildings I could see, so I got dressed, dusted myself off (literally and metaphorically) and strolled down the road to school. It slowly began to dawn on me that I had just survived one of those infamous Sichuan earthquakes!
The show must go on…
You would think the school would cancel the event, but Mr Kong, the Confucius International School‘s owner and namesake (he claimed to be a distant relative of the famous sage) would have none of it. The school was still standing, wasn’t it? The government officials were already on their way (those that weren’t stuck in Chengdu due to road closures, anyway). I didn’t really care. I felt invincible, like Jeff Bridges in the opening scene of Fearless. We found out later that day that we had been about 80km from the epicentre, where things had been shaken up pretty badly. Nearly 200 people died. Luckily, the pandas were unscathed.
I’m sure we can all think of a close shave we’ve had in our lives that’s made us reflect on the Stoic mantra “memento mori”, and perhaps for a while, it changes the way we act. Or maybe it invokes a reflection on our direction in life, our chosen career, or our priorities. In my case, that change of direction had already happened 6 months earlier.
Casting the net
In the Spring of 2011, after teaching an Australian Engineering Diploma course in Shanghai for nearly 3 years, I was given 18 months or so notice that I would need to find a new job, due to the programme being discontinued (it had been a Queensland government initiative to funnel students from Shanghai vocational colleges into Queensland university engineering programmes, but hadn’t achieved the intended results). I was in a fairly unique position of having some “runway” to reinvent myself. Should I try to transition back into engineering, perhaps with a Sino-Australian joint venture that would value my Chinese language skills? Look for similar programmes elsewhere around the world? Move into vocational education programme management? I cast the net wide.
The engineering options I was finding were underwhelming. I think the only offer I received was from an American company manufacturing water features (of all things) somewhere in Guangdong province. By the end of 2012, I was deciding between a programme coordinator job with an Australian mining training outfit in Ulaanbaatar, and a secondary Physics and Maths teaching position at Confucius. Despite the UB job paying double what Mr Kong was offering, once I did some research on the Mongolian capital’s climate, the decision was made.
The Chinese version of the good life
And so it came to pass that after a series of life and career decisions that began with me deciding to move to China, I found myself celebrating being alive and savouring the Sichuan spring sunshine with my new teaching colleagues at a street food vendor in Anren, China. Those first few months at Confucius were halcyon days – there was balmy weather, bonding with new friends who were all in the same boat and had nowhere else to go but the street food BBQ chicken wings stall of an evening (to date, those are still the best chicken wings I’ve ever eaten), the romantic notion of leaving the hustle and bustle of Shanghai behind for a quiet life in a Chinese village, and working hard but enjoying the process of learning to teach a new curriculum.
The closest thing to the real Tibet
That summer, my sister Sabella and her husband Michael came over to visit, and we embarked on a sometimes patience-testing but very unique road trip through the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture to the west of Chengdu. As you can see on the map above, Chengdu is kinda like the last Han Chinese outpost in central-west China before you hit Tibetan cultural territory. Indeed, many independent travellers hang out in Chengdu’s guesthouses and hostels while they wait for their Tibetan travel permits and train tickets to Lhasa, and if you’re short on time, you can get your fix of authentic Tibetan food and culture in Chengdu’s Little Lhasa without having to deal with all the red tape.
However, we decided to take matters into our own hands, and drive my wife Nan’s Toyota Camry straight up the mountain to Kangding, for a taste of the real Tibet.
This turned out to be not such a good idea. The road conditions deteriorated markedly once we passed Ya’an (duh, there had just been a 7.0 earthquake there like 10 weeks earlier), and the road up the range was torturously slow, full of trucks crawling along in 2nd gear and really bad for the suspension. Although we couldn’t cover as much ground as we wanted to, we made it as far “up” as Tagong, and drove some scenic routes around the Kangding region that afforded some great views of Mt Gongga (well, bits of it) and plenty of yaks.
The STEM Warrior begins
When I returned to Anren and Confucius after that summer break, the honeymoon period gradually began to wane as the weather grew colder and the growing pains of joining a newly established school became evident. By February I found myself searching for jobs again, and by late April I had signed a contract with Zhuhai International School (ZIS) to begin a new chapter in my life as an IB (International Baccalaureate) Physics and Maths teacher, a role that I have thrived in to this day.
In fact, it was during the summer break after my first year at ZIS that I first began to refer to myself as a STEM Education Warrior. And that brings us back to the reason for this post – the STEM Warrior origin story. The ideological shift can probably be traced back even earlier than my Anren “hardship post”, to when I first read Carl Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World” in 2011, but just like Batman, I had to go into exile for a while and hone my skills before I could return to civilisation and execute the mission.
That 15 months I spent at Confucius International School was my equivalent of Batman’s time at Paro Taktsang. It’s where I cut my teeth and learned how to set up a physics lab programme. It’s where I learned from maths and science teacher colleagues who’d done their training in rough parts of the UK how to engage a room full of teenagers who didn’t share my enthusiasm for the subject. And it’s the reason I was able to get into IB teaching, and ultimately, move to Vietnam, and why my career can now take me just about anywhere in the world. So thank you, Anren, for teaching me those valuable lessons.
