Let me elaborate on what prompted me to post this thread. Just last night I was at a dinner party with some Chinese friends. We were drinking, eating some great food at an open air sidewalk restaurant, and having a great time. A young woman, a coworker of mine, randomly started crying towards the end of the night. A nice bloke took the time to console her a bit and after about thirty minutes she stopped. She got up and went to the loo and when she returned she sat down next to me. We get on well at work so I asked her if she's feeling better, big mistake, the river of tears erupts again. This time I do my bit to listen to her.
I pull out the old active listening techniques, which fails horridly as her English isn't strong enough. Rather than playing the Shrink I just hold her hand and listen to her, which worked far better. Occam's razor I guess, the simplest solution tends to work best. With a weeping drunk Chinese woman the simplest solution is to STFU and listen. The tragic tale of her woe sort of verbally gets vomited out, not literally thank god, in painful sobs and wretches. The story behind her tears is simple, but quite astonishing from my perspective.
It seems this young girl doesn't even want to teach and is doing so because her parents demanded it of her. She doesn't want to get married but her parents are pressuring her to find some rich assclown to marry. She loves one of the foreign teachers in town, but he apparently is too oblivious to notice her raging infatuation with him (no it isn't me, she told me the FTs name). She's horridly ashamed of the fact that she drinks and smokes. Above all she feels a huge sense of failure that she's quitting her job at the end of this semester, which I don't blame her.
She gets paid a pittance, her boss (my boss as well) treats her and the rest of the Chinese Teachers horridly. They are stuck as the market for Chinese English Teachers is flooded to the point of absurd. Either they tolerate the abuse or find a new line of work. Up until last week the Chinese teachers were made to scrub the floors of the classrooms every Monday morning. A policy change, pushed by me, now has a paid janitor who does all of that. What sort of struck me the most about this was how profoundly grateful this woman was for this when she was half choking me to death, while still crying, saying thank you over and over.
What does this have to do with Programs?
Not a thing.
However, it did get me to ponder a deeper question of how this woman's culture is driving her to tears. It makes me wonder to what extent our own culture is driving people, young people specifically, into depressive states. When I was tromping through the woods a few years back I used to frequently be struck with the idea that often the kids I worked with seemed to act in certain ways because that is what seemed to be expected of them. I'm not talking about acting in a positive way either. An example of this is the case of a young fellow who was convinced that because he was feeling depressed he needed a prescription or three of anti-depression medication.
I pointed out to him, "You are in a program, you are far from home, you live in a cabin with 10 other boys, you regularly have to do consequences for other people's nutty behavior... Yeah if I was you I'd be depressed also."
He seemed to buck up a bit after that and if my memory serves me right he went onto get out of the program without the medication, thank god.
Out there somewhere I swear I can here big phrama cursing my name...
:twofinger:
Eat it big pharma, eat it.
But.. again.. is our culture driving kids into some of these alphabet soup afflictions?
