April

April used to come into my office quite often. She just liked to chat and hang out, which I didn’t mind, but I wished she wouldn’t squat on the floor. I always offered her a chair but she was quite comfortable squatting. I don’t know how she did it. I can’t do a flat footed squat. I’ve tried. I just lose my balance and topple onto my back. I suppose the Chinese learn to squat from an early age with their squat toilets. I kept the door open of course when April was in the room. It’s written into our code of conduct. A male staff member shall not be on his own in a room with a female student with the door shut. But I always felt uneasy when other people passed by my office and saw April squatting on the floor, close in front of me.

April used to talk about how she loved New Zealand and really wanted to stay here. “New Zealand is a nice country,” she said, “has beautiful nature, very peaceful and very suitable for me. Not like China. China is very crowd with people and traffic and the air is very pollution, very dirty, especially Beijing.”

She was sitting, or rather squatting, quietly with her arms on her knees, while I continued reading my emails. “As you know,” she said, “I am enrolled for just one semester, but I want to stay longer. When I finish the English course I could do the bridging course here and go to study Business Management at a New Zealand university. But my parent want me to back to China, back to Beijing.”

I listened and sympathised and carried on with my work. I had been to Beijing on a marketing trip to attend an education fare and meet with recruiting agents. I also did some sightseeing to the usual touristy places: the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall. Beijing is an interesting place to visit but I could see the point of not wanting to live there.

“Maybe your parents could come here,” I suggested.

April responded emphatically, “No, I don’t want my mum to come here. I love my mum but she is very controlling, always driving me to achieve. She’s a tiger mother. I was always studying, always getting top grades, always practising piano.” April’s fingers twitched on a phantom keyboard. “I had no freedom at home and really no freedom in China. Not like here.”

I could also see the point of wanting to be beyond the reach of the tiger mother.

The last time April came to see me she wanted to talk about moving out of her homestay. I usually just referred homestay issues to Phyllis, our homestay co-ordinator, but April insisted on talking to me. I knew from what Phyllis had told me that April’s homestay parents were unhappy about the way she was staying out very late or not coming home at all some nights and not letting them know. So April decided she would move out of her homestay and move in with her boyfriend, Sherlock, another Chinese student. Most of our international students were assigned homestays when they arrived and it was not uncommon for them to go flatting after a while, but April didn’t want her agent to know she was changing her accommodation, as she didn’t want her parents to know. I explained that we had to keep our records up to date and her agent would probably find out. She decided to go ahead with the move anyway and I figured she was old enough to make her own decisions.

April wasn’t her real name. Her Chinese name was Zhang Jie. Most of the Chinese students adopted English names. I told them it wasn’t really necessary but that’s what they preferred and some came with English names already given by teachers in China. At the time we had an April, a Mei and a June. Some of their adopted names came from English books or movies, like Sherlock and Ulysses, another of our Chinese students. Most of the Korean students just kept their Korean names, although one of the Korean guys changed his name when people kept sniggering at his Korean name. So now Bum Suk is known as Andrew. I suggested Wang King change his name but he was quite happy with Wang King. Most of my Vietnamese students had the same family name, the regal Nguyen surname. I’d had a Nguyen Thi Phuc and a Nguyen Bich Ngoc. My colleague Paul, who’d worked in Vietnam, told me he’d had a student called Phuc Dat Bich.

Anyway, other students dropped in and chatted, not just April. Some came to me with their problems and issues with other teachers or with their homestay. Pastoral care was part of my job as the Director of Studies and the students knew I was the boss of the other teachers. Saiko came to see me to complain that her English class is boring. I had to talk to Paul about that and observe his class. I was supposed to observe everyone’s classes but I didn’t usually bother if everything was ticking along all right. The Japanese students didn’t usually change their names but some, like Saiko, changed their appearance. She’d bleached her hair blonde and permed it and she wore cornflour blue contact lenses. She seemed to be trying to turn un-Japanese. Saiko was a party girl and a bit ditzy, or maybe that was part of her blonde persona. Anyway her name seemed to suit her.

Saiko came with her friend, Maki, because Maki’s English was quite good and Saiko was still struggling with communicating in English. They were quite a contrast, those two. Maki was really into surfing and was out in the sun so much that she acquired a dark tan. On a trip to the beach for a Friday afternoon recreation outing, she wore a skimpy black bikini, while most of the Chinese and Thai girls covered up with hoodies or coats and hats to avoid the sun. They didn’t want to go dark and look like peasants. Maki’s boyfriend, Tāne, joined us for the afternoon. Tāne was a local Māori guy and Maki could easily have passed for Māori herself. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t. Even her name could be Māori. She was delighted to see there was a Maki Street in town, and that maki was the Māori word for killer whale.

A few of the other students went in for a swim in the sea and most joined in the softball game we had on the beach. I marked out a rough diamond in the sand and set out floor mats from the vans for bases. Some of the guys were throwing the ball around and I called them in to organise the teams and start the game. But where was the bat? Mami, one of the Japanese girls, had wandered off down the beach with the bat like a walking stick, so I sent one of the other girls off after her. I couldn’t bring myself to call Mami back as there were a few locals on the beach and they would have thought I was calling my Mummy. We eventually got the game started and it all went well for a while till the incoming tide reduced our playing field to a narrow strip of the beach.

Friday recreation was a highlight at the end of the week and it was a good chance to get to know the students outside the school. We had a lot of international students at the time, especially Chinese students, and for a small city they were an obvious presence. I would often run into our students in town, almost literally one day. Sherlock nearly crashed into me as I was driving through a roundabout. I caught up with him later at school and talked to him about it. He didn’t know he was supposed to give way and he really had no idea about our road rules.  And yet he had a New Zealand driver’s licence, a Learner licence.

 I asked him how he got his licence and he said, “Ulysses helped me.”

 “What do you mean, Ulysses helped you?” I asked.

“The police let me have him as interpreter and Ulysses just tell me the answers to the questions.”

“Did you have a driver’s licence in China?”

“No, I never drive before.”

So Sherlock bought a car here, a high performance Nissan Skyline, much cheaper than in China, got a licence by cheating on the test, and he was on our roads learning to drive. And he was a menace to other motorists. We had a driving instructor on the campus and I made an appointment for Sherlock but he didn’t show up and I didn’t follow it up.

I had some other tricky issues to deal with at the time: like the incident when Sonya called me, all in a panic, to come to her classroom at morning break time. There were a few students standing around outside the door, and inside I found Mei cowering in a corner and Saiko threatening her with a knife. I negotiated with Saiko as calmly as I could, rather than trying to overpower her and risk getting stabbed myself. The standoff continued for some time before Saiko came down out of her rage. I called our counsellor in and she was no help. She followed protocol so strictly that she did nothing more than acknowledge an incident had occurred. It seems Harrison was two timing Saiko with Mei, and Saiko was going to sort Mei out.

It was like that for sexual harassment policy too. I was the sexual harassment contact person and I was supposed to just listen and acknowledge the complaint but not offer any advice. Those sorts of complaints were pretty rare but another Chinese student, Shanaia, came to see me about being harassed by a Kiwi student. Now Shanaia was a sweet, innocent girl but you wouldn’t think so from the way she dressed. She was wearing skimpy hot pants, a snug little crop top, a jewel stud in her navel, heels and white socks that came up to just above her knees. I said I would look into her complaint but if she didn’t want to be harassed she shouldn’t dress like a hooker. It was also about the same time that one of our Korean students impregnated a teenage girl in his homestay family.

 So there was a lot going on at work but I had some issues with my own family as well. I had to get my widowed mother into a nursing home as she was seriously developing Alzheimer’s. Then there was my son dropping out of university. Cody just disappeared for a while and then turned up at home out of the blue with the news that he was taking a break from uni. We were having a serious discussion that Sunday night about what constituted taking a break when I got the call from the police, from my old mate Senior Sergeant Grant Newland, to tell me that four of our students had been involved in a car crash.

It turned out Sherlock was not only driving around town but he also drove all the way to Auckland at the weekend, with April, Saiko and Harrison. Driving through the gorge on the way home, the car skidded off the winding road and crashed down a bank. It was found smashed on the rocks and half submerged in the river. The boys dragged April, unconscious, from the car onto dry ground. They tried to call for help but there was no cell phone signal in the gorge. Sherlock stayed with April, while Harrison and Saiko clambered up the bank and flagged down a car. The driver made the 111 call and drove on till he reached a spot where the signal picked up and delivered the call to Emergency Services. Harrison and Saiko waited at the side of the road for the ambulance to arrive.

The first responders descended the bank with ropes, a stretcher and medical kit, quickly on to the crash site. Meanwhile a police car had also arrived. The medics were quickly on to the crash site and found Sherlock, with a broken arm, kneeling on the rocky bank of the river, sobbing, cradling the lifeless body of his girlfriend.

*

I contacted the Chinese agent and he informed April’s parents. None of the other three was seriously injured but they stayed away from school on Monday. I broke the news to the staff first thing Monday morning and called a meeting of all the students in the main lecture theatre at morning break. The teachers had somehow to conduct lessons as usual for the first period. At break the theatre slowly filled with students and with a babble of several different languages. When all were in I got straight to the point and said four of our students: Sherlock, April, Harrison and Saiko were in a car accident in the weekend and April died in that accident. There were gasps and moans and someone laughed. I don’t know whether he thought I was joking or that it was just an uncontrolled emotional response to the shock of the news. Ulysses ran from the room to the lavatory and howled. Some of the Elementary students were having the news translated for them by friends with better comprehension of English but they still looked as though it was incomprehensible. I cancelled lessons for the rest of the day.

I met with Carol, the campus chaplain, to organise the funeral service and arranged for an interpreter for when the grieving parents arrived from China. April was an only child, as were most of our Chinese students, and her parents were distraught with grief. They had met with Sherlock’s parents in China, who paid them a sum of money, in accordance with custom and expectation. Sherlock also had to face the New Zealand legal consequences of causing a fatal accident while driving with a learner licence.

Many of the international students, homestay parents and our staff attended the funeral. I had attended a few tangis (Māori funerals) where kuia (elderly women) had cried and wailed for deceased loved ones and I understood the kawa (custom) and the catharsis of grief. But I was not prepared for the gut wrenching howling and keening of April’s grieving mother. Sherlock arrived with his arm in a sling and sat sullenly with Harrison and Saiko. We filed past the open casket where April lay in state. The funeral directors had done their best but April’s pretty face was still battered and distorted from the crash. The commotion of the bereaved mother’s grief continued unabated throughout the service and I could see people around me looking increasingly uncomfortable and some, for whom it was just too much, were disapproving and muttering.

Carol organised a memorial service at the Polytech for the following day to include all the international students. I was busy meeting with April’s parents and Myles, our CEO, while everything was being set up in the boardroom. I had been sympathetic but professional and composed during the meeting and throughout the whole rather stressful affair. I was beginning to feel the burden of responsibility lifting after this final meeting. It hadn’t really struck me on an emotional level, but my composure suddenly collapsed soon after entering the boardroom. It was not the boardroom I was familiar with at all. It had been transformed into a candle lit funerary house of mourning. The atmosphere was thick with the scent of many flowers, burning incense, and bereavement. Grief was lurking and struck me unawares and I broke down and wept. There in the midst of the student body and staff I found myself sobbing, despite my efforts to stay in control. I felt consoling, supporting hands on my shoulders as Sonya and Carol came to stand with me.

Not long after this, our International Department was closed down, not because of this tragedy but just because of what was happening with the international market. There was a sharp decline in student numbers, particularly Chinese students, due to the Asian economic crisis and other events. It was getting harder for regional polytechnics to turn a profit anyway. A Crown Manager was appointed to radically restructure the whole institution, department by department, and the International Department was the first to go. Restructured out of existence. Several staff were made redundant. I took early retirement, with quite a reasonable severance payment. I’m enjoying my retirement but I do miss all those troublesome students, and I miss my little chats with April.