I'm going to post some profiles of some of the Chinese people I was friends with when I was over there to hopefully shed light on the most numerous nationality in the world.
Teddy (占成 (Zhan Cheng)) was the first person from Jiangsu Teachers University of Technology that I met. He was standing with another two men outside the exit tunnel of the Changzhou train station. He had a printed sign with my name, as well as those of David, Danthemanstan, and Bryan. For all of last year, and the majority of this year, Teddy was the assistant director of the international office. I have mentioned Teddy in various posts, because he was all sorts of involved in my life in China. His job is two fold, he has lots and lots of red tape to take care of in arranging all of the trips abroad by any of the professors or administration (in China the party officials like Teddy do everything). The other part of his job was to be, essentially, our personal assistant. I'm sure the university or government has a much nicer, more professional name for it, but that's what he really was.
The rest of the foreign teachers and I would often complain about Teddy and how he carried out his duties. It was hard to complain too much though, because Teddy was our friend. Teddy is (was?) single and just a few years older than me, so was a natural person for us to hang out with. Add in that he has incredibly good English and has spent time with foreigners in the past (thus doesn't ask redundant, inane questions) and it made him a great guy to hang out with. Being unmarried at 28 for him was a big concern; but for us just made for all sorts of teasing fun...I was a little cautious, but when some of our Chinese friends started laying in to Teddy about it, I kept the jokes coming. Teddy grew up in Wuhan, an important city up the Yangzi River, and moved to Changzhou with his parents after college because of his father's job. His parents, both officials at our university, helped Teddy get his job. He only had one real coworker-a fifty something Party official that was his and (ultimately also my) boss. Thus, he didn't have many friends or connections in Changzhou, which killed his dating-thus the single status and made it so he really liked chatting and hanging out with us foreigners. He worried a lot about our affairs, and could be overly fastidious about unimportant details, but better to have someone worry too much than not care. Other than worrying and his tendency to linger, Teddy was actually awesome at his job. We found this out the hard way. All of our complaints about Teddy were proven to be minor and trivial this spring when he moved to another department and another guy filled his position. The person that filled Teddy's position had studied in Germany and also worked with Teddy for six months, so we figured everything would run smoothly, if not better given his time living in a Western country. Oh how wrong we were.
What Teddy's replacement showed though, by comparison, was how much personal effort Teddy put into his job. He was always getting requests that (to us Americans and Germans) seemed totally normal, but to him was absolutely crazy. But, he would always try to find a solution, often being humiliated when he called up some store or office and they certainly asked him "are you freaking crazy?" When I was in the hospital for two nights with a nasty, nasty case of food poisoning, Teddy spent the second night there-and stayed up the whole night on security detail-because some other patient's wallet had been stolen recently. Another great thing about Teddy, despite being a member of the Chinese Communist Party and both his parents being Party officials, was his cynicism and occasional wit when discussing the Chinese government. It was clear, after seeing how Teddy's replacement worked, that Teddy very often cleared up or eliminated the endless obfuscation of China's bureaucratic system. Additionally, Teddy often let things slide that he didn't see as that important, thus saving all of us hours of mindless red tape. Other teachers in China have talked of their advisors actually enforcing the draconian measures placed on foreigners regarding curfews, travel, guests, etc. Teddy knew he had better things to do with his time, and that made our school a much better place to live and work. To shower on the praises, it's worth noting that Teddy was also quite generous with both his personal and the international department's money. Always a good thing. I didn't think that an advisor/boss/liaison would have that much of an impact on my time in China, but talking with other teachers proved me wrong. Because Chinese is a pretty tough police state, a person in Teddy's position can make live truly miserable. Foreigners aren't going to get tortured and abused like Chinese citizens (deplorably) are, but the ol' CCP can make life pretty annoying, pesky, and miserable if they wanted to. Teddy deserves kudos for helping make sure that didn't happen to us.
