I assure you R.C.C. is not an appeaser.

He is a veteran participant in tough Wild West traditional sports and has a mouth that is for an about equal amout of time dead quiet as it is VERY loud, rough and even nasty with ANYone including the Chinese (unlike 90% of the wimps there, more than a third of whom with a serious booze addiction -- and I am talking of creatures walking on all fours away from the teachers' village canteen to the laughter of students at midnight, and don't even get me started on other stuff).

Unfortunately, R.C.C. is one of the rare few who also has his heart vested in that gloomy and pathetic place beyond the US$ 3,000 bonus, which he wants to make better and brighter (I think that's a wasted effort, but it is his own thing). Most others there are just a bunch of hypocrites and sycophants -- no, make that specific: sick sycophants.

That's why he will appear as a side character who is a human being -- with both virtues and vices -- in my collection, forthcoming in Hong Kong after I won a writing prize in Asia recently, while on the other hand his elderly male colleague who for some bizarre reason goes under his middle, and female, name will be non-existant in the novel and has instead just been reported for participating in a fraud to the Canadian Governor General who had issued him some governmental award on the occasion of a 50th, 75th or similar jubilee of something.

Ah well...

so he should have kept quiet like the rest of us and now he would have 20 thousand kwai like everybody else.

the words of someone who has truly lost their way in life, and all in pursuit of the sacred (sic) kuai.

I have been to /Luckily Escaped from Huizhou College's/ apartment after he distributed those same photos to all of us who work here at Huizhou University, and the state of that one room was horrible, but he had two other rooms and I think he managed to stay away from the worst. The problem as I see it had to do with his expectations of a normal place according to western standards, or the best standards of China, as he had worked in a couple other universities, and the total incompetence and screwed up minds of the administration employees at the college, who were unwilling and unable to do anything. We who have been here longer told /Luckily Escaped from Huizhou College/ to try not to rock the boat, because we knew what would happen as one of these two women he had a problem with so in the end they stopped his bonus payment is the granddaughter of some big shot in Huizhou city government, and the head of administration is a mistress of a party official twice her age, so it was obvious he would achieve nothing fighting those two in a country as corrupt as China in a small town where everyone knows everybody else. We keep quiet and we get our money. Granted nobody else had shit (virtually) smearing the walls, but as I said he didn't have to even go into that room, as he had plenty of space in the two other rooms, so he should have kept quiet like the rest of us and now he would have 20 thousand kwai like everybody else.

It was not funny to me while there for a year, and I guess it wasn't very funny for my visitor either (Thanks, Dave!) but at least the truth about this horrible place with incompetent, but highly vindictive and mentally deranged, Chinese administration (so called FAO, I am not even going to imagine what 4 letter words that must be an abbreviation of) is coming through.

In English the place purports to be a university, even though it calls itself a college (学院) in Chinese.

It has a bunch of people from the West with a B.A. and M.A. who call themselevs "associate professors" and such, more than a half of whom have a serious drinking problem. Those who do nto drink are mostly just plain crazy.

The Chinese administration personnel is cheating and nasty, and the apartments provided by this third grade community college are ruined. The good side is its remoteness (2 hours by bus from the new Downtown at Jiangbei), which means you can devote yourself to doing nothing, watching the steep hills slide down and crumble on the roads (happened twice in 6 months). Make sure you look out of a closed window, though, as the stench of the canal where students through everything from menstrual binds to old mattrasses and dead animals is unbearable.

The city is nice though, as it caters to the richer and more secluded of the Hong Kong mafia, not those cheap gorillas who spend days out in Dongguan with the prostitutes. Huizhou will not have so many "workign girls", you'll have to court the girl for weeks before you get to do it.