Lingdong Foreign Language Training School in Foshan fed us over. Big time.

On the last day of our contract, three of my friends and I were owed 21,833 RMB each ($3,235. usd each!!!!) by Lingdong for our last months salary, flight reimbursement, bonus (which we fully qualified for according to our contracts) and deposits. Long story short, our boss (Brian Qin) decided to just pay us for our last months salary and screw us over on the rest.

Were all still in shock about the whole situation. We were promised this money, we have contracts, but our boss doesnt care. I think in total, we spent about 11 hours arguing with him over the phone through his 21 yr old son and our bosss 25 yr old girlfriend (our boss is like 50 and married to a different woman!) because he was SITTING OUTSIDE the school in his van refusing to face any of us. Yeah, Im serious, what a FREAK! Ive never in my life encountered such unprofessional, rude, heartless people in my life.

God, it was such a mess and SO PAINFUL. The blatant lying from our boss was endless. At one point in the 11-hour negotiations, he was seeming more amiable and told us that if we taught a couple more classes for free (our contracts were over but the semester wasnt), hed give us our full bonuses (5,000RMB/$740.USD each). Of course we immediately agreed and our bosss son shook our hands and promised (PROMISED!!) that wed get that money. Guess what happened. I STILL CANT BELIEVE THAT WE LET THEM PLAY US LIKE THAT!!!!!!!!!!

Their reason for not paying us? They had so many excuses but the first that they tried was that we were bad teachers. We had luckily saved ALL of the reviews that each of our students filled out. Averaging all of our scores, Brandon was at 98% and I had a 97% along with hundreds of great comments from the kids. Then, we had ten months worth reviews from our managers which averaged 95%. We showed all of these to our bosss son (who reported to his Dad who was sitting out in the fing van) and he just said that our students/managers were just being polite (mind you, our boss or his son had never seen us teach). So, we asked the bosss son to sit-in on our classes (teaching students for FREE by the way). Of course, we taught the best classes weve EVER taught and did a PERFECT job. Our bosss son couldnt deny it, he said we were great teachers so then he moved on to a different reason for not paying us.

The school gave you free housing for the past ten months you owe us money! WTF?! It says in our contracts that were to receive free housing and utilities! Since when does ANY teacher in China have to pay for housing? Well, after several other tries, this is the excuse they settled on. We argued and argued but there was nothing we could do. Chinese people dont respond to logic (or contracts) and they correctly pointed out to us that if we try contacting the police, theyll just need to pay them off with 200 rmb ($29.00).

Please, for your own sake, do not work for Lingdong. I was miserable while teaching there and it turns out that it wasnt even worth the suffering because I was screwed out of money that I already earned.

Questions? Please contact us!
Mariel: mariel.klauber@yahoo.com
Brandon: bneth923@msn.com
Nelly: nellchic19@yahoo.com