My God!
I move across town, take a while to get my broadband up again, and THIS happens...

I can understand, in a rather twisted and pathetic line of reasoning, why some of the posters feel they can bolster themselves by discrediting Hemingway...their own stories at Huaibei would make pretty interesting reading themselves. The reasoning is wrong, of course, and really creepy, but I can sort of understand it. Others here seem to have NO actual knowledge of the people and events involved, so I can't imagine where they're getting off. Perhaps they just think they see a rare opportunity to sound like they actually know something?

I'm appalled and disgusted at the spew of bile, lies, and ignorance being directed at this good and decent man. I am NOT wrong about this situation. Hemingway IS my friend (no quotes) needed, and the only help he needs is to try and counter this insane effort to discredit him. Hemingway at least has friends willing to leap into the breach for him, a claim I suspect some of these other posters can't really make. I can't let this garbage stand unchallenged.

So, let's look at some of the assertions that have been made here.

First, no, I was not part of the Laowai Monologues. I was a fan, like many, many others...but only a silent fan. But i's made to sound as if writing the Laowai Monologues blog was in itself some kind of crime or wrongdoing. It wasn't. Yeah, sometimes there were some pretty jaundiced looks at life in a small jerkwater Chinese city, but the blogs were NOT racist or vituperative...they were certainly nicer than the treatment HE'S getting HERE. His writings WERE funny, pithy, thought-provoking, sometimes tender, sometimes pathetic...and they told the truth.

I won't back virulent racism against the Chinese or anyone else. The Monologues had a number of fans in the foreign diplomatic corps in China...and they won't support such things either. This charge is a LIE, completely and totally. The site finally disappeared because some snivelling little rat-faced git (and you know who you are, you snivelling little rat-faced git!) narked him out to the Huaibei uni, who forced him to pull the plug on the site.

The original review was in March, I think, yes. But it's not him who has been perpetuating the discussion. There's been a guy with an axe to grind after him ever since. And chances are pretty good that the Huaibei uni is part of this. He has every right to defend himself...and yeah, he has every right to be angry about what happened to him.

OK, let's look at Huaibei. Not the Huaibei photos produced by the local propaganda bureau, but the real town itself. It's in Anhui, a third-rate backwater province. Within that context, Huaibei is a third-rate backwater town. It IS dirty. It IS backwards. It IS boring. It IS going to be a shock to the shammies to most foreigners coming there to live. Don't believe me? Go there, spend some time, and look for yourself. This one is easy.

The point of Hemingway's beef is not the town or the toilets, although these certainly seem like reasonable background info to me. The point is GETTING VERBALLY AND PHYSICALLY ASSAULTED BY A GANG OF STUDENTS FROM THE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT, DAMMIT!

This has nothing to do with being disliked by the students. The students who did this were not even his students! They were from a completely different department! HIS students were sitting in their classroom waiting for him and watching all this with stunned looks on their faces. That said, I've heard nothing to indicate that Hemingway was not liked by his Huaibei students...which is more than can be said for one of the posters attacking him. I also knew the next place he went, and I know for a fact that he was well-liked and had no problems there. This allegation is pure conjecture...and a lie.

It has MUCH to do with the fact that the Huaibei uni had had some more teachers run away screaming in the night (surprise surprise!), had already badly overloaded Hemingway's agreed classes, and now were trying to coerce him into taking a bunch of hours on his only days off for an insultingly low wage. Hemingway had of course refused. So this gang of student athletes was just the uni's way of helping him see the wisdom of agreeing to do what they wanted. This is the way business gets done in places like Anhui.

I especially like the bozo who basically opined "Well, this has never happened to me, so it can't be true." What a load of garbage! Are we supposed to accept you as all-knowing about events in Chinese unis? Well, I'm sure you'd like that, but it isn't working.

If you've spent much time teaching a Chinese uni, as I have, you quickly learn that the "respect for teachers" thing is history...or at least it is for foreign teachers. They respect you around grading time, but the rest of the time you can forget it. You also quickly learn that, because there's so much competition for uni class seats, these unis really have their students by the short hairs and the students by and large will do anything they're told to do. So if the school says "Go teach this foreign devil a lesson", they're going to do it. Finally, you also quickly learn that many unis here are run by nasty, xenophobic little Party hacks who hate and distrust the foreigners in the first place. I've encountered this myself, even in much more "enlightened" places than Huaibei.

Yeah, Hemingway's account is long. So what. It seems to me that would possibly add to its veracity, and certainly not negate it. This argument is nonsense.

Yeah, Hemingway didn't publish his e-mail address so that every nightcrawler on the internet could come attack and vilify him in his personal e-mail account. The proper place for this discussion is right out here in the open, thank you. I occasionally see this "Oh, you didn't publish your e-mail, so you must be lying!" argument, and my response to it is always: "Blow me". But of course I mean that in the nicest, most positive sense of the words "Blow me".

We have at least one guy passing judgment on the story...what's true, what's relevant, and so on...and he doesn't have any idea what he's talking about! Doesn't know the people, doesn't know the place, doesn't know the story...just emitting hot gas. Spare us, please, Solomon.

Hemingway's wife DID constantly interpret language and culture for him. However, there was nothing she could do to stop the things that happened to them because of course she couldn't see them coming. No one could have. Hemingway had done nothing to warrant the treatment he got, save perhaps for refusing to be worked to death for street sweeper wages because the school couldn't get many teachers to stay there for long. So how could she have known? This, again, is a completely spurious and ignorant argument.

Hemingway's next city was NOTHING like Huaibei. Different as day and night. Hemingway was the first to say so, and he liked it there a lot...or at least as much as he could like ANY Chinese city after what he'd experienced. This is more misinformation.

Is Hemingway angry and hostile! Damn straight! You would be too, Jack, if it had happened to you...and if after enduring such horror you also had to endure a parade of little sphincters trotting out to make him look like the liar he isn't. You would be very, very angry indeed if it happened to you. And you'd have every right to be angry.

People coming to his aid? Here I am. There's more where I came from if we need them.

Hemingway got himself and his wife out of the country. After what he endured in Huaibei there was no way he could stay here. But I feel it would not be his thumb he'd want to show you, but rather certain other choice sections of his anatomy.

The bottom line is that this is a terrible, terrible school and terrible things have happened there. They not only can't hold the Westerners that they've lured into this trap, they can't even hold the Cameroonians and Filipinas and others they've turned to more recently...and these teachers are generally pretty desperate for any job they can find. If you go to Huaibei and work for this uni, you're going to find out which side of this is really telling the truth.

And boy, at that point you're going to be SO sorry you didn't recognize the truth when you saw it.

Raoul