This story blew into the lives of Canadian
ESL teachers working all over the world, and we are not happy about it.
A man having sex, or half-sex, or partial
sex - the full facts have not come to light yet, with at least 12 different children, mostly boys - was stupid enogh to film
himself and post the videos on the Internet, for his fellow travelers in this perversion.
So!
So although he scrambled his face into a scary whirlwind effect, reminding
me of the excellent movie Veritgo by Alfred Hitchcock.
So stupid and boastful was this guy, he did not anticipate the German
police could unscramble the pictures. They wondered who he was and searched with the help of Interpol for several years.
Well, the police went to the Internet public finally to ask for help,
and within 2 weeks he was captured as he fled to rural Thailand, an old stamping ground, from his job teaching children in
South Korea.
I am Canadian.
He is Canadian.
I am an ESL teacher.
He is an ESL teacher.
I grew up half-the-time in Vancouver.
He too is from the Vancouver area, as are two notorious convicted paedophiles,
also charged with child trafficking in Asia in the past few years.
The shock has worn off.
His family seems to be quite poor economically, judging alone from the
family home, a basement suite in a far-out area, shared by a mother and a grown brother.
Also, he was never a real teacher there, in that he did not have that
as his true educational specialty.
Still, unlike me, a woman teacher, a publisher, and a writer, and my
partner, a Chinese Canadian with 3 computer degrees, and no dummy - this character was welcomed into a good school in BC to
do some type of teaching.
Why was that?
How was that?
The travel and job checks that result from a scandalous story like this
do little good.
Many, if not most East Asians, so revere men before women, old before
young, that they little question why someone in their fifties or sixties suddenly arrives in Asia, with no teaching background,
and wants to hang out with five years old, day in, day out.
The folks back home - you - may as well hear it from the horse's mouth
- me.
Chaperones are the obvious answer in middle and upper class families,
and in the lower social classes everywhere, there is terrible vulnerability, caused by dire poverty.
The worst stories I heard in Asia:
It was raining heavily in January 2001 in beautiful Yang Shuo, and teachers
and backpackers were co-mingling on touristy West Street, sharing large wooden tables and plates of dumplings and green bottles
of Chinese brew.
An East Indian teacher working in Beijing captivated all of us with a
card trick.
"Guess the card, any card." Every time we picked a suite and a
number, he got the selection right - 100% of the time.
"How do you do that?" I asked.
"It's a mathematical secret."
He has a friend, taller and darker, and at first I wondered if this man
was Christopher Paul Neil, except he had a British accent.
We all talked about teaching.
We all talked about kids, how we liked them.
We talked about the Internet for jobs teaching.
The friend of the psychic sniggered.
"You go to the same website and see the same kids, getting older
and older, pretty quickly."
The mystic friend looked uncomfortable suddenly and changed
our conversation onto another topic, not children, not teaching, not the Internet.
The two men, a seemingly decent East Indian teacher from a
wealthy African business family, also who had lived in the UK, and his more bizarre companion, returned that Spring holiday
to teach again in Beijing.
I was confused by the statement, though the crude sexual snigger,
is a sound known to all women of sensitivity, and perhaps decent men as well. It is getting sex where the aggressor
is not really wanted, as though to impose yourself on one who does not desire you is more thrilling.
Unable to grasp what I had heard, what could I have done?
Things got worse in Taiwan, as I heard a story
about Malaysia.
We were all drinking cold beers out on the flourth floor balcony
of a famed teacher's hostel, located near the Taipei Train station.
A Scottish teacher told me and 2 women teachers from South
Africa how stunned he was as a novice to Asia tobe asked to join two old American men purchase virgins.
"Sure you don't want to come with us?" They tried to get him
to go along, as though his non- participation risked them.
"No way," he said, also not knowing quite what do to.
The girls lived in a guarded and enclosed area of some type.
They were only 12 years old.
They were virgins.
"The men were as ugly as sin," he confided, a handsome
and normal 28 year old Scots, able to get girlfriends without forcing himself upon them.
We thought the same picture: fat, lustful, crepey-skinned
oldsters falling on top of tiny brown Asian girls forty-five years younger.
More and more, I appreciate what my parents and teachers gave
to me, freshness and innocence, or at least, they allowed me to have those child gifts unsullied by the adult world.
From a pragmatic perspective, as sexual tourism, where so
few have money and so many have sexual needs, may only increase in coming years, the point of law to be enforced is Minimum
Age Legislation, both locally and globally.
