Return to China: Day 11: Scouring for Students at Trade Fairs

Saturday, March 28

After a week of travel and meetings with agents in three different cities, it’s time to return to directly connecting with students and families again.  Today I will attend a four hour fair in a downtown Guangzhou new city high rise with the EIC group to meet as many families as possible.

Before that, however, the four amigos (Clyde, Mark, Tomas, and I) taxi to the old train station, where black market goods thrive.  We disembark at a train station that I once saw in a documentary about the Chinese New Year migration. Each year at Chinese New Year hundreds of millions of people return to their home towns to eat and celebrate with family in the biggest mass movement of people on Earth.  This train station is ground zero, and in the documentary I saw people trapped for weeks in crowds of tens of thousands as they tried to board trains.  Today it’s merely frenetic, but the whole open plaza is cordoned off by steal bars that control chaotic crowds when needed.  We walk to the shopping districts where hundreds and thousands of street merchants hawk anything you ever or never wanted- watches, bags, wallets, clothes, shoes, glasses, pens, jewelry, et. al.  I spend some hours in utter shock, but come out of it for long enough to purchase a rip-off North Face bag and some “Polaroid” Ray-Ban style sunglasses.  I celebrate my purchases with a cup of fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice.

A few beggars and vagrants with severe conditions fan through this area, which is striking as I’ve seen surprisingly little of this on my trip.

We taxi back the hotel, then onward to the new city, where I devour a Hawaiian hamburger before the fair.  As I’m walking to the restroom in the restaurant, I hear: “Andrew!”  I know exactly one person in this city of some ten million people, and as I turn around, it’s her.  Anna is an agent for USA Boarding Schools, an online student finder that my school uses.  I can’t believe that of all the restaurants in Guangzhou, she had to walk in to mine. . .

Upstairs the fair is a formal affair.  EIC is a major player in exporting Chinese students.  Today some 20 Westerners are hawking literally hundreds of schools, as some people are representing tens or hundreds of schools at once.  People are here from all over - Beijing, New York, California - and many of this crew looks road weary, as some of them are shell-shocked by China, or they’ve been traveling here for weeks seeking to drum up business.

My translator is Vivian, a 24 year old woman who studied international politics in Shanghai but shunned a career in the foreign service because “I think it’s not good for a lady.”  She now works for EIC.  The next four hours are busy.  I present my school to students, parents, and agents.  Usually parents speak little to no English, and students are often nervous, so I speak all the Chinese I can muster to everyone.  The Chinese people are almost invariably impressed by my efforts, but then they start speaking very fast, overestimating my knowledge.  I make just a few contacts, and honestly this fair is a bit of a let down in terms of service, number of students, and punctuality of the affair.  We start late and pack up early, and the four hours my school had paid for ends up looking more like two.  Yet, such is the nature of this slippery student recruitment business.  Try, try, try, put yourself out there, and see what you can make of every situation.

It’s our final evening as a four man crew.  I’ve been traveling with Clyde and Mark for nine days now, and we’ve developed a hilarious, friendly, and even brotherly rapport.  They’ve kept me thinking, laughing, and learning the whole trip.  To celebrate, we enjoy a sunset view at the Westin Club Lounge, where Clyde is a gold member.  Never again will life throw me together with this crew in this way, but it’s been an unforgettable week.  To bed. . .