What do you fink?

[liukaiqin]

What kind of part-time or trainee work would be good for someone who speaks good second-year Mandarin but doesn't want anything to do with food? In the UK, I mean. Has anyone done any sort of brief Chinese-related job in the West that they'd recommend? I'd like to try something new this summer...

Comments

[bokane]

I got a gig working with a Chinatown immigrant rights group in Philadelphia last summer, putting together their Mid-Autumn Festival. High sress, low pay, but I actually had a lot of fun doing it.

[liukaiqin]

That's a good idea. I'd love to get involved with immigrant rights groups somehow, I'll see if anything goes on in Edinburgh. Oh and BTW, respect! I love reading your Chinese :)

[goreism]

Um, I worked once at a pearl milk tea shop where about 40% of the clientele was monolingually Chinese. That wasn't very fun. I also did the whole Chinese-language voting assistance in the 2002 election, which was funner. But all high school-ish jobs.

[liukaiqin]

Je highschoolischer desto better. ...Voting assistance... goodness, I wonder if, say, Ireland would ever help all its, say, Poles to vote in their mother tongue. That's nice. ...I still think my Chinese is so bad at this stage, I'd hate to ask money of anyone... but sure, I'll still be saying that when I'm fluent...

[goreism]

In a city that's nearly a quarter Chinese they better have voting assistance.

[liukaiqin]

God yeah. Dublin should too, really - I mean, everything official is translated into Irish at great cost in the Republic, and now Dublin has more Mandarin speakers than Irish speakers. But this is the Irish we're talking about here. We're not very advanced. Online I came across the Garda Síochána's leaflet aimed at improving police awareness of other cultures (www.garda.ie/angarda/pub/interculturalgardadoc.pdf) and had trouble believing the basicness of its advice to Gardaí. Bless. It's only been a generation since nobody was drawn to Ireland but English hippies :)

[csn]

I would recommend getting involved in the immigrant communites and/or any one of numerous gigantic human rights causes in China, although, of course, that could get you blacklisted from going back to China, since they like to keep tabs on anyone who actually reports all the horrible things that happen there. My room mate is extremely involved in these kinds of things, though, and for this reason, is not planning on going back to China any time in the near future.

[liukaiqin]

I don't feel like poking the tentacular blacklisting anemone just at the moment, but it has come to my attention that for some people Falun Gong isn't a cause as such, but a way to find the Chinese Embassy...

[csn]

What do you mean?

[liukaiqin]

Lol. Incoherent as hell. Yeah, I was just thinking about the effects of doing a Chinese major and anticipating a China-related lifetime, one of which is that you become very averse to pissing off the PRC government. At least if you're a bit thick, like me.