The people served.

1. Outreach by geography—local, county, far away.  If you want to help other people, there are many ways you can do it.  First: if you like the place where you live and don’t want to go out, there are all kinds of opportunities right in your neighborhood!  The best place to look is in the schools that serve the “floating population”.  If the teachers are willing, you can link up with a student and help them.  Ask the teachers for some advice on which students to choose.  If you want other people, try the schools for the “fixed population”; you can match your English abilities with the appropriate school grade.  The “Chu-3” and the “Gao-3” students will be very glad to work with you, but their English interests will be very much influenced by the exams they must take.  There are more options available in your local area; therefore, look, think, and study carefully…take your time and choose well.  Don’t let “the urgency of need” overly influence you.  Second: you can go into the neighboring county, into the countryside surrounding your city, and work with somebody there.  It will take you two or four hours by bus to get out there.  The further away from the city you go, the level of educational services declines, usually because of less funding or fewer qualified teachers.  Third: you can go somewhere really far away, such as Xi Zang or the salt-pans of Qinghai.  Obviously, the needs are very great here, but so are the opportunities and the rewards (they are not measured in tangible things such as money, but in an unseen, also rewarding “currency”).  Here, the “frontier” is still large. 
2. Outreach by “comfort zone”—with people like you，people somewhat removed from you, people very removed from you. What is the meaning of “comfort zone?” It is the area, concrete or psychological, within which you feel comfortable operating. It is different for different people, under varying circumstances. You can work with people as an English teacher, depending on what you are comfortable with. First: with people like you. If you like familiar people, settings and culture, try this one. You don’t have to cross over to the other side of the world to succeed. You can get down to work right away, and with no “culture shock” (which for some people can be very troubling). Second: with people somewhat removed from you: If you want to be a little more adventurous and have a “new experience”, step outside the life you usually inhabit and reach out to someone a little bit different. You can draw upon those things that you do have in common. (Most, if not all of us have something in common.) However, it may be helpful to your teaching if you have already had some previous experience, however common, relating to people who are a little bit different than you. Third: with people very removed from you. This will be challenging for many people due to the influences of “culture shock”, “reverse culture shock” and a range of other cultural/psychological/living problems you will face. (To learn more about “culture shock” and “reverse culture shock”, please go to other books or the internet –they are very, very important concepts to understand if you go this route.) I am certainly not trying to stop you from going deep, deep into Xi Zang or somewhere in the Tian Shan—or into the forgotten shantytowns within Panzhihua, Fuxin or Yangquan—but I certainly want you to know that what you are trying is challenging, difficult, possibly heartbreaking and certainly life-influencing. You should, I think, have had some “cross-cultural” life and work experience in your own city or area before you try this type of work. (For a few of you, I may be wrong—you go straight out.) Remember, being “cross-cultural” does not mean you must find and spend time with (western) foreigners! There is enough variety of cross-cultural experience inside China to make the world outside China irrelevant. The 56 “Minzu” each have their own “subdivisions”, based upon where they are living or what they are doing. (Hey, I am not being “splittist”.) For example, Uighurs (Wei Wu Er Zu) are Uighurs wherever you find them, but when it comes to working with them, there is a real difference when you compare people like these: the man selling raisins on any street in China, the small business owner in Altai, the small shopkeeper in Hotan, the baker in Beijing, the medical student in Urumqi, the commodities trader in Shanghai, the poet in Kashgar, the woman selling pranik in Karamay. So, if you look at the 56 “Minzu” like this, there is an almost unlimited range of people you can teach English to. Remember these three things. First: much of the rest of the world is not ready to let thousands of Chinese visitors or workers run all over the globe…yet. Second: China, the “mini-world”, is your own country—you don’t need visas!  (I do). Third: in due season, the outside world will open up to a flood of Chinese talent in the not-too-distant future—especially Africa, and then South America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the South Pacific island nations (I believe). Those of you who have accumulated some useful “cross-cultural” work and living experience inside China will be well placed when the call goes out for outside, overseas workers. (Of course, having “strong relations” (tie guanxi) does help, too.) So, in summary, you can choose where you go to teach English based upon how culturally different the people you work with are from you. For many of you, it may prove to be a way of life that you will never forget (or want to leave).

 
Outreach by time—weekend visits, over a summer, over one or two years, over many years. For most or all of you, the constraints of time are very important and cannot be avoided. Therefore, you must arrange your English outreach by time. First: weekend visits (or daily). If your “cell student” lives nearby, then life is simple—you meet a lot. If they live on the edge of town, then a longer visit (of say, four hours) once a week may be better: of course, you can use the telephone a lot too on the other six days, since it eliminates the time you spend in traveling. Perhaps your first tutoring “job” will be like this. Second: over a summer. It is amazing what can happen to you over a summer—or over three or four days. I came to China on a summer teaching program in 1994; at the end of those five weeks, I knew I wanted to come back. Earlier, I also joined a volunteer high-school group in 1979 in London for a few days; this experience was also deeply influential.  If you join a group and go out somewhere to help out, or if you go out with a few friends or by yourself, you can get a taste for this kind of work. Since many of you may be college students, the summer holiday may be the best time to go out and try. Third: over one or two years. Now consider this—you have just left college, but instead of going to your new, carefully–hunted job, you leave home and friends, and go to a small school in the mountains, or deep in the industrial wasteland. There you stay for two years. You do your job, of course, but you also train up two “English-cell” students … then you move on. Many of you would think this is total madness, but if you were guaranteed a job after a two-year term of service in a “difficult” part of China, would you go? I hope that more and more work units would consider the concept of “deferred job hiring”; in promising such “two years later” jobs, they would release thousand of bright, energetic, enthusiastic and idealistic people into the needy areas of China. Fourth: over many years. Perhaps a few people will go, like the work, and never come back: they will have found their vocation. Today, such an idea may seem crazy, but consider this: many young people are now leaving the big cities to go camping, hiking or mountain biking in very remote places in China over their holidays. They are called “donkeys”. If such is true for campers, perhaps it could also become true for English teachers, for others who want to help others and serve the country, for artists, for those who have retired, for those who want to grow their own food and return to nature…for you. Again, it was Thoreau who wrote, “The mass of people lead lives of quiet desperation.” Today, “development” is on everyone’s mouth; however in time, what is in their heart will come out. I hope that those who live in the forgotten areas of this country will become the direct beneficiaries of such a change in this society. Is there anyone out there who would like to train up talented people in such places?