 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Mobile Connections. Okay. And today we're going to talk about Americans teaching overseas. We're going to talk about the possibilities, the salaries, the benefits with Richard Talon. Okay. We're back with Richard Talon. He joins us from San Antonio. We're talking about Americans teaching overseas. Welcome to the show, Richard. Thank you for having me, Jay. Absolutely. So you are an educator and you're an author. Tell us about your career experience as an educator and author. Well, I think my experience teaching started in 2012 because I had an opportunity to teach in Hong Kong. I was teaching in Texas at the time and basically my wife kept telling me that she had been there. Let's go to Hong Kong. Let's live there. And so I applied with the Hong Kong Education Bureau, which is their government schools. And after a year or so of not getting hired, finally I was hired and moved my family, my wife, my young daughter at that time, from Texas to Hong Kong. In fact, you know, with Think Tech Hawaii, I watched it for years because I'm always going through Hawaii for a visit. And I even said my story goes from Caltown to Kona to Kowloon and back. And so with that, I've authored some books based on those experiences in Hong Kong and teaching overseas as an American teaching overseas. I taught there 10 years and recently came back on a midnight flight just in the past few months. And so I'm in San Antonio currently teaching here. But Jay, I've got so many experiences from being in Hong Kong, teaching English as a second language, and teaching special education classes too. Some students with dyslexia and autism. And during that time, I had the opportunity to drown and in a pool in the Philippines on a trip with my wife and daughter. That's always exciting. That's really fun as if anybody's ever seen some Jack Nicholson movies, it's very liberating if you remember some of his lines. Did your life pass before you? It was just a kind of like that, but I don't recommend anybody do it. I see you live it in a less risk-taking way. But yeah, I was there and a few years later, I got caught in one of the famous Hong Kong typhoons that was the winds were going at about 160 miles an hour and I wanted to kind of go outside and see what that was like to be in that. And as a bicycle flew over my head at one point in a huge metal sign, flew over my head at another point, I crawled back into the apartment building where we live after about an hour later. Again, I don't recommend those things, but I have a history of living dangerously. If you remember the book in the movie, The Year of Living Dangerously, that's a very similar- That's the Southeast Asia, isn't it? Yes, this happened to be a Mel Gibson film about that part of the world. So, right. So, let me drill down on your teaching experience in Hong Kong. Was it a living wage? How much did they pay you? And did they help you in finding a place to live? What was it like teaching a school in Hong Kong, especially English as a second language, for example? I assume you taught in English and I assume it was a good experience, so much so that you stayed there for 10 years. But tell us more about what the contract was like, what the experience was like, because really what I would like people to know about is what you did and how they might do the same. Yeah, thanks. Those are good questions. And I would say it was more than a living wage. I know you said something about there and I've watched many programs about that as an educator. And I've read a lot about Hawaii schools. In fact, I thought about moving from Hong Kong back to Hawaii before I decided I'm coming back home to my home state and being close to family and family situations. I encourage people to look into Hong Kong, not necessarily just Hong Kong, but it could be the Middle East, it could be Latin America, it could be Europe. And one of the best ways to do that is teaching English as a second language. You do not have to have loads of experience to do that. In my situation, Hong Kong, you can actually look on their website of the Hong Kong Education Bureau, which is the government, like the public schools here or the Hawaii Department of Education. And they will list salaries there. I basically doubled my salary from teaching in the Fort Worth, Texas area 10 years ago. I doubled my salary within two years and continually got raises and bonuses. And in fact, Jay, they were giving me bonuses that I never really did figure out on my paycheck, why I was getting a end of contract bonus every two years and then a monthly bonus. But they do pay you because I think of their generosity and their appreciation of educators and respect that the Hong Kong culture and many Asian cultures give to educators will pay your living expenses on top of your salary. By the time I finished a few months ago, I was making well over six figures. It was around 130 or 40,000. Then I finished up that. And in fact, I do have a book on Amazon. That's one of the books I wrote. It's called How I Became the World's Highest Paid High School Teacher. And I would say it's not mathematically or statistically provable. I admit it's a little bit of a self-promotion, but I have looked at other salaries as teachers and curious people like think tech people are. As a teacher, I did a lot of research on what somebody could make, not just me, but what somebody who's willing to go there makes. And it's more than Paris or the Middle East, New York City, Los Angeles, and Japan and Korea and other places like that. You have special qualifications that would explain that high salary because, I mean, the average person just hearing this discussion would say, I got to get over there. You would expect people would be flooding into Hong Kong for these jobs, no? Well, I had at the time about five years teaching in Texas with a teaching certificate, a state issued certificate. And I had been teaching some English and had had some international students, but I was teaching history in, you know, 12 or 14 years ago in Texas. And so you do need a certificate, however, whether it's from any of the 50 states, you know, Hawaii, Texas, anywhere, or the English-speaking countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, they do recruit from those countries. And those are the higher salaries. And you do need a basic ESL certificate, which some people go over there with master's degrees in ESL. I personally just took a course work that I had took me about two months of weekends and ESL. And those are, those are, you know, not too difficult. I don't consider myself, I really consider myself kind of a B grade student as far as, you know, averages, you know, when I was in college. I wasn't the top of the tier, but to go overseas, you know, you need some, you know, willingness to get into another culture, to uproot yourself, to be a global person, as you guys talk about all the time, and to be willing to be in a culture where, you know, you're the minority. I was the only foreigner in a government school for 10 years. And you've got to be somebody that's willing to do that. But some people just go to Hong Kong, or they go to Japan, or maybe they go to South America, or another country, or the Middle East, maybe they just teach a year. But you don't have to speak the language of the country for ESL. All you have to do is speak English, right? Correct. There must be a challenge in communicating with people who are weak on English. How do you bridge that gap when you don't speak, for example, Cantonese? Correct. Right. The Hong Kong, as a lot of your viewers have seen, you know, has gone over quite a few changes. And I was right in the middle of them. However, they do have a very good English speaking population. They've been working hard on that for the past 25 years. And so typically the government schools there, the principal and the staff, speak, you know, very levels of very high quality English, because many of them are educated in the UK and Australia, New Zealand. You know, depending on their personal, they're either very clear, or maybe some of them are just, they only want to speak with you as little as possible. So it's kind of a personal thing. But yes, the schools there teach are very good and have a lot of very high communication in English. You know, I remember my own delight at going to Japan for the first time. And I could not speak the language. However, however, and you may have seen this happen in your teaching, I could carry around a little yellow bed with me. And I can write out my message to someone in English in block letters and hand them the pad and they would be able to read it, even though they had no ear for it and could not speak it. Did you find the same thing in Hong Kong? Yes, yeah, you can, you can do that very easily. Of course, with these days with there are apps that you can hold it up and read the read the Cantonese yourself and the sign that you're reading tells you whatever it is. I've done, yeah, I've done that many times, hold up a yellow pad for this. So yeah, that's, I encourage people like I said, I know about the education, you know, seen in the US with a shortage of teachers or teachers looking for something else and another opportunity. And a lot of us, we're just born with that traveler, that wanderer, that looking around corners, that, you know, God gave us, you know, internally, whatever. And we're not going to be satisfied until we, you know, trekked across the frontiers or said, hey, I want, I want to do more than trekking there. I want to, you know, live there. And that's what I'm telling your viewers, maybe you can say, I can't see going to another country for 10 years, but I could go for a year. Well, there's a lot of opportunities like that out there, Jay. There's websites that are promoting or promoting and recruiting as we speak. I was looking at some just a couple of hours ago. So yeah, though I've been in Hong Kong, there are amazing places in the Middle East, the UAE, Korea and Japan, Latin America. As you mentioned, Latin America, what about Europe? Europe has some food. You'd be amazed at the Eastern European countries that are promoting the spoken English and wonderful opportunities. I know Disney operates English schools throughout the world. And you can't argue with that brand is knowing how to produce teachers that are going to get the material to the students. And the students are going to do that. So they do, again, I can't say where they specifically where they are, but Eastern Europe, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, it all depends on those places. I would say that what you're saying earlier, living wage, that phrase is maybe more of a living wage in a lot of those countries. It's just enough for, especially in mainland China too, it's just enough for somebody to live comfortably in that location, maybe even save a little bit of money each month, but then you're really going for the experience to be living in the middle of Eastern Europe or Latin America and to be a traveler, a wanderer like myself, my wife. I do, like I said, I just tend to highlight Hong Kong because, hey, when I was there, it was an opportunity to sock some money away for my family. I currently just with the money, we saved about 50% of our income because Hong Kong does pay well and you are limiting on your expenses too. We purchased a house. You didn't live on the peak then, did you? No, I didn't. No, not quite. That's like beyond, you know, Beverly Hills or beyond the price in Honolulu zones. I lived kind of the Orwellian named New Territories, which is about eight miles from the border and I did experience the revolution from outside my window. There was a time a few years ago when I had to walk to work a few days and back because the trains were shut down by the government because of the protesters and walking past some areas that had been burned. I say that because I like to state facts, but I don't like to scare somebody, scare some viewers off from what I did because Hong Kong has changed for the locals, but it doesn't mean it would change for a teacher going over there. Well, I tell you, I know a lot of teachers, I shouldn't say a lot, but a handful anyway, of teachers who taught law in Hong Kong and who were close up to the umbrella movement and all that and wrote about it, lectured about it, engaged with their students about it, and they did not make friends with the government. And when it all hit the fan on the umbrella movement and thereafter, they were not particularly welcome in Hong Kong by the PRC, which was taking it over day by day. And so the question is, how do you avoid that? How do you avoid getting in trouble with the government? How do you avoid being bothered by the decline of democracy, if you will, in Hong Kong? Well, those are good questions. I would say personally myself, I went there with, I decided that, hey, I'm an American and I'm certainly showing up with some, maybe some baggage. During the time I was there when Obama was re-elected and saw, watched it on the big screens there because they, they, that's the way they show a lot of current news shows on huge screens in the huge shopping malls there. And then when you know who was elected in 2016, that just was pretty interesting four years there. So my idea with Jay going there is I was a guest and so I did want, I did want to show respect to my employers and my principal. In all honesty during that time, they gave me a lot of freedom even up until the last day. They didn't ask the, you know, they didn't ask anything for me not to do anything. There was, You managed to skirt the whole political issue. Yeah, I think because, because I was kind of alone in a situation, again, in the middle of the, of the, as I called it, the sticks, the new territories. I was living in the sticks and you're, even though I had my family there and a few expat friends, very few Americans that I know in the 10 years, any expats that were mostly British or UK. I was kind of, kind of a loner and so that they also kind of took a hands off to somebody that from the US or maybe somebody that was a little different and they didn't really bother me and I did have some freedom to talk about things. But at the same time too, my idea too is I wanted to show some respect as they call it their filial piety. I'm sure many people know about that and that was something I wanted to show to them because they did benefit me and bless me. You weren't going to talk, you weren't going to talk, think about teaching thing. That would have been illegitimate. No, it wasn't. There was never any necessarily reason to because, again, the classes were, it's kind of like, I give the information I tell about the world outside and, and so it was more or less like stating the facts. I do know that, you know, there were teachers arrested over the last few years, however they were the local teachers that were kind of teaching, that were teaching the local curriculum. They weren't arresting the the net teachers, the Native American teachers. Were you teaching your net in Hong Kong or in Kowloon? The school at which you were teaching, was it in Hong Kong or Kowloon? It was in, it was closer to Kowloon. So it wasn't on the Hong Kong island, but it was in the Hong Kong city under the government. Yeah. Was it different, and my question really is, was it different, would it have been different if you were teaching on Hong Kong island? Well, I would say probably not, because I would have been teaching still at a government school. And again, they still did give people in my situation, native English teachers from overseas. They gave us a lot of flexibility, because I think their idea was kind of like, you're maybe a little bit special, you're a little privileged, and we do show respect to, you know, a certain amount of respect to foreigners and teachers. And a lot of it was just like, you know, you're there by yourself, and that was okay with them as a high school teacher. But as a professor, yeah, I think there would have been a lot of, I would have been more like your friends that you know. So I think it would have been a different situation there. But I know. I've talked to a lot of Americans who had jobs positions as the representatives agents of American companies in China. And this goes back to the ought years, if you will. But they saw their jobs and positions in any given city in China as a jumping off point. So there was never a weekend where they didn't, you know, fly to some distant other city in China. They explored all of China every time they had a chance. And I'm wondering whether your situation in Hong Kong permitted you to do that. Could you go to China? Could you get in without any difficulty? Could you travel around in China? Did you do that? Yes, yeah, that was certainly one of my dreams of a lifetime. My, I remember several years ago, my cousin said, oh, Richard, I'm not surprised you're in Hong Kong because when you were a kid, you would, you know, when we were 10 years old, you were saying I'm going to live overseas. And I pointed to the pictures and my cousin told me that about five or six years ago. So yeah, there was a before COVID, of course, that changed everything. But being eight miles from the border, I could wake up in the morning and be in mainland China within about an hour or so. And that's just taking buses and trains. And in a little suburb of called a little suburb of 15 million people called Shenzhen, I know you know about that. And, you know, you're, then you're, you know, you're in the big game once you cross in there and you are going by their rules. And so, fortunately, I was able to do that many times or just do day, day trips into Shenzhen to look around to explore, see the different areas. But also issues with being able to get into the country, you know, or get around from city to city. I mean, did they have to present papers, did they check your papers, did they inspect you on travel? So nothing more than showing a passport on the several times, you know, when we would flew to Beijing for Christmas and took a bullet train back from Beijing to Hong Kong. And then one trip with my daughter's cheerleading competition into the next province from Hong Kong. We traveled pretty freely. And I believe they're used, they're used to travel. I can't say they are the now, but I do know that I'm in the few times we were there. I was told that I was in about eight or nine different camera databases that, you know. Sure. What about, you know, what about COVID? You referred to that a minute ago and you were there, you've been there. I mean, COVID is three years old. So some of your time in Hong Kong has been with COVID and that has certainly affected mainland China but also Hong Kong. How did that affect you? It did quite a lot over the last three years. We're still, my family is still in a situation where we're kind of like taking trips, you know, road trips in our car because we didn't need a car, you know, you could travel by bus and train. So we're on the road in San Antonio in about an hour and a half. We can be down in the beach in Corpus Christi, Texas. And we've done that quite a bit recently. So we enjoy getting out and we enjoy our freedom because we didn't have that. We weren't necessarily locked down, but we were highly restricted over the last three years in movements and where you could go, where you could go into a theater or a church or a grocery market or just sitting in a bench somebody could walk up to you and say you're not allowed to sit here or no apparent logical reason. It's just that somebody deemed that that bench, you know, in this park would somehow spread COVID and so this whole area would be off limits. Was that an inconvenience for you? Did you feel burdened by it? Well, it was. Yeah, it was. Again, used to being freedom and move around or jump on an airplane, maybe take a two-hour flight to the Philippines or three hours to Thailand, which we were doing, you know, and then all of a sudden it just clamped down for the last three years. Mentally, we knew, you know, after a couple years that I was in my last contract. So mentally, we were like, we're going to be leaving in 2022 anyhow. Let's just patiently deal with it. But we saw a lot of people fail. They just expats just left. And again, though we have great memories and are, you know, glad to have been there, we did know a lot of people that just moved out there were just empty flats and apartments and friends that moved away in the past 18 months or so. So is that to say that the, you know, idyllic quality of teaching, American teaching in Hong Kong and maybe in the BRC also, you know, has changed to the point where it's not as attractive as it was during most of the years you were there? Well, I would say again for myself, I'm still positive about people going over there. And that's, and I don't make any money off of this. I'm just, you know, I believe in it. You know, I don't try, you know, I don't work for anybody to get a, you know, a commission. And if somebody, you know, signs up, although there are websites that are recruiting now, if I would say it's changed for the local people that live in the PRC in Hong Kong, but it doesn't mean it's changed for somebody that wants to go over there and spend a year, spend a couple of years. And again, it's, in my case, it's an opportunity for a lot of, you know, people again in the States, whether you're a Hawaii teacher or a Texas or anywhere, and you want to put some money aside and get an opportunity to buy a house that, you know, we just did that about four months ago. And we even made enough money that we built a small home in the Philippines for about 25,000 that we could go to any time. It's about 700 square feet. Man, it's a real modern structure that's kind of like a vacation place. That's great. What a wonderful thing. That's all a fallout as a result of the income you were earning through the teaching in Hong Kong. Yeah, it's just, we are thrifty people. I mean, we're not misers or anybody like that, but we're thrifty. We don't need a lot of expensive gadgets and clothing. So we do save about 50% of our income. And somebody that's enterprising, a go-getter that has a teaching license from one of the States and has a few years of teaching experience, could see their salary go up tremendously and you could save it. So yeah, that was an opportunity, you know, for my dream is to buy a house in Texas from the savings. And so I've been happy to have been able to do that just in the past few months. That's great. You know, there was a piece on the news just a few weeks ago about how teachers were leaving the profession in the United States. They were complaining about career opportunities. They were complaining about they were unhappy with the salaries they were getting. They were unhappy with the trouble they were having with school boards. Right. And with COVID on top of that. And from parents. It's like they became pincushions for everybody who had a complaint, would go after the poor teacher. And they were saying, I don't need this. You know, they're not getting paid enough to justify the aggravation I'm having. And the numbers were pretty impressive about all the teachers that are leaving. You know, by the way, the same process is happening with the police in this country, you know, leaving their jobs. This is not good. We need the human infrastructure in both of those areas. But it strikes me that a teacher, you know, who has been disenchanted with teaching in his or her state or, you know, school district would listen carefully to what you are saying. Because a lot of the problems that we have in the US about teaching don't happen overseas. And it's not just Hong Kong. I mean, as you mentioned, it could be Latin America. It could be Africa. It could be Eastern Europe. And the Middle East, for example, and you get treated pretty well. And you don't have the impediments that, you know, that have emerged in teaching in the US. What do you think about that? That's again, it's kind of a kudo to the culture in a lot of Asian countries in Hong Kong is definitely part of that is I just had zero discipline issues partly because the students do tend to come in there with a very quiet attitude. No school shootings. I take it no school shootings. No, there's there's just no guns in Hong Kong. There are just no guns. The police do have them. But you just don't have to worry about that. And still now there's just not a violence issue. The students in the classroom are they're very quiet. They tend not to speak up. And so you have to really work with kind of the cultural issues. And but there is a amount of respect in a lot of Hong Kong and a lot of places like that that they go and sit and they're there to listen. And so there's just not that issue. But by the way, I would say being in San Antonio, it's a blue city in a red state. And it's quite multicultural. And I have I don't have any discipline issues here. I've had zero. And that's just something that's not brought out by the mass media of all the teachers that go through their day and enjoy their job and enjoy their students. There's just not a discipline issue. It's just not allowed in the schools in in San Antonio and all over because they do the teachers do have control and the students are there with a certain amount of that they want to learn. I get called sir all the time. Maybe that's an issue, you know, southern. But it's but I have people with, you know, more degrees than me and more experience calling me sir. So I think that that stands to culture of a lot of America that we don't hear about in the mass media, the mainstream media, that it's a really a good occupation and a good career. Happy to hear that. That's very important that we should understand, you know, all the elements that feed into, you know, the press. So question, would you would you go back to Hong Kong? Would you go back to teaching ESL in Hong Kong or in some other place where, you know, these jobs are available? Do you plan to do that? I would go back. However, I'm so, you know, happy to be around my brothers, my sisters, my nieces nephews, my wife is here. My daughter is in university nearby. So I just think as far as my age, I would go back for our younger, you know, take a hiatus now. I would say with my age though, I'm really set back home in San Antonio. But I would say, you know, if I were younger, I would go back somewhere, Japan or Korea or Latin America, because I do have that adventure in that curiosity. And so that is that is their jay for people. Again, whether you make somebody can make a six-figure income, which a lot of people, again, I only had about five years of experience. And then within a few years, I was in a six figures. And that's a lot easier to do in Hong Kong than other cities. Is that the reason you stayed in Hong Kong? I mean, you could have gone to Korea, you could have gone to Japan, you could have gone to any number of places. You know, I could count them on my hands and feet and all these places that seem attractive culturally and, you know, in terms of the environment. But if you stayed, you stayed in Hong Kong all that time, you never rotated to another place. Why not? Well, when I got to my school, you can get a two-year contract, which again, a lot of people would like something like that. Go there, you get a two-year contract. And then once you do a good job, they'll issue you another one. They do dangle a bonus. And again, like I said, there was another bonus there. I just never asked about it. Maybe they were worried you were going to pick another country. I think it's just, it's possible because sometimes people that go overseas to teach English or, you know, wanderers that like to explore, you know, they're like, okay, I've been here a year or two. I want to go to a totally different country. So they do do that. They pay people to do a good job. And so I did, I kept saying, sure, I'll stay here. And it was likable. It was fun. My family enjoyed it. My daughter was at that time pretty young and she was on the subway system, even up and during the, you know, the last few years with the issue with the, you know, PRC taking over some things, she never felt unsafe. And as a young girl, it is very common for them to ride the bus, ride the subway walk late at night and not worry about violence because the nature of many of the cultures there is very calmer than as we Americans can be shocked at the calmness of the people there. It's one of the relevant we should cover before we, before we closed. And that is this, you know, back when we had the Peace Corps, and we had Americans under Kennedy and for a little while after traveling to the border corners of the world, going to developing countries, going everywhere, really. And delivering, you know, what do you want to call it? Citizen diplomacy everywhere, making friends, making, making the U.S. and Americans look good. And making connections, you know, and I think, you know, there was a time when a lot of, a lot of young people were going to China, getting jobs in China, not only education, but lots of other things, trying to make a living, trying to make a life, trying to build a company, what have you, in faraway places. My observation, however, is that it may not be happening as much these days for what do you want to call it, geopolitical reasons. And I just wanted to know whether you felt as an educator in Hong Kong and observing other educators in other countries in Asia, whether there was an element of that, of citizen diplomacy there, where you were actually having an effect, a positive effect on the relationship between the United States and Americans in general, and the citizens and, you know, institutions of these other places. Yes, I would say I viewed myself, you know, as a teacher, you know, of course, teach the classes daily and the students and do what benefits them, help them. But the Hong Kong people and teachers are very, very smart, very astute at everything. And the media was free, you know, to access CNN, you know, NBC, any websites, so BBC world websites, and they were, they were always asking me about this, that especially over again, over three presidents, I was there. And of the Trump years, they were right in there. What do you think, you know, what's your opinion? And my idea was kind of, even though, you know, nobody told me, you know, to go over there, I wasn't sent over there by my government, I was sent over there by my, frankly, my need to save money and a better future for my family. And well, along with my adventuresome spirit, I mean, that was there. But, you know, somebody who's taught history and government for years, I kind of took the middle road and said, well, this is why, you know, this happened and this is why that happened. And try not to be somebody that's really necessarily waving the American flag, but telling them, hey, there's, there are good opportunities in the USA and the West, you know, whether it's somebody traveling there or living there. So the people that, you know, did ask about that, my idea was kind of like, well, read the facts for yourself and watch the news and make your best opinion on what's best, not so much. I was never, somebody's interested in saying, oh, you know, my guy didn't win or my guy won. So there's just not that you were an example of an American and you knew it. And they were looking at you for that. We're out of time. I've got to go. Thank you so much for joining us today on Global Connections and talking about Americans teaching overseas. It's been great to talk to you, and I hope we can connect again. Good. Thank you very much, Jay. I enjoyed it very much. The fame. Aloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.