What follows is a brief outline of my life. I have expanded upon this over time by adding more detailed Anecdotes on a second page. Links to these anecdotes can be found in dark blue at appropriate points below. The story that follows is intended to cover my life up until the point where my China journal takes over. It is the story of my first 25 years from December 1976 to December 2001.
INDEX
birth | schooling | hippy | aviation | limbo | australia | melbourne | darwin | carefree | lost in sydney | bludge job | ELT | CELTA | christchurch school | conclusionI was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in December of the Chinese Year of the Dragon. Both my parents were cattle farmers at the time. Before I entered the scene, my Dad had been a pilot and my Mum a nurse, and they had spent five years together living and working in Canada. Anyway, I am a fifth-generation Kiwi on both sides of my family.
For most of the first five years we lived on the farm, but eventually we moved to the city. I started off in the public (or state) school system, but went to study at a private school from the age of eleven. I didn't take my studies at all seriously but I tried virtually every sport and hobby I could think of, including around four years in the performing arts.
I was very average at team sports, but I liked social games a lot. I did okay at solo sports like kayaking and at one point I fancied myself to be pretty decent on the snooker table. I also became a fairly reasonable bagpipe player in the school's pipe band, travelling New Zealand regularly for competitions. The crowning achievement of my school days came in mid 1993 when our pipe band spent several weeks touring Japan and Singapore.
In my last years of school I partly opted out, choosing to change schools and study alternative subjects instead at Hagley Community College. I did two levels of drama in one year, as well as some completely new subjects (to the New Zealand high-school curriculum) such as psychology. My school was a school for adults as well as youth, and I liked it very much. We dressed how we wanted and called our teachers by their first names. I wore flares, grew my hair, and considered myself something of a neo-hippy during that year. Indeed, these things (such as growing my hair and dressing radically) all but amounted to my highest ambitions at the time. I did okay in maths and passed my last year of English. Somehow, I managed to get my Higher School Certificate (which I truly think may have been a freak marking error in my favour). As I have read can be common among males, I did not develop an intellectual appetite until my early twenties. From about the age of sixteen onwards, I really enjoyed being a teenager. [In fact I did have one ambition. Anecdotes: Writing.]
In 1996, having already done a bit of flying training at our local aeroclub, I enrolled to study aviation full-time. Again, it was a very good year. I met some of my best friends, and by the end of things I had achieved my CPL with IFR qualifications. I now had a professional pilot's licence that rated me to fly multi-engine aircraft under instrument meteorological conditions. In layman's terms, this means that I can fly through heavy clouds on the darkest of nights - perhaps with ice buildup on the windows, just to top it off - and I can still fly across the country and almost to the point of landing (at which point we are required to go visual). It's a significant mental challenge, it keeps you pretty switched on, and it's a lot of fun. [Anecdotes: Close Call.]
After that year as a pilot in training, I tried for a while to make aviation my career. In 1997 I worked for a time in Rotorua, flying a Cessna 172 on scenic operations, but then that job packed in and I ended up back in Christchurch working in F&B at a casino. Having achieved so much so young, this was a humbling experience for me. I found happiness through my friends, and my greatest joy was owning a motorcycle that twice almost killed me. Somewhat lost, about the only tangible ambition my mind could formulate with any success was that regarding the courtship of women. All former ambitions seemed to be falling out of reach, and very modest goals, such as that of becoming a soldier for a few years, began playing on my mind. [I began hitch-hiking, which lead to some interesting adventures. Anecdotes: Hitching.]
At the start of 1998, aged 21, my Dad made the wise decision to kick this bird out of the nest. He bought me a one-way ticket to Australia and told me to go and make a life for myself. Fair enough!
For the first two months, I worked in a bottle-shop in Sydney's extremely colourful red light district, Kings Cross. There, I saw everything from transsexuals (who yarned about their "seventeen-thousand dollar" operations) to drive-by shootings (a biker let off a shotgun into another biker's knees), but at no time did I feel any sense of personal danger. After a fascinating stay, I hitchhiked up to Cairns, where first I worked as a snorkel diver on the Great Barrier Reef and then I found work in a kebab shop. I lived in Northern Queensland for almost six months before moving to Melbourne at the end of the year. [Read about my epic hitch-hike and the pirates I met along the way. Anecdotes: Cairns Hitch.]
Things did not go so well for me in Melbourne either. I couldn't find the stable work I needed to finance further flying experience and I couldn't get my head straight when it came to women. Regarding the flying, it takes more than qualifications to become a pilot. What you really need is about 600 to a thousand hours of air time, and a pilot only graduates with 250. It belongs to the more thorough autobiography that I hope one day to write to discuss why I didn't make it happen for myself, but ultimately of course it boils down to the fact that my interests diverged. After six months of bad, casual and irregular jobs, I did a quick hitchhike to Adelaide and back and realised during this time that I had to move on. I decided to make another crack of it in Darwin.
Darwin allowed me to clear my mind and rethink my life. I met a lot of good people and had an absolutely fantastic time. I pretty much shelved my flying career - at this point I knew I was more into philosophy and literature than anything else - and I made the conscious decision to worry less about life.
For the first month in Darwin I had absolutely no money and I slept in a park. But this was not to be like my time in Cairns. This time, I loved it! The difference was that I decided that I wouldn't give a damn. In Cairns, I had spent every day hunting for work as if I might otherwise soon succumb to the plight of the unfortunate people around me - meaning, I thought their emotional despair and chemical addictions might somehow transfer to me, as if by osmosis. In Darwin, I rationalised that if the world were really to be so horrible as to precipitate my destruction, I might as well resign myself to it and sooner be out of my misery. No longer afraid, a weight lifted from my shoulders, and I simply allowed myself to live in the moment and trust in being provided for. I had no time for thinking about tomorrow.
It wasn't long before a routine developed. In the mornings, I would sneak into a hotel so that I could shower and shave, and so on. Having washed my shirt in the shower as well, I would then hang it outside on the line and swap it with the shirt that was there from the previous day.
In the evenings, I was well fed because the local pubs served free food in order to attract the backpacking masses. I would then make myself a part of as many pub games as I could. If I lost, I still typically earned a jug of beer for participating. By sharing this round, I made friends, blended with other paying customers, and could expect others to eventually buy me beers in return. However, I didn't always lose. Winning always meant several jugs of beer, and I also won free haircuts, bus trips throughout the Northern Territory, and other various vouchers. Eventually moving on to some part-time bar work, my six months in Darwin were fantastic.
Having followed a girlfriend back to Sydney, I then spent the next twenty-two months getting back into the swing of the working world. Fed up with bar work, I ended up working in call-centres, which supported me up until the time I left Sydney in the middle of 2001. Nevertheless, although I loved Sydney and met some excellent people, I remained a failed pilot with a very average job, very big dreams and no immediate prospects for realising them, and very frequent mishaps and setbacks. Emotionally, for much of this time, I felt like a lost soul, and I could only hope and pray for another lucky break to come my way - a break comparable to that stroke of luck that made me a pilot.
It was my last job, as a night-shift supervisor at a call-centre, that gave me this break. Being entirely alone from ten at night till eight in the morning, the truth was that I had no one else to supervise other than myself.
Aside from listening to sales' staff recordings, appraising them and providing feedback, my job mainly involved compiling and retrieving the day's business statistics from data stored on computers. As my website demonstrates, I'm fairly good on computers. The managers seemed to think that if each report took an hour to retrieve, and there where six or seven reports, then my job would take six or seven hours. Instead, I just turned on six or seven computers and did each report simultaneously, and this meant that I had nine hours to myself on every shift. (When I tried to point this out to them, they didn't seem too concerned. They explained that they still needed someone there twenty-four hours, so I soon refrained from trying to talk myself into a busier timetable.)
With so much free time in my day, and still a comfortable, steady income, I devoted myself to my studies. I read and wrote a lot, I began the website you're reading now, and I wondered about the idea of travelling the world. After a well-timed suggestion from a friend, some considerable thought, and some extensive research, I decided that I would become an English Language Teacher. I rightly thought that this would help me to see the world and develop my own writing skills at the same time; and so I would accomplish two top priorities and finally have a career to speak of in the process.
Completed in July 2001, the Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults cost me all up around $3500 Australian, took a month of sleepless nights to complete, and, despite its brevity, is considered the equivalent of "1 out of 6 subjects of the MA in Applied Linguistics" at the University of New South Wales, Australia [CELTA]. I have yet to find someone, however qualified, who has done the course who thinks it was easy.
Having finally found my break and applied myself considerably to make a success of it, I then returned to my hometown (Christchurch) to be with family, reacquaint myself with old friends, and very conveniently take up my first teaching position. I then spent three months teaching at the Christchurch College of English, where I consolidated all I had learnt about teaching in the atmosphere of a very professional school; and so I come to the point in my story where my Journal now takes over. [China]
In summary, by the end of 2001 I had gained a Commercial Pilot's Licence and an internationally recognised qualification through The University of Cambridge. I had also spent 3.5 years living in four Australian cities and states (each for about six months or more), and I had lived a life of adventure and gained experience in a variety of jobs and situations. I had come to know both success and failure, and what it means to overcome adversity. I had confirmed my interests in life (including history, writing, cooking, and website programming), and I finally had some idea of what I was going to do in order to realise my destiny. I would travel the world to get the experiences necessary to one day become a successful author, and teaching English was to be the respectable means to this end.
Jonny B Harman. 29 Feb 2004, 02 Sept 2004
From here, read some of my Anecdotes if you haven't already. Otherwise, you may go directly to my Journal on China. Photos from this time can be found under Life in my photo albums, as can further links to other various Journal pages and the countries in which I have since taught.
