Good News! I think I just solved my problem of supporting myself (paying rent, eating) while I’m in grad school. The plan had been to find enough individuals to tutor to make up about 10 hours per week. At 200rmb/hour, that’s 8000rmb/month, which is enough to live on comfortably. 10 hours of work a week shouldn’t take too much time from my studies.

Up until today I had only one student so far, found through Shanghai Tutor. She only gave me two hours of the ten I’m going to need. I still work part-time for Melody, but the pay is half of what I get for tutoring, and it doesn’t provide stable or frequent work.

Then around noon I saw that I had a new Shanghai Tutor application. They asked that I contact them by phone, so I did so an hour after getting the application.

It’s a good thing I reacted quickly! A few hours later I was meeting with a Hong Kong businesswoman in her luxury apartment in central Shanghai. Her two children (Paulo, 11, and Tiffany, 9) are basically fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, but she wants them to get extra help in English, Math, Science, etc. Most potential students balk at Shanghai Tutor’s high rate, but she agreed to it without batting an eye, and agreed to reimbursing the taxi fare too, coming and going. She said she had found two other potential tutors already, but if I could do it, she’d cancel their interviews. (She was very pleased that I could teach her kids basic Spanish and Japanese.)

She wants me to come over every evening, Monday through Friday, for two hours of tutoring. The Indonesian housekeeper will give me dinner. Yes, that’s my ten hours of tutoring taken care of, right there (plus free meals)!

I already tutored the kids a bit the first night and was paid for it. The kids are pretty nice… not too bratty. And they’re both smart.

The only issue is that I still don’t have my class schedule, but I told the mother that, and she understands. I have good reason to believe there will be no conflicts, though.

Also, since Lenny comes home so late, me being gone as well every evening will mean we won’t be able to keep Ayi. Ayi is a whole other special headache, though, and we’ve been debating a lot lately as to whether we should keep her on. This settles it.

So I’ve been very busy lately, but things are looking good!