It’s really cool that in Beijing there are many opportunities for foreigners to earn money, especially students. Last summer when I was studying in Beijing, a few local students were developing a hand writing software program; they were looking for western educated students who could write in cursive. They paid me two hundred Yuan to write a few sentences on a cell phone and on a tablet device.

Similarly, last week, a Chinese student who was looking for native English speakers approached my friend. He told us we were going to a summer camp in ZhangJiaKou (a city in nearby Hebei province) and that we had to just stand around and speak English to some of the people attending. The idea was that we were a promotional stunt, and our presence gave the impression that the children who would attend this summer camp would learn English. We decided to go.

We took a six a.m. train to Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing. After having lunch, instead of going to some summer camp, we went to a hotel. After sitting us down in a conference room of this hotel, we were told that instead of going to some summer camp, we were going to be judging a children’s English competition. And that we were the ‘celebrity’ judges, from the US. The competition was held in a big hotel ballroom of sorts, and it had a stage and many seats for all the parents. The competition was for students from grades 2 through 7. Our job as judges was to read off first a Chinese sentence, and have the students translate them into English, and then read an English sentence, and have the students translate it back into Chinese. We as judges were scoring the students on their fluency, pronunciation and clarity.

This was the first part of the competition. The second part was short plays, all 6 grades, 2 through 7, did the same play, Cinderella. It was really funny, especially since the plays were all exactly the same. The last part of the contest was 6 students who all sang the same song. This was also really fun, since the kids were all dressed up and I could see they really tried their best.

After the competition, my friend and I had a photo-shoot with the kids. It seemed like the kids had not seen Westerner’s before. Even during the competition, some kids would stare, and parents would try to take pictures of us without us noticing. It was really a great experience, and I earned some money as well. I guess this is part of the China experience, doing strange and odd jobs, just for the stories.

Location: Beijing, China