The Headmaster, the Terrorists and Me

Travel Stories: Two years after the Bali bombing, Julia Ross recalls the attack's unlikely impact on her teaching experience in China

10.05.04 | 9:37 PM ET

Nobody liked the headmaster. That much I figured out by my second week in China. The morning of my arrival, he stood at the school gates and issued nervous orders through cigarette-stained teeth to those who had worked hard to make my teaching assignment there possible.

A 50-ish man of rural stock, he was clearly pleased to have reached local prominence in this dusty little town where Shanghai’s urban echoes dissipated beyond the last ring road. Two members of the English faculty translated his welcome to me, but in their nonplussed tones I detected a red thread of embarrassment. He may preside over this fiefdom, I thought, but he doesn’t hold their respect.

Soon thereafter, I discovered my presence had given the headmaster much to gloat about. As the first foreign teacher in the school’s 99-year history, I represented a bureaucratic coup that enabled him to trade significantly on his all-important guanxi, or connections, across working class San Lin. I heard rumors he was lording it over the other headmasters in town, and was surprised when English teachers from neighboring schools began showing up at my weekly teacher training sessions. My first impression had been on the mark.

Our Waterloo, the headmaster’s and mine, came about two months into the school term. That week, terrorists bombed a nightclub in Bali packed with young Western travelers. More than 200 people were killed. The attack had left my Australian friends teaching in China particularly unnerved. I didn’t think the Shanghainese had taken much notice of the event until my department chair relayed a message from the school district: An unnamed administrator suggested that I not be allowed to leave the school grounds often due to the “threat” against foreigners.

I laughed off the overreaching directive—I lived on school grounds, so enforcing it would have meant virtual imprisonment—and assured my department head I was safer in Shanghai than at home in Washington, D.C. I was about to learn that authority couldn’t be so easily dismissed.

Days later, I received an invitation to one of my first grader’s homes. Aileen’s mother had decided to throw a Saturday afternoon party for several of the school’s teachers. She sent a rose-embossed card with a party agenda carefully presented in girlish English, explaining the event was being held “For the healthful growing up of Aileen Lu.” Charmed, I told Mrs. Lu that I looked forward to attending.

To my surprise, word came late Friday that the party had been cancelled. Disappointed at a missed opportunity to visit a Chinese home, I assumed an emergency had arisen. Mrs. Lu’s breathless appearance at my door that evening told me otherwise.”

Something has happened,” she warned. “The school called and said I must cancel the party because it is not safe for you.”

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Julia Ross is a Washington, DC-based writer and frequent contributor to World Hum. She has lived in China and Taiwan, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Mandarin student. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Plenty and other publications. Her essay, Six Degrees of Vietnam, was shortlisted for "The Best American Travel Writing 2009."


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