LOCKED UP ABROAD
A dream job teaching in China turned into a nightmare for Eastern Cape youth arrested for not having work permits.
When she landed a job as an English teacher in China, Tristan-Lee Niemand’s mother, Stacey-Lee, thought her daughter had finally got the breakthrough she had been waiting for.
However, all that changed when the 19year-old from the Eastern Cape was arrested in a sting operation in China for not having a proper work permit.
Tristan-Lee, a former Lilyfontein High School pupil in East London, is one of at least two Eastern Cape people languishing in Chinese jails.
Tristan-Lee and a 25-year-old former Stirling High school male student, whose mother asked that she remains anonymous as her son is married to a Chinese woman, have been in custody for close to two weeks.
They are apparently being kept in a prison in Nanjing City.
Tristan-Lee arrived in China on October 14 and was teaching English at Sesame Street English School in Nanjing, in the Jiangsu province.
According to Stacey-Lee, her daughter had been encouraged to take up a job in China by her 25-year-old friend, who had been teaching there for the past four years.
A Chinese recruitment agency paid her travelling expenses after she secured the teaching job.
The name of the agency that contracted her is unknown, but its representative on the employment contract Tristan-Lee signed on September 5, is identified as a Derlin Zhao.
The contract stipulated she was to be paid 11,500 Chinese Yuan – or R22,969 per month.
Though department of international relations and cooperation (Dirco) and the Chinese Embassy failed to respond to questions about the incident on Friday, Stacey-Lee confirmed her daughter’s arrest.
Tristan-Lee’s distraught mother has accused Dirco and the Chinese Embassy, who did not respond to Daily Dispatch’s questions, of dragging their feet on the matter.
“My daughter had been unemployed for sometime but it [job] turned out to be a big nightmare for her,” she said.
Stacey-Lee told the Dispatch that her daughter went to China on a study visa with a promise by the agency that she would get her work permit upon arrival, a promise which never materialised.
She however apparently continued teaching without the permit
Many South Africans are teaching in China and, some of them, including others from countries such as the US, Canada and the UK, travelled there having gone through dodgy recruitment agencies with promises that they would be afforded work visas once they arrived in China.
However, some of them have waited for over four years for such promises to materialise, while continuing with their teaching duties.
Chinese authorities in an apparent clampdown a fortnight ago, arrested some of them on suspicion of contravening immigration laws.
Police apparently stormed a flat StaceyLee’s daughter shared with other foreign teachers earlier this month, and arrested three of them.
Stacey-Lee said she had been in contact with Dirco and the SA Embassy in a bid to have them released, to no avail.
“I was in contact with them since last week, but they kept on promising me that they were dealing with the matter and that they would get back to us soonest, once the matter had been resolved. It has been more than a week now,” she said.
While it is not clear how many foreign teachers are sitting in Chinese jails, the Sowetan reported in June that 51 teachers were deported after they were released from custody.
Niemand said she had been informed the group were being kept in China pending an ongoing court case against a Chinese agency that allegedly lured them to the country with a promise of lucrative teaching jobs.
Niemand said the people she was in contact with in China informed her that no one was allowed to visit the arrested teachers, or even send them food or clothes.
The mother of the 25-year-old man said the experience had been traumatic for everyone.
She said her son was arrested earlier this month, released after 48 hours, and re-arrested again two weeks ago.
This was while waiting for his work visa for the past four years.
She said she knew of at least eight young people from East London, Cape Town and Johannesburg who were in custody in China on similar grounds.
“I believe that the owner of the agency, who recruited some of them, had been arrested and we were told that our children could be kept in custody for 30 days in order for them to testify against him.
“We were also informed that they had not been paid their salaries this month. Their phones and passports were confiscated.”
The mother of the 25-year-old male teacher said the arrested group was allowed to make a limited number of phone calls, “but only to Chinese numbers”.
Questions were sent to Dirco spokesperson Ndivhuwo Mabaya on Thursday morning. On Friday, he said he had just returned from Russia and would look at the e-mailed questions and respond. However, he had not responded at the time of writing on Friday.
An official from the Chinese Embassy in Pretoria on Friday promised to get someone to call back to the Dispatch, but that did not materialise.