Twelve-year-old terrorist and a pair of scissors

In the first three months of tutoring I taught mainly 12-16 year olds. The incident I want to recall was one of those rare horrific moments early in my career when I found myself in a situation over which I had little control. I had been asked to work with a thirteen-year-old kid from Hong Kong who was living in NW London. He was a straight A student. He was said to be hard working and polite. I was there to teach him History and English over the Easter break.  

‘I’m going to be the next 9/11 bomber.’

 I put down my pen and made Jason Li look at me.

‘That is not in any way an acceptable thing to say.’

Jason laughed in my face.

‘The Americans are a bunch of wankers. My dad says so. China is gonna bomb the ass out of it one day soon.’

‘Jason, I’m going to stop teaching you if you keep on like this. Now focus on the question.’

On the table in front of us was an A3 sheet of paper with a number of historical sources relating to the end of the Second World War. I had spent an hour at the agency digging through God knows how many disorganized files to find them. The agency had a basement room packed full of every exam paper and teaching book ever published, except all the tutors kept stealing the papers or putting them back in the wrong folders so that you had at best a 50-50 chance of finding what you needed. There were two written sources: the first a diary entry of an emaciated English POW in Burma suffering the effects of dysentery, the second a newspaper article describing the capture of Berlin by the Russians. There was also a photograph source, depicting the charred and desolate remains of Hiroshima. It was this picture which had prompted Jason’s anti-American invective, the general line of his argument being that he wanted to “blow their fat asses sky high” because they were, if I remember the words correctly, “Yankee imperialist scum”. This attitude prevailed despite the fact that Jason’s father worked for an American bank in Hong Kong and that Jason had, as a young child, lived in a palatial apartment in the centre of New York’s fashionably expensive district of Chelsea. His bedroom and study area were also caked in the trinkets of latter-day Americana. A Pixar/Disney Toy Story duvet cover swamped his camp bed, an American LA Lakers basketball net was suckered proudly to his door, and a series of framed Star Wars posters displaying characters from the piss-poor-prequels lined the wall. The only nod to the boy’s Chinese heritage came in the form of house slippers embroidered with a phoenix and dragon locked in battle. A pair had also been found for me.

Now when a child started acting up, I had been advised by the agency to seek out one of the parents. This was impossible. The mother was attending an interior design conference in Paris and the boy’s father had been in Hong Kong for the past three months. The current Li household consisted of thirteen-year-old Jason and his two Chinese nannies who spoke perhaps fifty words of English between them. Even if we had been able to communicate, their loyalty was undoubtedly towards Jason. They had laughed profusely when the boy greeted my arrival with a middle finger.

I was on my own.

‘If you were able to kill either Hitler or Stalin, which one would you choose?’ Jason asked, pulling at my jumper.

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because by answering that I’d be playing some sort of God.’

‘But it’s obvious. You kill Hitler, then the war would never have started and everyone could have directed their weapons towards destroying communism.’

‘You want to destroy communism?’

‘Only Russian communism.’

‘And where did China get its communism from?’

‘It’s completely different.’

‘That might well be true, but still it’s Russia who tried communist ideology first.’

‘My dad says the Russians are a bunch of thugs.’

‘What does your dad say about the British?’

‘He says you are easy to make money from and that you eat too much cheese. I hate cheese.’

‘Your dad has a lot of opinions.’

‘You smell of cheese.’

‘Jason. Get on with the fu…’

I stopped myself just in time.
‘Get on with the question.’

An hour and a half was a long time to be stuck with such a piece of work as this little kid. I was not one for stereotyping, but when the agency said it was a boy from Hong Kong I made the assumption that I would be teaching someone who liked studying fourteen hours a day and played about six different instruments. A crazed genius, but with unfailing discipline. Jason failed on both counts.

It is perhaps worth mentioning here that I have come across high levels of racism from white English mothers who say that there are too many Asian overseas children getting accepted to Oxbridge who are incredibly bright but not socialized. I wonder, though, if it's not a case of sour grapes because I found from my time in Shanghai, students to be well motivated but still very capable of holding a conversation. Too many of the students I have worked with in both the private and state sector are unable to take the initiative or  simply want to be spoon-fed an entire syllabus.  

I kept looking at my watch every ten minutes. I also went to the toilet twice as a way to kill time, but this was a fundamental error. Jason’s bathroom (and it was his own private ensuite) was a sleek washroom designed in the ubiquitous style of a five star hotel with a large red marble shelf along one wall over which a black marble sink was not so much built as sculpted. A mirror covered the entire wall above it. There was a large ceramic dish full of smoothed pebbles next to the sink and next to the dish was a militia of bottled soaps. Now the first time I went in there was no problem. I didn’t even need to pee. I just stood at the sink and washed my hands using as much of the swanky hand-wash as I could squeeze out of the bottle. After an hour I genuinely needed to take a piss so I went to the toilet a second time but as I stood peeing into the bowl I heard a rattling noise coming from behind me. I turned but it was already too late. The lock on the door swivelled to open and then the door flung open with an almighty bang to reveal Jason brandishing a pair of scissors. Before I had a chance to stop peeing, the boy moved over to me and waved the scissors in the vague direction of my crotch shouting: ‘Gonna cut your dick off you mother f**ker.’

I masked my penis as best I could and screamed at the boy to get the hell out of the bathroom. The boy made another lunge at me, and I turned and zipped up my flies before turning back to Jason to force him out of the bathroom. He kept swiping the scissors in the air around me, like he had hold of some crazed killer butterfly, and had a look in his eye that was truly scary. He wasn’t all there. Eventually he gave up and I manoeuvred him out of the door, locked it again and lent back against it as I tried to calm my breathing. I’ve got asthma and this little episode had all but brought on an attack. My brain was doing a three-sixty. What the f*ck was I supposed to do? I could just imagine the headlines: Young Tutor Seduces Minor in Masochistic Scissor Game.

I cleaned up the mess I’d made around the toilet and then waited about five minutes before I had enough courage to go back outside. When I opened the door I half expected Jason to jump out and staple me in the face but, to my surprise, the boy was at his desk and appeared to be working. I sat down warily, checking the seat for drawing pins.  

‘I’m doing the answers,’ he said.

‘Well carry on.’

Jason worked in silence and I realized the boy was scared that I might tell on him. I relaxed a little. There were less than twenty minutes until the end of the lesson. I kind of zoned out and found myself peering out at the roof terrace opposite where a sturdy middle-aged woman was trimming away at a few shrubs. The terrace was little more than fifteen-square feet yet the woman had squashed no end of plants on to it. It always amazed me how small a space people called home in London. She was probably living in a small one bed and yet here I was in a five-storey house in which the kid got an entire floor to himself.

Jason finished writing and I checked through the boy’s answers and found that they were remarkably good. His written English was far above standard for his age, revealing an easy and elegant prose style.

‘When are you going to move in?’ Jason asked as I put on my jacket.

‘Move in? I’m not moving in. I’m just here to teach you.’

‘But we could play on the computer now.’

‘I don’t think your mother would be happy paying me to play on the computer with you.’

‘We don’t need to tell her. She’s away and never comes up here anyway.’

‘Well maybe some other time. I have another appointment to go to.’

‘You teach other kids?’

‘Yes.’

Jason didn’t seem to like the fact that I was working with other students.

‘When are you coming next?’

‘I’m supposed to come again next week, but I need to speak to your mother first.’

I was more than a little reluctant to commit myself to teaching a child that was potentially capable of cutting off my manhood.

‘You have to come again.’

The boy sounded sorry enough and his pleading was almost touching. How many teachers had Jason been through? I was envious of his home just off Sloane Square but it didn’t take a genius to see the kid was a serious case of neglected. Still, it wasn’t my job to sort him out. I had other kids to teach and this whole tutoring business was supposed to be nothing more than a stopgap until springtime.

As I went downstairs Jason made one last attempt to prevent me from leaving by running down in front of me and picking up my shoes. I didn’t bother to chase him upstairs but instead calmly went to the nanny and asked if she could fetch them. She wearily called to the boy who eventually returned, handing me one shoe at a time.

‘When is Mrs Li back?’ I asked.

‘Mrs Li not here this week,’ the nanny replied. ‘You must speak with her?’

‘Yes, but I can phone her.’

‘You leave message?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘He a good boy really,’ the nanny said, as though this was an oft disputed subject.

‘Yes, well goodbye.’

I stepped outside and Jason came running out after me.

‘Goodbye,’ the boy shouted, forming his arms into a Heil Hitler salute.

I never went back and I phoned the agency to explain there had been an incident in which the student had come at me with a pair of scissors. Luckily it turned out that there had been another tutor who had been punched by the boy and had left after only two sessions. I was more than a little pissed that the agency hadn't bothered to tell me that before I said yes to the job. Still, there was a bit of me that was sorry for Jason. Neglect of a child is a terrible thing, regardless of money.