A Kindergarten Teacher Ran Into an Awkward Question About Being Gay, and Took It to Court | 2018 Stories ⑦

What responsibility does the head of the kindergarten, who fired him under pressure from parents, bear?

"Writing down the actions and daily lives of ordinary people," Walt Harrington said, "there is far too little of it in our trade. These stories record people's behavior, motives, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, grievances, hopes, fears, achievements and longings as they look for meaning and purpose in their lives. They help people understand where they stand in the world."

He once wrote a story about a family "whose teenage boy had killed himself two years earlier. I tried to explain to them the kind of story I wanted to write, how deep I hoped to go. The father listened for a long time, and finally said, 'So what you want to know is what goes through my mind when I pray alone in a quiet room.'"

At its simplest, Harrington said, it comes to this: how do people live, and what do they value?

The lives of all of us, together, make up this world.

"2018 Stories" is a new column from QDaily.

At 9 a.m. on November 13, ahead of schedule, Mingjue (a pseudonym) arrived alone at the labor and personnel dispute arbitration tribunal in Qingdao's Laoshan District. He waited by the ground-floor entrance for his lawyers, ready to hand them five LGBT information pamphlets and some bank statements to pass on to the arbitrator. Mingjue thought the pamphlets would help the arbitrator understand him, and help the case along.

A little over a month earlier, Mingjue, a kindergarten teacher, had filed a claim with the tribunal, saying that Wei Wenquan — the head of his former employer, the Mengbao Kingdom Daycare (hereafter Mengbao Kingdom) — had fired him illegally because of his sexual orientation.

Before the hearing, Mingjue had been through every step a labor case is supposed to have: filing, talks, mediation. None of it produced a settlement, which left only the last stage: the hearing itself.

Mingjue had prepared a great deal for the day, but when it came he decided not to go in with his lawyers. "I was afraid I'd get too worked up," he said, thinking back to the mediation session where he had started crying the moment he began describing the discrimination he had faced.

The five pamphlets were handouts he had picked up at gay advocacy events: Understanding Tongzhi, The Seven Deadly Sins of "Homophobic Textbooks", The Anti-Blackmail Handbook, Duoduo's Odd Encounters and Campus Bullying: STOP.

The hearing had been set for 9:20 a.m., but a last-minute switch to a closed session — a "procedural issue" — pushed it back more than an hour, to 10:30.

While he waited, Mingjue rode his bicycle over to Mengbao Kingdom.

He had not been back for some time since leaving. He noticed a new sign over the door, someone cooking in the kitchen, and fresh traces of children's play in the small sandpit in the yard.

Whether he could ever return to a workplace like this was now an open question — even if he won.

1.

Mingjue is from Tai'an, in Shandong. He is 31, short, wears glasses, and speaks softly and mildly. He has just finished his tenth year as a kindergarten teacher.

He had never considered what he would do outside education. Until this August he was still planning to save enough money and open a kindergarten of his own in Qingdao.

He moved to Qingdao in 2014, by which point he counted as an experienced early-childhood teacher. He found work at a kindergarten in Laoshan District that followed the Montessori method he believed in, and stayed three years.

Two things happened there that changed the course of his career.

The first was a mass protest by parents. In 2015 a group of parents jointly reported the kindergarten over its poor facilities, and children began to withdraw. A school of nearly 30 pupils lost more than half of them almost overnight.

The parents demanded the kindergarten move. Mingjue was only an employee and could have ignored them, but to keep the place from closing he spent his evenings cycling around Qingdao looking for a better site.

He even joined a direct-sales company to fix the enrollment problem the withdrawals had caused, then found it did not work very well.

His reasoning was simple: "When I was studying for my counseling certificate I got to know a woman in direct sales. She invited me to give a talk on education at one of the company's branch offices, and the response was excellent. I saw that their teams were spread all over Qingdao, and our kindergarten was having real trouble recruiting at the time — the facilities weren't good and the location was bad — so I thought the talks could be a way to advertise."

In June 2017 the kindergarten closed.

That closure may have set off the second event: going into business with Wei Wenquan, the father of one of his pupils, to open a kindergarten together.

2.

The closure left Mingjue suddenly out of work. At the same moment Wei Wenquan approached him and asked whether he wanted to start a kindergarten together, with Wei putting up the money. It was Wei's first investment in early-childhood education.

"He'd been my older son's teacher, and I thought his classes were fine — that place was pretty small, after all. And my second son happened to be about to start school. After spending some time around him, I felt he was a good teacher," Wei Wenquan said.

For Mingjue, who had wanted his own kindergarten for years, the offer was a chance to do it. He agreed quickly.

Mengbao Kingdom was formally registered on October 23, 2017. Besides Mingjue, Wei brought in another teacher to handle enrollment; the three of them were partners. The daycare opened to children in March 2018.

Mingjue went from ordinary staff to the daycare's director of teaching and curriculum. In one sense this was a first attempt by two novices.

Everything began from nothing, and what lay ahead was mostly uncertainty and difficulty. Mingjue and Wei often differed over how to teach and how to run the place. "The first year or two is all adjustment and exploration. We were both trying things out, and neither of us assumed his own ideas had to be the right ones," Mingjue said. "That's all within the normal range of a partnership."

It is worth noting that Mengbao Kingdom sat in exactly the spot where the closed kindergarten had been, inside a residential compound in Laoshan District.

The compound has five buildings; Mengbao Kingdom took two ground-floor units in one of them. The courtyard outside had been turned into a small playground — colorful graffiti on the walls, plus a sandpit, a slide and toy cars.

Within two kilometers of Mengbao Kingdom there were nearly 10 other kindergartens, most of them comparatively large, with 200 to 300 children, mainly aged 3 to 6.

That was one reason Mengbao Kingdom decided in the end to take only children aged 0 to 3 and to call itself a daycare. Its fees were also on the high side: management fee plus meals came to about 5,000 yuan a month.

Between the high fees and the size of the premises, nearly four months after opening the daycare had at most eight children — one of them Wei Wenquan's second son.

Recruiting was a problem almost at once. "Later, when enrollment didn't look great, we started advertising — we made an official account and a mini program, and we even screened films in the compound. I was supposed to be the teaching principal and another operations principal handled enrollment, but later on a lot of it still fell to me," Mingjue said.

3.

On July 28, 2018, Mingjue took his mother to the second-anniversary celebration of PFLAG China's Linyi branch in Shandong, where he spoke about his life as a gay man.

On August 6 he posted the write-up of the event, "Linyi Branch's Second Anniversary: A Chicken Feast — I'm Gay and I'm Proud!," to his Moments.

He had not come out to everyone, so he set the post to be hidden from the parents of Mengbao Kingdom's children. Parents of his former pupils saw it anyway, and messaged Wei Wenquan.

"Some parents reacted very strongly. They sent me WeChat messages asking whether they should take their children for blood tests, that sort of thing — several of them. I could tell the parents really minded, and I was more worried that if word started going around our daycare, the place would collapse. We only have a handful of children as it is; if the parents all objected, they might all pull out," Wei Wenquan said.

The next day Wei called Mingjue into the office, passed on the parents' "feedback," and gave him two choices: never again make his homosexuality public while identified as a teacher, or resign.

"His professional ability is strong, nobody doubts that. But if you don't go public with your identity and just do your job well, I think that's still acceptable," Wei said.

Mingjue was still angry when he recalled the conversation. Nothing like it, he said, would happen to an "ordinary person."

As a gay man, Mingjue believes teaching has nothing to do with sexual orientation. He also understood that the matter had little to do with whether his partner personally minded: "Maybe he [Wei] thought the place was still small and firing one person didn't matter. But it also shows how afraid he was of pressure from the parents. He was thinking as an operator — it could hurt enrollment."

Mingjue was torn. He was, after all, one of the daycare's partners; but once the rights of gay people were involved, it became a matter of personal mission. So on the night of the conversation with Wei, he posted a photo of a resignation notice in Mengbao Kingdom's internal WeChat group. It said he was resigning for personal reasons.

Afterward he told friends what had happened, and through the gay-rights group the LGBT Rights Advocacy Association he was introduced to two lawyers, Tang Xiangqian and Yu Liying, both of whom had litigated for sexual minorities before.

"Legally, the grounds for dismissal are not sufficient. Forwarding an article about gay people breaks no rule," Tang Xiangqian said.

The lawyers' backing hardened his resolve, and he decided to sue.

4.

On September 19, Mingjue went to Qingdao's labor and personnel dispute arbitration tribunal and filed an application, choosing to bring his discrimination claim against Wei Wenquan in the form of a labor dispute.

Outside the building that day he held up a sign that read: "I teach children to be honest, so I cannot lie. I am gay."

On September 27 the Qingdao Labor and Personnel Dispute Arbitration Commission formally accepted the case, and Mingjue received a notice giving the hearing date, the location and the stated cause: compensation.

Because Wei Wenquan had never signed a formal labor contract with him, the law requires an employer involved in an unlawful dismissal to pay the employee double wages every month from the second month on the job.

News of the filing first came out through the LGBT Rights Advocacy Association's official account. Other outlets picked it up at once, and before long it was a trending topic on social media.

Mingjue talks with a teacher's enthusiasm and is generous with his views and values. Even while the case was consuming him, he turned away no reporter who came knocking.

More than 20 outlets contacted him; he gave them their own label and chat group. During the stretch when he had "lost his teaching job," he kept up the direct-sales work and spent much of the rest of his time answering interview questions.

Stirring up wide public debate was one of his reasons for suing. "After the case came out, it set off an argument online about whether gay people can be teachers. I'd say that gets me part of the way to what I wanted," Mingjue said.

Mingjue and his lawyers treated the case as advocacy — in other words, they believed the way it turned out would shape other people's attempts to claim similar rights.

"This is discrimination against gay people, but in the case itself it is a labor dispute. Without his identity, this would be an ordinary labor case," Tang Xiangqian said.

Mingjue said Wei had once warned him that if he kept going, no one in Shandong's early-childhood education world would hire him again. Mingjue thought the suit could correct a wrong impression among a much wider group of people, which made it worth fighting.

As the case went on, the two men diverged over where it should go and what to expect from it. Wei only wanted the arbitration to come out reasonable; Mingjue wanted the inequality gay people face to be named — though the people he really needed to argue with were those parents.

"I have no wish at all to bring him [Wei] down or ruin his name. Mostly I feel the whole thing is unfair — that I got fired over something like this," Mingjue said.

As for Wei Wenquan, what the investor cared about most was the money. "I didn't treat him badly, including over the resignation — he wrote the letter himself. He left, I paid him compensation, I did everything decency asked of me. I think I did everything I should have," Wei said, and added: "He's suing me, but I don't think of him as an enemy. If you're going to do it, you must have your reasons... I suppose I'm a witness and a participant in this gay-rights business too."

Mingjue says he had come out to some people at the previous kindergarten; Wei says he did not know that. He had only sensed that Mingjue might be gay, never clearly, until he saw the Moments post on August 5. When he invited Mingjue to start the school with him, he said, the question never crossed his mind.

Wei said Mengbao Kingdom had been losing money without a break since it opened. He had long expected losses in the early phase, but he had not imagined that five months in, a parent would come to him to report that Mingjue was gay and unfit to teach small children.

5.

Mingjue says he is now a "controversial figure" in Shandong province. Applying to any kindergarten at all "might put them under pressure, and I don't want to cause other people too much trouble" — which means he has to give up teaching for a while.

Before he was fired, his closer friends and relatives, his colleagues and some parents already knew he was gay.

He says being gay had never brought him unfair treatment at work before. "In all these years this is the only time a boss has fired me. It was always me firing the boss — if I wasn't happy in the job, I said goodbye." At school, though, classmates had bullied him for being effeminate.

Unlike gay people who keep to their own private lives, Mingjue cares a great deal about gay rights.

"Right after university I thought about going into social work. I even wanted to write to people's congress deputies around the country, asking them to legalize same-sex marriage. Later I decided that when it comes to fighting discrimination, the law is of course one route, but the root of it is changing people's hearts — changing how people understand other people," Mingjue said.

6.

Between the filing and the mediation, Mingjue said more than once that when the case ended he hoped to go back and teach at Mengbao Kingdom again. He missed the children.

He also knew perfectly well that the moment he decided to sue, the idea became a fantasy.

Mengbao Kingdom is now down from eight children to six.

Wei Wenquan said that the day after the case was filed, officials from the Qingdao education bureau came to Mengbao Kingdom and told him to shut it down, because "the public reaction was too big — outlets all over the country and even overseas ran it, and the government was under pressure."

Wei argued for staying open until after Spring Festival, when a group of children would graduate and could be seen off. "In the end the education bureau didn't say yes or no, just said keep it open for now and wait until this business is settled. If the daycare closes, after all, there's nothing left for the arbitration to deal with. What would I be dealing with then?"

On the day of the hearing Mengbao Kingdom was still running, though Wei had no idea for how much longer.

More than one thing about the case was uncertain. The two men ended up at a formal hearing because the mediation committee could not get them to agree either.

Mingjue was not in fact hard-nosed about the money: he came down from the 40,000 yuan he might have claimed to 9,000. What he wanted was one line added to the mediation agreement as a note: "Both parties acknowledge that gay people enjoy equal employment rights."

Had the mediation worked, that line might have counted as legal support for Mingjue and for gay people more broadly. In another sense it went beyond what the labor dispute between him and Wei was actually about — neither man denied that gay people have equal employment rights; Wei ended the employment under pressure from other people and out of business interest.

Wei agreed to add the note and settle.

Tang Xiangqian put it this way: "We wanted a document with an official stamp on it, which carries more authority. For our client that was the bottom line. Without that sentence the case is an ordinary labor dispute with nothing to do with being gay."

The arbitrators, however, would not allow sensitive wording on the mediation document of a labor dispute, and the mediation was declared a failure.

7.

On November 22 the arbitration ruling came down in Mingjue's favor. Wei Wenquan was ordered to pay the difference in wages owed — six months' wages in all — and Mingjue's other claims were rejected.

Mingjue passed the news to reporters the moment the ruling came out, and said publicly that he felt relief and disappointment at once: "The arbitration gave a relatively fair result, and the case let the whole society see how much sexual minorities want their legitimate rights. But at the same time there is some disappointment, because as things stand society still holds discrimination and prejudice, and many people still refuse to try to understand groups unlike themselves — they even do harm to others and choose not to see it. So this case is not an endpoint but a starting point. I hope more and more gay people who face discrimination over their sexual orientation and gender expression will stand up and say NO!"

Under Article 83 of the Labor Law of the People's Republic of China, a party who disagrees with the ruling may file suit in the local court within 15 days.

Mingjue told QDaily he was not sure whether Wei Wenquan would go to court. Wei has not formally said.

Cover image from Cory Woodward on Unsplash