Overseas experience
Continued »
their first child and, due to the nature of their jobs, they had never really lived together. She joined Trevor Burke and Crawford Bain at Glasgow as senior lecturer in dental primary care, setting up the masters course at the dental school. While she was doing that, Arshad Ali approached her to work as a specialist at his new Niddrie Square Clinic, which she accepted. Madeleine increased her
working week at Niddrie Square as the primary care course commitments reduced, and, as well as giving birth to her second daughter, she started a masters degree in medical law and ethics. So it was at this point, with every- thing falling into place, that her life was turned upside down following the news that Craig had been given the opportunity to expand the company into China. The family headed out to the Far East for an initial period of two years – which eventually turned into five fascinating years in Shanghai. Madeleine knew that she
wanted to work while out in China, if at all possible, and she managed to get in touch, and find work, with a US-Chinese joint venture clinic in Shanghai. The clinic owner was a Chinese dentist who taught at Jiaotong Univer- sity in the city and who had completed his masters degree in fixed prosthodontics in the
28 Scottish Dental magazine
US. The dentists at the clinic were either ex-pats or locals who had gone overseas to do masters degrees. Madeleine said: “I worked there part time as a periodontist, a day or two a week depending on what was happening. But it meant that I could continue to work, which was unusual among trailing spouses, because most of the time you can’t. “I was determined that I
didn’t want to stop, because I knew that if I stopped I’d probably never get back as it would have been too long since I had used my hands.”
despite a very friendly and open ex-pat community, she missed having familiar faces around in the early days. She said: “I think I missed people more than anything. I really missed the ability to communicate properly. Meeting somebody in the street or at work and having no ability to pass the time of day because you can’t speak the language properly, I found that really hard.” Even though she was
working at the joint venture clinic, she missed being known as a working professional in her own right. “I missed having my
“I missed having my own identity. The first question anyone asks is ‘who does
your husband work for?’ Madeleine Murray
With ex-pat colleagues
and bilingual dental nurses, her work at the clinic wasn’t affected by the language barrier too much, unlike her route to work: “The place I was working was in Pudian Lu, and just about half a mile away was a street called Pudian Lu, spelled the same but pronounced with a different accent on the second half of the word. If I got in a taxi on my way to work I would often find myself driving past where I wanted to go to because I had pronounced it incorrectly!” Madeleine explained that,
own identity,” she said, “As a trailing spouse, the first ques- tion anyone asks is: who does you husband work for? Nobody had ever asked that – a lot of people I worked with never even knew I had a husband!” However, with work no
longer taking up the majority of her time, Madeleine was determined to keep busy. She became involved with several local charities and even set up a small business with a product designer friend making bags and selling them on. In the fourth and fifth years of their stay, Madeleine started
working at Jiaotong University teaching dental English in the dental school. She said: “There was myself and an American woman – she taught them the American pronunciation and I would teach them the English. I would also teach them the Scottish pronunciation occa- sionally as well!” With the student accom-
modation at the university on top of the teaching block, it made for an interesting contrast to UK dental schools. She said: “You’d go upstairs to the phantom head room and besides the phantom head room all the students’ washing would be hanging along lines in the corridor. “The teaching block was not
at all like teaching blocks in the UK – it was very different.” The teaching environment
was also quite different to what Madeleine was used to, with the students being taught by rote for the most part. “They often had specific texts that they had to learn,” Madeleine said. “And they would chant it like the children here chant their times tables. They would get on a roll, I would try and stop them every now and again, to ask them about a specific word and ask them to put it in a sentence, etc. But that was very difficult for them. “Also, students here would
always ask why, why, why? Which is absolutely right. In China they would never, ever challenge a teacher like that. “Even if they disagreed with
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