What followed was less "valuable educational experience where I teach English and my Chinese students teach me something about life" and more "Netflix original comedy that gets canceled after one season due to lack of interest." We had "translators," but they often knew about as much English as I knew Chinese. So I employed the time-honored teaching tradition of winging it. If no one knew a word, I just used a mediocre translation app, which essentially means that I was flown across the planet to operate a smartphone. To accomplish anything, I had to go off-book and talk about what the kids were interested in, like movies and sports. Then they became eager to learn more, but being able to rant about the plot holes in Captain America: Civil War wasn't going to help them hit it big unless their parents wanted them to become high-profile comment-section trolls.

Marvel Studios"Your son is using slurs at a college level. I sense big things in his future."

Which, come to think of it, might be an actual career path in China.

We all had photo shoots done while we posed in suits, trying to look academic or, in my case, like I just farted but am fully committed to denying it. Those images were plastered all over billboards and bus ads. We became mini-celebrities, no obscenely rich parents, grueling career in pop culture, or blurry sex tape required.

Some ads promised that children who learned English would become Harvard graduates. That's really why we were there -- as living, breathing testaments to the fact that Harvard is a place that people can theoretically attend.

Miramax

Columbia Pictures"All of our instructors are fully accredited viewers of Good Will Hunting and The Social Network."

My school's principal would often tell parents, "If [your child] comes here, they will be an Ivy League graduate." He was essentially a used-car salesman, and we were his run-down Geos.

Our presence as Americans made that dream believable for desperate parents. But even putting aside the fact that Ivy League admission is a crapshoot for many homegrown American valedictorians, we did not represent our country's best and brightest. Some of us barely had GEDs and weren't fit to mow Harvard's lawns, but we were the subject of awe for parents far more educated than we were. We worked 20 hours a week, were paid for 40, and were given free furnished apartments. That's a pretty sweet gig for someone who got rejected by the downtown Kansas City Chipotle.

Many Chinese parents want nothing more than an Ivy League education for their kids. Thirty-one percent of all international students in America are Chinese. Some American schools have actually started putting caps on how many Chinese students can attend, which backfired by pissing off Chinese-Americans.

Most Chinese parents know of only a few American schools -- Harvard, Yale, maybe Stanford. Chinese businesses care only about those big names too, so if you show up with a degree from a state college you might as well show up with a clowning degree from the University Of Phoenix. It's all about branding. It's like American Psycho got lost in translation and became an inspirational life story.

Shawn Hempel/iStock"Magna cum laude from Emory? If this is a joke, it's not funny."

Case in point: One year, I was in charge of hiring a Chinese-born, English-speaking liaison. We got it down to two candidates. One spoke English perfectly, but I was pressured to hire the other guy. Why? Because he had gone to an Ivy League school and his mere presence would bring us prestige. But he knew only one English sentence: "I speak English."

MelanieMaya/iStockFrankly, four years without the words "beer" or "pong" barely sounds like college, but maybe that's why we didn't go to Harvard.

While technically correct, that wasn't really what we were going for. I don't know if he had lied on his resume or had somehow managed to bumble through a year at Harvard with his own fish-out-of-water story, but with sufficient begging I was able to convince my boss to not hire him, thus tragically canceling the second season of his own Netflix original comedy.

The most popular topic among the students, by far, was American pop culture. America's entire Navy could be wiped out by a sea monster tomorrow and the influence we wield would barely change, thanks to television. Every student wanted to know what Americans watched. You know how, thanks to pop culture, we think of Russia as a snowy field full of drunks and picture the Middle East as one big desert full of terrorists? Well, their image of America is based entirely around Pretty Little Liars and The Big Bang Theory.

"Do we get to bazinga directly off the plane, or is there a form you have to fill out first?"

Personally, I used better shows that made lots of pop culture references, like Scrubs, as jumping-off points into discussions about some aspect of American life. In one episode, Dr. Kelso is unable to get treatment for an uninsured friend. My students were amazed that someone could be denied health coverage and started getting worried that it could happen to them when they went off to their Ivy League schools. Thus began a lesson about the American healthcare system. I explained emergency care, insurance, everything. And while at the end of the lesson they still couldn't understand why we made comedies about our terrible healthcare system, they did understand how it worked.

Kirby Hamilton/iStockYou kind of have to be raised here for "crippling medical debt" to work as a punchline.

I would say that the thing most Chinese adolescents want to know about is relationships. They were very amused to learn I had several girlfriends in college and high school. In China, having more than one serious significant other is rare, as marriage and family are their parents' end goal. It leads to some very awkward mismatches, like when you don't have a serious boyfriend by 25, so mom and dad pick one for you from their friends' kids. I knew a lot of women who got married to their husbands like that.

It sounds goofy, but analyzing TV helped a lot. Instead of getting a skewed view of the country from the small number of shows their government lets them watch, they learn American values and customs, tons of new words, how to speak English naturally, and how to recognize our sarcasm and humor. I guess what I'm saying is that like 80 percent of my job could have been done by a DVD box set.