In August of 2012, Martin Wolff, an American English teacher and former lawyer who made a name for himself writing about issues related to English language education in China, passed away in Taizou, China at the age of 65 (see Lau, Reference Lau2013, for a remembrance). Mr. Wolff's name will be familiar to readers of English Today and to any observers of EFL in China who follow English-language commentary on issues including Chinglish, native English speaking teachers in China, and the difficulty of creating an ideal environment for English learning in EFL contexts.

I did not know Mr. Wolff, but I think it is important to highlight the unique impact of his legacy, not only as a prominent commentator on English in contemporary China, but as someone who embodied many of the tensions and contradictions of EFL teaching. Wolff's work and writing walked the line between two worlds in which many EFL educators find themselves: the North American and European centers of western applied linguistics scholarship vs. the periphery communities in which EFL is taught; the world of scholarly publications and materials vs. the wilderness of self-publishing, blogging, and online communities; the professional world of academia and accredited teacher-training programs vs. the amateur world of native speakers seeking new careers abroad; the major institutions of English language teaching and learning in EFL contexts vs. the foreign teaching community who sometimes bemoan the way the language is taught in the countries where they work.

By all available accounts, Wolff led a colorful life and was no stranger to controversy. He was involved in Hawaiian politics in the 1980s and ran for mayor of Kaua'I; he was a member of the First Assembly of God church and was involved in ‘smuggling’ Bibles to Tonga, China, and Palau, and said his car was once firebombed in the latter country (Reinhold, Reference Reinhold1987: n.p.). He was a lawyer, but was disbarred by the state of California for making false accusations against colleagues and a bizarre incident involving mistreatment of his own domestic workers (see State Bar of California, 1999). He spent over a decade in China before his death, working at a number of universities in the country and posting on many online communities related to English teaching and learning in China, including China Daily, TEFL China Life, UsingEnglish.com, and his own website, China Holistic English. The editor of UsingEnglish.com, Richard Flynn (Reference Flynn2012), commented on his site that Wolff ‘was a complex and prickly character who rubbed many people up the wrong way, but he also made a lot of friends … I always enjoyed his sarcasm and wit. His papers were also peppered with it. Many disliked his ideas, and I disagreed with plenty, but they were heartfelt and thought-out. He was never dull and often had a lot to offer.’

I first became aware of Wolff's work when I was working as an EFL teacher in China – like many of my background (an American native speaker who had never travelled outside what I would come to know as an ‘inner circle’ country, in the parlance of world Englishes), I easily obtained employment, getting a job I did not know how to do in a country I had never visited and whose history and education system I knew almost nothing about. In my desperate Internet searches for viable lesson plans and information about English in China, I came across Wolff's work.

Wolff published many articles in English Today, often with his frequent collaborator Niu Qiang (e.g.,Niu & Wolff, Reference Niu and Wolff2003a, Reference Niu and Wolff2003b, Reference Niu and Wolff2005, Reference Niu and Wolff2007; Teng, Niu, & Wolff, Reference Teng, Niu and Wolff2004; Niu, Teng, & Wolff, Reference Niu, Teng and Wolff2007; Wolff, Reference Wolff2010). At first, I read them with pleasure, feeling I had found a reliable guide who had gone through the same difficulties as I had as an American teaching in China, and who had diagnoses about what was wrong and solutions about how to fix it. Wolff wrote passionately about the problems involving English in China from a number of angles: he criticized the putative linguistic imperialism of English while also critiquing the methods with which Chinese teachers taught. He lambasted Chinese universities for their mistreatment of foreign teachers while criticizing those teachers for doing their jobs poorly. He lamented the lack of opportunities for students to practice speaking English while chiding university administrators for lacking English skills themselves.

As I continued to read Wolff's work, finding more of his articles in various publications and websites, my initial enthusiasm waned. Wolff's writing about English in China was frequently recalcitrant and dismissive of Chinese educational culture and teaching methods. His prescriptions – such as an insistence on creating a wholly English-language environment on Chinese university campuses – while made with good intentions, seem to have been unrealistic. His writing became increasingly entrepreneurial, promoting his proposed curriculum and textbook series involving English-language films. He published a number of books – with publishers that have been accused of being vanity presses – which seem mostly to be unedited collections of articles previously published elsewhere.

I left China in 2009 to study for my PhD in Canada, and the further I was pulled into the scholarly world of applied linguistics, the less interest I had in work like Wolff's, which seemed to have less relevance in the world I now inhabited. I turned to the work of scholars who wrote about English in China in a more nuanced way and did empirical work on the issues Wolff wrote about: Phiona Stanley and Ling Shi on issues facing foreign teachers in China, Hu Xiaoqiong, Kingsley Bolton, and David Graddol on the sociolinguistic role of English in the country, Xu Zhichang, He Deyuan, and Eric Henry on issues involving ‘Chinglish’ and its more ‘legitimate’ cousin, China English.

Now that I have finished my PhD, I am thoroughly ensconced in the academic world of ELT. I no longer search Internet message boards and e-mail discussion lists looking for information about EFL teaching, and find much of what is written online to be negative, inaccurate, and unhelpful when it comes to educating prospective EFL teachers about working in China. I now advise students to take with a grain of salt any website they find purporting to offer advice about teaching English in China or elsewhere. There was a time in my career when it seemed the Internet was all I had, however, and writers and teachers like Martin Wolff were my guides. Wolff's legacy as an EFL teacher in China – a ‘foreign expert,’ as the Chinese government calls us, a label with Wolff wore proudly – is a complicated one. He did more than almost any other writer to raise the ELT community's awareness of English education in China (and its many problems), but he did so as a perennial outsider – a kind of loyal opposition to applied linguistics and Chinese educational policy. I disagree with the spirit and content of much of what Wolff wrote, but I am grateful that he wrote it. The readership of English Today and the EFL community in general have, in fact, benefitted from his effort to put the challenges and contradictions of English in contemporary China in the spotlight.