I am an American teaching English in China. We are winding down after the last classes on a Friday evening. I’m in the back with our boss and one of the two head teachers when we hear a crash coming from the front room accompanied by the sound of lots of scattering little pieces.
Boss: “Sounds like someone dropped the Lego box.”
Me: “That sounded pretty loud. I’ll check it out.”
I jog out of the teachers’ office and around to the front room. I pass by the Lego building area and nothing is amiss there. I head to the entrance and, to my shock, I find one of the double glass entrance doors completely shattered on the ground! Two of our local Chinese workers are talking with an elderly woman and a younger woman, and there is a crying five-year-old boy with a bloody cut on his head. I run back to the teachers’ office.
Me: “It was our door! A kid broke the front door!”
Boss: “A kid broke our door?!”
Me: “There’s glass everywhere and a child is bleeding. You need to come out here and deal with this.”
The three of us returned to the scene of the incident. The head foreign and head local employees were talking with the mother. I didn’t understand much of what was going on because the discussion was almost entirely in Chinese. However, at one point, the elderly woman (who had been mostly silent during this event) objected to something the younger woman said. The old woman punched the younger woman in the shoulder and said some angry words to her.
I later learned that the elderly woman was the younger woman’s mother and the child’s grandmother. The younger woman was trying to put the blame on us, but her mother was having none of it and making her take responsibility for her son’s actions.
We had to close down the area for safety concerns and direct everyone out of an alternate egress point. A guard was hired to stand watch all night since we could no longer secure the main entrance. The door was boarded up and eventually replaced — with another double glass door that honestly looked worse in quality.
The security camera footage showed the boy running into the door and pushing it all the way open. He kept pushing it after it had reached its limit. Since he was small, he was putting all his force against the lower part of the door, causing it to flex. Tempered glass is under pressure and does not react well to being bent, so it shattered and collapsed. The top 20% of shattered glass stayed in one chunk until it landed on top of the boy, which is what caused the head wound. He received a few stitches in a hospital but was otherwise all right.
The head employees visited him in the hospital. Confronted with the video evidence and Grandma, the mother did not attempt to hold our business responsible, and insurance paid for the replacement door.
