Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

Sunshine Party, Tiger Party and Badboy Party

The textbook the school gave me to use isn't all that great sometimes. There's actually a section about Walkmans. Who uses Walkmans now? So with the election coming up, these past two weeks I've been teaching my students about American government and politics.

As part of the lesson I've had my students divide up in groups and create their own political parties. There's been some pretty generic sounding ones, like Peace Party, Victory Party or United Party. But there's also been plenty of creative ones, some quite silly, and a few I didn't quite understand.

There's been several Sunshine Parties, a cute name in my opinion. I've also had a Tiger Party, not sure what that has to do with politics, but cool name nonetheless. One group also named themselves The KFC Party. Their symbol was, as expected, a chicken. It was so funny, I let that one slide. Another group decided on The Scale Party, drawing a scale on the chalkboard for their symbol. I think they were maybe going for justice.

My personal favorite was Badboy Party. Their symbol was apparently a man in what looked like a beret, smoking a cigar. Ironically the party wanted to fight corruption. There was also The Killer Party, who had to later explain they don't like killing, they just "kill" at everything they do.

I then had my classes pretend to be in a presidential election. Each Party would have one member run for the "presidency" by giving, what I hoped would be a rousing speech. My students are often times quiet, so I wasn't quite sure how'd they do.

Though their grammer and pronounciation was off at times (Corruption turned into "kraption" and Healthcare became "Healthycar") , some of my students just blew me away, especially the ones in my international finance 704 class.

"Ladies and Gentleman, I am Handsome and I want to be your President!"

Handsome -- yes, that is his name -- killed his speech. He basically yelled it. "I will improve healthcare! I will create jobs!" the words just lunged out of his mouth, decibels higher than the hesistant and soft-spoken answers he had given me in the classes before. To add to the atmosphere, I had my students chant the presidential candidates' names before they went to speak. Most of my other classes seemed too shy, and unaccustomed to the chanting part. But International Finance 704 totally got into it. It wasn't just chanting, but more like a synchronized roar. "HANDSOME! HANDSOME!" the students shouted together.

David Bens, his opponent, wanted to up the ante, yelling just as loud all the while pointing to his classmates. The response: passionate applauses and sproadic yells of "YEA!!!" Students even rocked their desks, and stomped the ground, making it sound like a tremor was erupting. For those five minutes, it felt like my class had turned into a mob. And I loved it.

Yea that was a good class.

‘My favorite famous people is Hitler’

This week I've been teaching my students how to talk about famous people. So naturally, one of the questions I've been asking is: "Who is your favorite famous person?" In today's morning class I posed the question. My students, being a bit shy and nervous as usual, seemed too hesistant to answer. Seeing no volunteers, I picked a student named Steven.

"My favorite famous people is Xi-te-le," he said, with a bright smile. "I like him because he is very smart."
"Ok. Good job. But um, who did you say?" I asked.
"My favorite famous people is Xi-te-le," he said again, smiling.
Oh.
Now I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Steven meant Adolf Hitler ( ???) or XiTeLe. Another very awkward moment.

I had read a little bit about this in Peter Hessler's River Town, where he had a similar encounter as an expat in China. From what I remember, apparently some of the Chinese people he met thought Hitler was funny and comedic, because of the way he had been portrayed on an old television show. They saw the interpretation and adopted it as their own view of the man.
But I'm not sure why Steven would hold one of the world's most hated leaders in such high regard. Saying Hitler was smart was an interesting way of describing his appeal, if you could call it that.

Then again this is China; even as one can compare Hitler to Mao Ze Dong, there are still many people here who still revere the Chinese Communist leader, despite all the horrible things he's done. As Steven said he liked Hitler, the rest of the class didn't show much of a reaction, except for a few laughs. Steven smiled on, innocently, probably more concerned about whether he pronounced his speech correctly. "Ok, great. That's good," I said to Steven, moving on to the next part of the lesson. "Now let's if we can use some other words to talk about famous people."

It's funny. Since being in China, what Steven said was probably the most offensive thing I've heard. It was all unintentional though, and I'm not even certain for sure that he meant Hitler. Something I'll have to look into though.

We Are The World

So I sort of just embarrassed myself in front of maybe a thousand just now. Sigh...

Two days ago on Tuesday I met with the people in my foreign language teaching office. They had a pretty awkward request.

"We are going to have a concert," said Annie, one of the coordinators here. "You will sing 'We are the World' together.'"

I raised my eyebrows, cracking a nervous smile. God, I just knew it: they wanted all the foreign teachers to sing a corny rendition of the song, as if we were ambassadors for the rest of the world. "Oh, yea...Okay, great," I said sheepishly.

To make it better, we'd only have two days to prepare. The first rehearsal would begin on that day. At what time I asked.

"Please be there at 4:30," said Zhao Lei, another coordinator, who actually hired me for this teaching job. I looked at the clock behind her. 4:28 it said. I was exhausted; I had just finished teaching three classes. Why didn't they tell me about this earlier?

I went to the rehearsal. But it actually didn't start until 5:30. Me and a few of the other English teachers waited in the auditorium as we listened to more than a dozen students sing Silent Night. Sounded good, but it was strange to hear the song during October; they'd be singing this song at the concert too.

If you don't know, We Are The World was a famous song, sung by more than a dozen singers back in the 80's.

We decided to divide the parts among us four teachers. I sang the parts by Tina Turner and Billy Joel. God this song is so corny.

Wednesday was our second rehearsal. And we did okay: we knew our lines at least. But there were also problems.

1) We didn't have a chance to practice in front of the real stage, with the real mics.

2) The ending of the song goes on forever, where you hear the chorus over and over again like seven times before it finally ends. Would we just bore the crowd to death or stop at some point?

3) I think we could all feel it, this impending sense of embarrassment about to be heaped upon us once we really did perform. We all seemed to shrugged it off -- embarrassments happen all too often when your in a new country as my past posts elaborate on. The school wanted to show off its foreign teachers, fine, no big deal. Still, it would have been nice if we had more time to practice together. (I must have seen the youtube video of the song at least two dozen times on my own. Never do I want to hear the song again.)

On Thursday night came the concert. Oh man.

I remember walking into the gym where the concert was being held. The entire floor was covered with plastic green stools, no higher than my knee. Half an hour later, all the seats were filled, a sea of people in their stead.

"Have you ever sang to this many people," a fellow teacher asked. "Nope," I timidly replied. "Just to about 30, 40 people in a classroom."

I saw the stage. It was professional, with multi-colored lights, even capable of emitting smoke and bubbles. The first act were a group of students were dressed in ivory suits, and red & white gowns. I was wearing jeans, a white undershirt, and my brown jacket.

"Why am I doing this?" I thought to myself. "Why is the school making me do this?"

Then the concert began. All the acts were impressive. The school even invited a Norwegian singing troupe. Looking like beatnik-pirates, if there is such a thing, they sang in a style that made me think of a barbership quartet. They were good. Clearly they had done this many times before in who knows how many countries. As for the next act, well, it was us, the teachers with limited singing experience who only had two days prepared. Great...

But before we went on, something funny happened.

As the Norwegians were still performing, one of the concert coordinators told us, "You will sing with them. You will sing 'We Are the World' with them."

Did the Norwegians know this? No, they did not.

After they finished their last song, they started walking down the stage's steps, when a concert coordinator told them go back up. Me and the other teachers, along with more than a dozen students then went up with them. We formed two or maybe three lines together and faced the stage. I was in the very front, the yellow lights on my face. Though it was blurry, I could see the faint outlines of a vast crowd of people in front of me. Oh shit. I was so nervous that I couldn't smile. I literally had trouble forming an expression on my face.

Then the music played. And then we sang.

Though song is about helping others, all that went through my mind was, "Shit! I'm really doing this." In the crowd I could see what I'm sure was a German student I had met weeks ago. He erupted in laughter when we began to perform. The rest of the crowd, however, looked maybe a bit perplexed as to what we were doing. Gradually I cracked a tiny smile on my face, even as I forgot a few of the lyrics.

Then came near the end of the song, where the chorus would repeat over and over again. Well, the teacher next to me, did something which I thought was brilliant and ballsy. She walked out in front of the stage and began singing and clapping to the chorus. It was corny, but you knew it was the oh-so-perfect thing to do. Two seconds later I followed and went in front of the stage, clapping and singing and trying to smile, all the while hundreds of students watched.

The other teachers joined in, all of us clapping together to the song, like we were on Seseme Street or something. The corniest thing ever. But the crowd was supportive too, clapping along.

We were told that the chorus would be only repeated three times, and then the concert crew would turn off the song. Well, that didn't happen. The chorus went on and on. But by the fifth time the chorus sang, one of the other teachers then walked off the stage, waving goodbye. We all did the same, waving goodbye, signaling the end to our performance. Another brilliant move.

God it felt good to get off that stage. There was a collective sigh of relief among the foreign teachers. It was pretty damn funny, but at the same time, part of me didn't want to show my face at the school again.

As for the Norwegians, I was later told, that they had no idea what was going on. So when we performed, they simply stood on the stage with us, not doing anything for the first half. Only until the chorus was repeated again did they catch on.

As for the concert as a whole, it did highlight this feeling about a major difference with China. You can say China is more flexible, laid back, or has this "anything goes" type of attitude. But another apt way you can put is China can be pretty chaotic at times. Our performance was basically slapped together. Later in the concert there were other problems. One singer, dressed in a beautiful pink gown straight out of a Disney movie, went on the stage and began singing, only to find that he microphone wasn't working. I overhead someone saying the battery to it was out. The Norwegians, who performed again, saw similar microphone problems. A scrabbled and raspy sound started interrupting their singing mid-way in their second act.

I'm not sure if stage-tech problems serve as a fair metaphor though. But yea, what a night.