Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

King of Pop

It's funny. Michael Jackson has appeared in my lesson twice. Once in the beginning and once in the end.

For my first class here, I tried to explain to my students how Americans receive their names. Sometimes parents like to name their child after someone they know I said.

"I was named after a very famous singer," I told my students. "Do you know who this is?"

I then played to my students a bit of "Billie Jean."

"Yea, it's Michael Jackson," I would then add. "My mom really liked Michael Jackson, so she named me after him."

This past week, I've been seeing my students for the last time. The topic of my last lesson has been music, and so I've been showing them a few music videos I think they might like.

One of those videos has been Michael Jackson's "Beat It."

"So maybe Michael Jackson is saying: don't fight, just dance," I've explained.

I'm not sure what my students think of the song. Most just seem to be lukewarm about it.

(Perhaps they were more astonished at how Michael Jackson originally looked like. Another foreign teacher recently told me that one of her students was wondering if black people want to become white people, and used Michael Jackson as an example.)

But now that Michael Jackson has died, it feels like a strange coincidence that I've been having my students listen to one of his famous songs.

"You must have felt the psychic energy from M.J. warning you of things to come," one of my old high school friends told me today. "So you started playing 'Beat It' in his honor ahead of time."

Rest in piece MJ.