It's 11:30 on this Sunday night in my apartment and I am trying to think of how I am going to summarize everything that has happened between now and my last post. I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I just want to be able to share everything that has been going on. To make it easier, I will break it up into 2 separate posts.
After Mid-Autumn Festival our group was preparing to put together a performance for the Federation of the Women of Changchun, or something of that nature. As foreigners, we were of course asked (and basically expected) to put together a performance by our Foreign Affairs Office at Hua Qiao (our school). They committed to helping us and even picked out the songs we were to perform, one of which was "Jambalaya" with lyrics like "settle down far from town to get a pirogue, and he'll catch all the fish in the bayou, swap his mom to buy yvonne what she need-o, son of a gun we'll have big fun on the bayou." It's scary what some people's perceptions of Americans are. As bad as we wanted to sing that old American favorite, we decided to switch it for another Billboard buster "A Whole New World" from Aladdin.
The day finally came when we were to perform. As we entered through the backdoor of the theatre, we found many other performers in costumes, rehearsing and applying make up in the dressing rooms. As we peered out from behind the stage we were surprised to find that this was actually an event to be taken seriously. It was too late to change anything but i was sure we were going to make fools of ourselves, representing the U.S. in the process.
The event finally began and we took our seats in the audience and watched the other performers until it was our turn. There were a few performances that were... well, interesting to say the least, but i can attest that i did find it enjoyable. There were a couple of performances that were very well put together and executed. Soon it was our turn to take the stage and in my mind i had already placed us in last. After all the stellar performances were finished 9 Amerian teachers took the stage and began to sing "A Whole New World." I will note, however that we did sing it quite convincingly and with an 'above average' level of charisma. The second and final song was "Auld Lang Syne," chosen by our FAO's. We sang the verse twice in English and then to everybody's surprise, the American's began singing in Chinese. I didn't spot any tears from where i was on the stage, but we did get the crowd clapping. To top it off, we unfurled a banner with Chinese characters on it that translated "We love China, We love Changchun." Had we not dropped it mid-song we may have added a point to our total, but what we lacked in professionalism we made up for in... i guess just being tall and white. We earned the loudest applause and gained much 'face' for the school we were representing. Of course there were others that were more deserving of this, everybody else in fact, but we embraced the praise and were thankful for it to finally be over.
Afterwards, we were taken to a delicious lunch with nearly everything on the table being edible, courtesy of our appreciative FAO's. They thanked us for our performance and said that we could expect more of these in the future.... goodie. Well, at least we had that behind us and could now focus on school the next day and the upcoming sports meet before National Holiday. It's days like these that seem to fit the appropriate acronym "WIC," "When in China..."
-jo
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