Karaoke
Teacher Appreciation Day was a couple of weeks ago. My second Friday as an English teacher to be exact. The school cancelled all classes after lunch and held an exhaustively long karaoke “competition”. The day before, during lunch, Mr. Ye had approached Lisa, Colin and I and asked us if we would please attend a small karaoke celebration in honor of Teacher Appreciation Day at 1:30pm on Friday. Of course we agreed. When Tish and Matthew were asked about the competition, they said nothing of the sort had been put on the year before. Of course, neither of them was at the school for Teacher Appreciation Day last year.
At 1:45pm the following day, I walked into our office to find most of the Chinese co-teachers doing their makeup or practicing song lyrics under their breath. It was bizarre to me. These women were getting really excited. Something that apparently shocks me even today, even with all of my experience: Asians LOVE karaoke. In Japan, everyone fervently participates in karaoke and everyone is pretty good at singing. I don’t know what it is, but my friends and family just don’t sing like they sing over here. When a co-teacher shyly told me she is a terrible singer, I showed what a terrible singer is and she amended her statement. For a Chinese, she was a terrible singer.
I walked over to the auditorium where the event was to be held and found a room full of seats for at least 300 people. No way was I getting up to do Annie Lennox or Lynyrd Skynard or Nina Simone or Patsy Cline. No way. Not for a million bucks. The auditorium was only a quarter full so I went back to our office. The co-teachers were excited, antsy, and nervous and I had a vision of a high-school talent show. I started thinking about my friend Aimee and how I used to tag along when she and her Filipino gang would head to Goldie’s on Aurora, a B-list casino in Seattle, and we’d eat $4 steak and I’d watch Aimee and her friends sing their hearts out in between grizzled lounge lizards who had their old stand-bys and sang them two or three times a night, through a haze of 2 for 1 cocktails.
Of course, karaoke in China is nothing like that. No cocktails, no smoking (amazingly enough, no one smokes around the children – even after hours), no dark-lit room full of half-drunk song veterans. No clanking of dinnerware and no place to hide. Around 3:30pm, an exodus occurred and the foreign teachers blindly followed. At the door, a woman held a box full of little pieces of paper with numbers on them. Not being told what the numbers were, we thought they had something to do with singing and none of us took one. We later found out the numbers were for an on-going door prize raffle held in between every five or six songs.
We found seats towards the front and around 4pm, the endless talking without translation began. A man with a purple scarf tied jauntily around his neck and a woman with a sequin-studded T-Shirt exclaiming “Buy Bread More” started talking a mile a minute into their microphones. Sometimes the mikes worked and sometimes that screechy reverb would drown out their optimism and fill the room with a blood-curdling squeal that had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. People ran around excitedly and busily and I envied them their enterprise. There’s nothing worse than sitting in a room full of people, not understanding what is being said and not having a part in all of the activity. I decided to throw my energies into enjoying the music. The English teachers to my right and to my left were terribly negative about the event and their negativity only challenged me more into being extremely enthusiastic about the words I couldn’t understand and the music that just didn’t interest me. I found it surreal when the two emcees would crack some highly orchestrated joke and the audience would laugh politely and clap a little bit. The laughter sounded nervous to me. I really wanted to know what was being said, and I tried to make up stories and ideas based on the sounds I heard but Chinese just doesn’t lend much to the imagination like I had hoped. Unfortunately, my six weeks in Shanghai is deteriorating at the speed of light and I find I know less and less each day.
The actual participants weren’t that bad at all, but the sound system was awful and people who I knew could sing managed to sound very bland which didn’t help the attitudes of my fellow foreigners. We had been told by Mr. Ye that the school would take all of the teachers out to dinner after the singing was through and you’d think us foreigners hadn’t eaten in weeks the way we were squirming and pouting for the singing to be over. There were only eleven of us and maybe 290 Chinese in the room so of course they didn’t bother to translate anything into English for our benefit. It turned out that the singing event was a giant competition for each department across all three campuses. When teachers from any of the English departments got up to sing, we screamed and hollered support and that was fun. The co-teacher who sits next to Julia and I – Mrs. Bi (Sandra) – noticed our not-so-enthused group and asked the woman with the box of numbers to come over. She handed each of us raffle numbers and we perked up a bit in between songs when the judges drew numbers.
Then a completely Chinese thing occurred. Mrs. Bi asked me what my number was. She asked for the numbers of the teachers to my left and to my right. Next thing you know, she’s talking on her cell phone. She asks me what my number is again. I lean over to Lisa and say, “How much you wanna bet my number gets called in the next ten minutes?” And, sure enough, ten minutes rolls by, the number box comes out and a judge withdraws my number from the box. Trying as best as I could to act shocked, I jumped up excited on the outside, guilty and slightly sick to my stomach on the inside. Were we so difficult to please that our hosts had to rig a raffle to entertain us? I was given a 280 kuai gift card to a spa. Then, Tish’s number was called. RIGHT AFTER MINE. God forbid they just hand us the cards – they had to make it LOOK like it was all a great, exciting unplanned event. Tish’s dramatics were even more pronounced than my own. Hers came from her innate desire to be on stage while mine came from the guilt of being afraid that a regular teacher would somehow catch on that it had been rigged. I felt ashamed. The funniest part was that Lisa got really upset, I think, when her number wasn’t called.
Then, the brothers from Oregon got up and sang Jingle Bells. It was totally bizarre. They were given the spa cards for getting up and singing. The older brother, Matt, ended up giving his card to Eileen because her birthday was last week. She and I plan to check this spa out soon. One of the co-teachers told me that the card might be just a ploy to get us to spend a lot of money. As in, the card is good for 280 kuai but maybe the cheapest thing on the spa’s menu is 400 kuai. Get it? We’ll check it out and I’ll let you know.
The grand finale was the best part. All of the principals and top administration for the school got up and did some sort of folk song. At the end of their song, someone pulled a cord and balloons and confetti came falling from the ceiling. It was pretty cool. The head principal said a few words and within the same breath silenced the crowd with a look that scared me though I had no idea what he was talking about. For the next fifteen minutes he spoke in terribly serious tones and almost scolded the audience with his eyes. Then, when he was finished with his rebuke or whatever it was, he smiled, said something and waited for laughter. The audience gave him a very nervous titter and then everyone started moving and leaving the auditorium. I asked several co-teachers what the last part had been about and they suddenly had amnesia and couldn’t quite “say” or “remember”. What? Finally, I found a co-teacher who seems a little less in tune with the school’s bureaucracy and a little more in tune with reality and she told us that a photographer from a newspaper had been snooping around the school on Friday, the first day of classes, and had taken several unauthorized pictures of children. Nothing terrible had happened but the principal was furious that the photographer’s movements had gone unnoticed by teachers and staff alike. Something told me we weren’t getting the full story, but I was hungry so I let it slide.
Eleven of us, co-teachers and some foreign teachers, piled into a rented van and headed to the restaurant, which turned out to be a fancy seafood buffet. The school forked out 68 kuai per head (at least 300 teachers were at dinner) and we were allowed to eat and drink all we could for three hours. The foreign teacher’s table was loud, full of food and the beer and wine were flowing. It was strange. We had alienated ourselves completely. Here we were, the English teachers for the school, sitting at one table, amid a sea of our colleagues and there was almost no interaction. One thing I have noticed, and maybe this is something that is changing with China’s speedy development, but, the formality of ritual in Japan is visible in even the simplest of business transactions while the things you take for granted go unsaid and undone here in China. I had to find out where I was teaching Kindergarten by wandering over to the building on Thursday, which I was perfectly capable of doing; it is just so unusual. No one told us about dinner or how to get there, we just forced ourselves upon our co-teachers who seemed almost annoyed by having to schlep us to the restaurant.
I want to reiterate that I’m not so much complaining as showing how surprised I am at the informality of EVERYTHING. It’s nice, really. In fact, Mr. Ye sat in on a class of mine this past Friday and I have no idea why, or what he thought about it. He was there when I arrived and he left a minute before the bell rang. I didn’t see him for the rest of the day and would have emailed him about it but he has yet to answer an email, so I thought, well, if I’m in trouble, I suppose they’ll let me know.
And this is one heck of a post, so I’ll sign off now. Oh! But not before divulging the bit of information that Russell let me in on when I returned from school this past Friday. Apparently, the reason for the faulty Internet is a high amount of pornography downloading that’s been occurring. Seems someone’s been clogging the speed of our Internet connection with very high files and files of a nature that the blocker flagged and informed the school’s computer guy about. So, Russell was asked to tell each and every one of us that the school knows about it and even knows who the culprits are (more than one!) and it is very embarrassing for the school because an outside party monitors activity on the Internet. Thank goodness my hands are clean! And, maybe the Internet will have a little more bounce in its step now that this activity has been frowned upon. Here’s to hoping!
