kdrama

To continue the story of the last post would mean that I have to skip ahead of telling the story of my actual Christmas spent in Hong Kong in the pleasant company of family there. For making you feel at home in the wintertime of a country that ostensibly doesn’t celebrate Christmas, there’s nothing like watching a two-year old rip open his presents under a tree in Hong Kong (the one ostensibly Chinese place that does celebrate it).

But that would delay things too much, and I owe you more frequent updates, so here I am again in the lunch break of my Thursday back at the dashboard. Except today’s lunch break is a truncated one (though it is hard to say a 1 1/2 hour break is short), and my last class of the day has been cancelled. All this to allow all the teachers of Yucai Third Middle to leave, in three buses, to go celebrate New Year’s in….I don’t know where, actually. There’s a lot of things that I only find out about at the last second here. Like how this was going to happen over the weekend. Like how this was actually going to happen today instead of over the weekend. Like how I was supposed to learn that dumb dance, then learn how to sing the song, and then learn the dumb dance (in a series of unfortunate fake-out mistranslations). I have stood my ground on not learning the dance (see the last link in the last post and you’ll sympathize), but tonight we will see how my vocal chords hold out while crooning to those middle-aged lady teachers some Korean pop songs of the most atrociously saccharine variety (when I asked why they didn’t just use a recording, the English teachers pretended not to understand me.) At one point in the choreography that Nana seems responsible for, they all swoop around me in a circle and throw up their hands in an adulating ring. I think I’m supposed to belt out something like “HONEY YOU KNOW THAT I NEED YOU” at that point.

Now, consider this. Nobody in the audience is going to really understand what I’m singing. So the only one suffering through all of this will be me. Trapped in my own head. How very metaphorical and appropriate for illustrating my Chinese battles with insecurity! Although in this case, I don’t know if there’s really any redemptive quality to it, because whether or not I get a nice little moment of personal empowerment out of it, in the end I’m still going to be singing a really godawful song – and not even ironically. Hipsters, take note: it turns out that irony is a quality that your audience is responsible for and not you. Ergo: you’re not postmodernly cool like you thought you were. Boom.

Anyway, I have to stay the night wherever it is we’re going (probably a hotel), so I’m hoping that I can crawl into my room and hide there with a book to read or something right after the performances. The last time that the Yucai Third teachers went out together for a “meeting,” everyone got pretty drunk. It’s one thing when you’re at a party with your friends…and kind of something else when it’s with a bunch of teachers who are mostly older than you. (That time, one old guy had to be piggybacked to his room comatose by a PE teacher.)

I would so much have rather written a nice post about Christmas trees and family dinners.