A Year in Reflection

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I'm not sure whether you'll find it as hard to believe as I do, but a year ago - on December 28, 2012 - I arrived in Hangzhou.

This year came to a tumultuous close, ripe with insane new schedules, projects, personal strife and triumph alike, homesickness, future plans and, generally, the most difficult month I've faced to date.

The great thing about writing about all of these things here, though, is that I can do so with a "hindsight is 20/20" twist that helps me to appreciate my journey as a reader, rather than a soldier powering through. So, as it has been a month since I've written and a year since I arrived, here is my tale of December 2013:

My take on petty theft is this: objects are material things that can always be replaced; if someone so desperately wants my belongings that they'll go to the lengths to sneakily steal it from me, let them have it... they've worked harder for it than I ever did.

December opened with the theft of my brand new cell phone. See, I finally caved to the demands of my friends back in August and purchased a smartphone -- a Samsung Galaxy Style to be exact. Being me, I naturally found it on sale in a big way and got a heck of a deal on the typically overpriced contraption. For three months, I admit, I treasured the thing. It had an amazing camera on it, free voice-chat apps, and access to my email away from home - a lovely combination of delights in my world. So, is it really any wonder that as soon as this month of destruction hit, my beloved cell phone would be the first to go?

Now, it should be noted that on November 25, I sent my passport, work permit, and several documents to Shanghai in order to renew my residence permits and such for the coming year -- a year for which I have committed myself, yet again, to the service of Disney English.

Without a passport, an expat can't really do much around here. That includes the reception of new SIM cards and cell phones. So, I was obliged to go cell-phone-less until my tattered and roughed-up passport should return from Shanghai.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. More on that to come.

The day that I realized my cell phone was missing was an adventuresome day on its own. That day, James had been out of the building and it was my responsibility to play Director. I noticed the phone was missing around 4pm when I had the overwhelming desire to send a text message to James reading: You can have your stinkin' job back 😉

That night, I found myself at Discount-Burger night at Vineyard with some friends. Given that it was the first really cold night of the year, Taryn and I decided to take a cab home rather than walk. Ah, fateful nights such as these teach us the extent of our personal education. Our destination was quite literally a straight-shot from our pick-up point... the man needed only to drive about 1 kilometer up the same road he picked us up on in order to drop us where we were going. So, you can imagine my alarm when he made a right turn almost immediately following our pickup, and proceeded to pick up the pace. In Chinese, I asked him where he was going, at which point he became angry that I was questioning him... a natural response for someone who thought he was going to make a quick extra buck off of a couple of ignorant foreigners who wouldn't normally know better... busted, buster brown. Seeing that he was becoming irate, I told him to stop the cab, and Taryn and I got out -- without paying; something completely within anyone's right as it is stated on the backseat of the cab: if you driver does not take you to the location you request using the most direct route possible, you do not have to pay. We backtracked our way back to the main road, disgruntledly deciding that we'd walk the rest of the freezing way. When we got back to the main road, we walked maybe 50 paces before we heard tires actually squealing on pavement as a cab pulled around the corner and cut off our path. It was our angry cab driver. He got out and began shoving Taryn, screaming at her in Chinese. I asked him if he had a problem (the best I could come up with in my broken Chinese), and he turned his shovings to me. I explained to him that he did not know where we were going and that we will walk. I probably wound up saying this statement 60 times by the time the confrontation ended. As he was continuing to use violence on us, I managed to get the attention of a passerby and ask for help. When the man stopped to watch, the cab driver at least stopped pushing us. I continued with my same phrase - you don't know where we're going, we will walk - over and over as the man screamed at us. Finally, the man had the sense to ask, "where is it that you're going?" and Taryn and I, at the same time, were able to point directly at our destination, which was still only a few blocks away. Noting this, the cab driver backed down, but not without growling what we believe to have been some kind of nasty insult... that's the great thing about not understanding a language... your little swear words have no effect, sir. But, we otherwise escaped the incident unscathed. Ah, December. It had only just begun.

In these days of cell-phone-less-ness December, I was also assigned to a pet project of insanity. I may have mentioned this previously, but I'll give a brief back story. In August, I was approached by our Center Manager who had a pipe dream of starting the first-ever Disney English Children's Choir at none other than the Hangzhou Wulin center -- directed by yours truly. I laughed when she proposed this, but said I'd be involved if she got the thing started. Well, she got the thing started. As talks with sponsors developed, I started asking the now-notorious question: "Joice, do you know what goes in to a production like this?" As it turns out, Joice had no idea -- and it showed. I was handed 83 children and 3 weeks with the command to teach them 4 Christmas songs that would some how fill a 90-minute performance slot (yeah... you do the math...). All of my attempts to help arrange formal schedules, uniforms and stage-direction practices were pretty well shot down under the guise that Joice, "has it under control." My job was to make the children look pretty and sing pretty (despite the fact that there was no formal rehearsal schedule in these said 3 weeks, so random children would show up at random times and I never once rehearsed with the entire group prior to their arrival at the actual performance on Christmas Eve... but that's beside the point). Anyway, the panic and frustration of this project dominated my month. My actual classes (what I was hired to do here) got back-burnered to the point where coverage of classes was actually arranged for me on set days so that I could go make TV appearances to pitch the dang thing... I can assure you, all of my classes' parents were thrilled about this idea... I can assure you. So, that carried my month of December, and was enough in and of itself.

That's when December 17th happened.

On December 17th, I stayed at my friend Taryn's apartment over night. We arrived home around 2:30 in the morning following our boss's birthday party that included KTV and copious amounts of pizza. At 7:30 in the morning, Taryn woke up because the children running up and down her hallway sounded like they were in her apartment... this is because the door to her apartment was hanging open. Yes, sometime between 2:30 and 7:30, someone had broken into the apartment and left with her handbag and my backpack.

This now rendered us BOTH cell-phone-less, and now wallet-less as well. Ah, but the blessing in disguise is that my passport (as you may recall) was away in Shanghai. This means that not only was my passport not stolen, but I had also not been able to purchase a brand new cell phone just in time to have it stolen again. So, I was just out some bank cards.... which is a royal pain in the butt, but that's about it.

At this point, though, I was pretty tired of things being taken from me and generally sick of China and its people in general. I grant you that any one of these things could happen in the States -- I've had wallets and phones stolen there just as easily as here... but the Christmas season was also upon us and I was just generally glum. My colleagues, in noticing this, pointed out that at the very least I had a Christmas-y activity to attend, and they did not. Nothing says Christmas like a children's choir singing Rudolph, right?

So, Christmas Eve arrived.

James, his wife Savannah and I arrived at the venue in time to see Smurfs and knock-off Disney characters dancing on a stage. Praying that this was not meant to be our performance site, we desperately scoured the over-sized shopping mall for anything with the Disney English logo on it. Unfortunately, we found the DE logo... on the backstage of the Smurf setup. Ouch. James and I made the decision that we were going to have fun with this if it killed us... so it should be duly noted that for each of the events described below, James and I could be found laughing our heads off in a corner somewhere. Over time, my 60-something children arrived with visions of their 4 rehearsals dancing in their wee little heads. They were administered their costumes which, thankfully, were not velvet Santa suits as those were sold out. Gee darn. An hour late, my wee ones mounted the stage -- unbeknownst to any of us in charge. So, the thing kicked off with 60-some-odd children standing on a stage under full lighting and with sound equipment on the stage, with no supervision. I can assure you, they were on their best behavior as any 4-12-year-old would be in that situation... because screaming into the microphones, knocking over mic stands, shoving each other off of stairs, and running up and down the stage is the best behavior that they could come up with... what would you have done in their place? So, hearing the chaos, I decided that the best option was to warm them up using our usual Happy Birthday pitch matching exercise... pitch-matching... haha... yeah. Anyway, so the event somehow got kicked off - the kids never left the stage, and there was no announcement that we were meant to start. People just kind of started talking behind me. This is when I realized that, standing on the stage as I was was creating quite a view barrier. Let me rephrase, I didn't really REALIZE this so much as have it screamed at me by already-irate parents. I had full intention of proving a point by not adhering to their requests for me to move until I looked back and saw 2 TV cameras placed at center stage... with camera 1 pointed at cheek 1 and camera 2 pointed at cheek 2.... I was not about to have my rear-end be the centered shot on those cameras. So, with a little Chinese help I cleared an area for myself to stand on the floor. The performance itself went as well as one could expect: children shouting into microphones placed to close to their faces, children screaming to mom and dad from the stage, children crying during the 10 minutes during which Joice made the decision to pass prizes out to people in the crowd, children taking 8-bar instrumental breaks as a good time to tell mom they're hungry or need to pee, and fights breaking out behind the stage. Ah, yes. Joice made an announcement just as we were wrapping up that free gifts would be handed out back stage. This meant that children were then ripped off stage and run to the backstage area where no sense of crowd control was established. Instead, people were throwing elbows, fists and cheeseburgers alike to make a grab for their free gift. Naturally, not only the 100 parents that were present at our performance heard about these free gifts. As I said, the thing was performed in a shopping mall on Christmas Eve... so suddenly, our audience of 100 became easily 500-600 hundred children, parents and grandparents alike screaming and generally mobbing to receive their free gift. This resulted in more than 20%!o(MISSING)f our actual performers not receiving their gift, and general anger befalling the choir. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.



From here, it is on to January 1st... a time of new starts for me. It's a new year, a new contract, a new birthday, and a new month which means payday 😊 And with all of this I plan to count down my short time left to February when I intend to have a very boring vacation. Some of that time is surely to be spent on a beach somewhere in the South China Sea, and the rest of it at home in the US with a cup of coffee and a whole lot of Channel 9. It's funny the things you look forward to when you travel. But, in all honesty, I wouldn't take back any of my decisions. I still hold true to my no-regrets lifestyle and mindset and am proud to power on.

Come on, 2014 and the year of the Horse. I'm ready for you.

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Comments

[Grandma]

yuck!
As you can imagine, I can truly empathize. However, I simply can't in my mind's eye, what that was about in China. I remember once doing "Christmas Carol" on a very small stage....I mean small.....where my kids had never been before. We had practiced in a large room.....All everyone did was pump into each other. And, of course, Christmas in the future's grey sheet fell off onto the floor. Anyway. So it goes.....A Happy New Year, Jessi. Be anxious to see you in February. Love ya, Grandma

[Joyce]

And a Happy New Year to you, Jessi!!
Thanks, Jessi, for sharing your fun-filled month!! I enjoyed hearing about your activities, especially the Christmas program?! Hope you had a Merry Christmas, in spite of many events, and my wishes for a wonderful 2014 to you!