Zhuzhou City National Day Banquet

Tiffany, Tina, Janet, David, and Mr. Zhang at the Banquet
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Saturday September 27, 2008: The Zhuzhou City government hosted a banquet for all of the foreigners in the city to celebrate Chinese National Day. The banquet was to be held at the upscale Huatian Hotel – the fanciest place in town. The concept seemed a bit funny to us: Why would you bring all the foreigners in town together to celebrate a uniquely Chinese holiday? Further, by my count the foreign population of our 4 million-person city was about 9: Tiffany, me, and the 7 other American teachers who came to China with us to teach English at other middle schools in Zhuzhou. I pictured a slightly awkward evening of the 9 of us sitting around a table with Communist Party officials, us speaking broken Chinese and they speaking broken English.

I can’t say we were particularly looking forward to the event, but in talking with Mr. Zhang, the foreign affairs officer at our school, attendance was pretty much mandatory. Further, our school had signed us up to perform at the banquet! I’m not sure why the Chinese seem to get so much pleasure in watching Americans make fools of themselves on stage, but it’s beginning to wear on me. Anyway, Mr. Zhang suggested that we sing the song, “Unity is Power” that we’d sung at the Teacher’s Day performance a few weeks earlier. We agreed - It’s not too difficult of a song; and better yet, it is pretty short. Since this "warning" that we would be performing occurred less than 24 hours before the banquet, we decided to stick with this song we had sung before.

Saturday night came and it was time to go to the banquet. We went with Janet, the other American teacher at our school, Mr. Zhang, a psychology teacher at our school whose English name is Tina, and Mr. Yu, the “Owner” of our school (Our school is private, and Mr. Yu invested the money to get the school built and started).

Upon arriving at the banquet, we were mildly surprised to find that the foreign contingent in Zhuzhou was slightly larger than I’d realized. There were maybe 50 foreigners in our city who attended the banquet. Most seemed to be German engineers working at the various factories cluttered on the outskirts of town. (I felt bad for them, as they live even closer to the pollutants here than we do. But then again, their factories are to blame for all this smog).

The banquet was quite a formal affair. In attendance were the Mayor of Zhuzhou, the head of foreign affairs for the city, and numerous other high ranking government officials. There was a huge buffet with both Chinese and “Western Food” (Pizza). It actually looked pretty good and we excitedly hopped in line to get food. However, just as soon as we had gotten in line, Mr. Zhang pulled us aside to tell us that we would be the first “group” to perform – there was “no time to eat now!”

Pre-performance Microphone Check

So, we went up on stage in front of the entire foreign population of Zhuzhou and all of the city’s highest ranking officials to sing. We had practiced a bit and were ready to sing our song quickly and move on. However, Mr. Zhang threw us a wrench by bringing a different recording of “Unity is Power” than he had given us to practice with previously. Yeah, it was still essentially the same song, but the differences were a complete surprise to us and were significant enough to throw us off completely. So, we completely butchered one of the most patriotic songs China has in front of a slew of the most important government officials in our city. How embarrassing! Worse yet, the version of the song Mr. Zhang brought kept repeating over and over again, and nobody seemed to want to turn it off! By the end of the song we were so confused that we were reduced to just clapping along to the beat while the crowd got a kick out of the “silly foreigners” dying on stage. We walked off the stage, our pride a bit bruised. Later that night, we went to toast the Mayor of Zhuzhou, and he made sure to mention that we were excellent singers. What a lie that was! However, it got me thinking: Even in the middle of “Single Party” China, there are still some excellent politicians!