I am More Awesome Than You

Existence can be a humdrum affair, but every once in a long while, a tiny crack appears in the drab brick of everyday life, a short crumbling sliver that allows you to wiggle a finger through and, for just a moment, touch the vast awesomeness on the other side.

Thus was such a tiny crack opened for me when I got called to host some anniversary for a school I’d never heard of. The first clue it was special should have been simply: they were calling. How many third graders get their school’s anniversary celebrated by ten TV hosts?

They weren’t really clear what it would be, just that it was for some school and there would be some hosts and we would pretend to be ‘teachers’. I would be the English teacher.

The second hint was that they called me to ‘practice’. “Why?” I asked. “Because it’s really important,” they said. They were paying more than usual and I thought it was weird, but just went with it.

When we got to the school, four teachers came out to greet us, like we were arriving dignitaries, and took us into the school where the whole fourth grade was waiting. It was very Chinese, like 50 kids in identical uniforms. They said in perfect, creepy unison, “Hello Teacher Cao.”

The teachers told me I would sing a song with the kids. They told me what the song was.

I laughed.

They gave me my lines. I laughed again. We ran through it. I left.

A week later I arrived at the Beijing Central Auditorium for the actual thing and was a little startled.

I walked in through crowds of security guards, busloads of children, acres of cut flowers and into the main hall. I realized that this was seriously a much bigger deal than I had realised.  

Over the next hour the auditorium filled up with kids, their parents and, frighteningly, about a hundred government officials. Full. A thousand people.

The lights went down. The thing started. The kids and their ‘teachers’ each screeched and gyrated their way through their little variety show routines centered on a certain subject (like let’s dance around with abacuses to ‘be math’).

And suddenly, it was time. And it was in that last quiet moment as I peeked, frightened, from behind the curtain, at the full thousand seat cavern that I realised something. I had in my pocket a tiny sliver of greatness. I had the speech I had been given by the teachers. I had the song. In a tiny school room they were unspecial, But with a thousand people … I saw what I could do.

One minute later I was rushing like a great rainbow wave towards the stage with my 50 kids, the auditorium went quiet and I stepped forward.