Our first adventure was to a high school for migrant workers' children at a high school called Beijing BN Vocational School. Is the first tuition-free charity secondary school in China, and its initial branch was the school that we visited in Beijing. The need for the school is huge: more and more people are moving from the countryside to the cities to find better opportunities, but due to their low education levels there are no jobs for them. Their children are either left behind with grandparents (often alone, due to the One Child Policy) for years without seeing their parents. There are 58 million of these workers' children under 14, most of whom end up as middle school drop-outs. And that's just the legal children. Illegal second children are often left outside hospitals because the parents don't want to pay the huge fees to make them legal. Illegal children can't go to school or get identification. They can't go on airplanes or have jobs that require documentation. But paying the penalty to legalize children is often prohibitively expensive. It was 6,000 yuan when a government salary was 100 yuan a month. It's a system with a lot of problems.
This high school, founded in 2005, takes in children (I assume only legal ones, though) who can't afford normal high school fees and who hope to gain vocational training and fulfill the dreams with which their parents arrived in Beijing. The students take classes in air conditioning, plumbing, English, ancient Chinese culture, embroidery, pastry-making, electrical wiring, waitressing, computer skills, gardening, plumbing, and numerous other subjects. Different companies seem to sponsor various facilities, like a recent computer lab given by Motorola. It was a really nice school and the students all seemed incredibly engaged and grateful to be there. So where does a random American choir come into the picture? Well, it turns out the school has an extracurricular singing group, too. And the school believes that music builds character and aids learning, which is pretty nifty. The choir performed two songs for us, one in English (called "Proud of You") and the other in Chinese. Pretty adorable.
Then we sang a few songs to show the range of our repertoire, ending with Fengyang Song (a huge crowd pleaser here, though it is a simple children's song). We then broke into groups to practice Little Innocent Lamb, which we had been told they had learned. It was rough. Nobody in our group really spoke Chinese and the girls did not seem to know the song at all. But we persevered and I think they had a good time. The contrast between these shy girls and the boisterous high school class that we worked with a few days ago was striking. Both sets of students were lovely and engaged, though, so we had a good time.
After outreach, we were dropped at a mall to fend for ourselves and get lunch. We were told to go to the fifth floor food court, but one of our girls is from Beijing and led us to another food court on the third floor that had a range of interesting offerings.
We also had our first rehearsal with the choir and orchestra from the Central Conservatory of Music, which was interesting. The conductor seems to ignore most of the mistakes that we make and instead forges onward to the end of the piece, then runs it again without fixing anything. After two runs and a few tiny spot-checks (of not even close to the biggest mistakes), he lets us out of rehearsal early. This happened both times today. Sometimes the problem is that he gives instructions in one language and forgets to give them in the other. Sometimes it's the dearth of pencils to annotate our music and bend Beethoven to his will. Sometimes it is a difference in how we were rehearsed before being brought together. But little gets resolved and so the problems persist. But the conductor is nice, as are the other students. The soloists are equally confused by our conductor, which makes me feel better about not understanding him, but they sound beautiful. Things always come together at the last minute, right?
After rehearsal, one other student and I got interviewed for broadcast on the Beijing nightly news. They were typical sound bites devoid of anything sensational. They merely wanted to know where we had gone in China, whether I liked the other choir, whether I liked China. Apparently looking foreign is interesting enough.
And then dinner. It was delicious and another adventure, but the best part was the conversation. David proposed a topic of discussion - our five year plans - and it gave us a chance to ask very real questions of each other on topics that would otherwise be difficult to broach. I learned a lot about people's strengths, failures, and fears. It contextualized a lot of their decisions. I loved it. I went first and was very interesting to see how different my story was from those of other people. I have found love. I have a fairly certain next five years. I have no Plan B.
After dinner, four of us skipped the bus back to the hotel and took on the city. We walked the perimeter of the Forbidden City, arriving at its back corner just in time to sit on the edge of the moat, admire the sparkling buildings, and watch it all go dark. We walks alongside parks and through residential areas, peeking through door cracks and sneaking into construction areas. We experienced real public restrooms (not just squat toilets, but squat toilets with no doors and no real walls) and explored convenience stores. We at last arrived at a lake rimmed by the heart of Beijing nightlife and pulsing with its bass beat. On one end, pairs of locals played a game halfway between hackey sack and badminton, involving extreme feats of coordination and hip flexibility. A weighted tuft of feathers was kicked, bounced, and ricocheted between the partners. It was mesmerizing.
Eventually we wandered further, past the men with glowing floats on their fishing lines, past bars with live music spilling out the door, past women selling illegally-powerful laser pointers and craftsmen making replicas of people out of clay. Past amputee beggars and groups of tourists from other parts of China. Past stalls selling old Communist propaganda and knock-off sneakers. Past street food stands and bars with Chinese names and bars with names in English. Past hookah bars and American bros and illegal taxi drivers in dark cars. All with the lights glittering on the water and the clink of glasses. It was a three hour tour of Beijing, starting with history and ending with modern glitter and indulgence.
Here's to a day when the impossible seemed possible, and people could overcome anything.
Spotted: Things that are not as they esteem. Apparently that karaoke bar in our hotel basement that I was so excited about may actually be a cover for a brothel. Such was the discovery of two Glee Club men who went down to investigate the possibility of a Glee karaoke bonanza in coming days. Females who went to ask were told that the elevators don't run to the basement. A search of TripAdvisor by one Glee Clubber apparently revealed similar revelations published by somewhat horrified former guests. Well, that was unexpected.
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