Black Friday

Dayao, Hunan, China

Still half asleep, I traipsed down the dark staircase and across the school campus. I noted a stillness in the air that I had never associated with Dayao; mornings were usually marked with a stray firework or the frantic bay of some animal making a break for freedom. The school, too, usually echoed with a chorus of student voices or the bellow of conversations as teachers paced the stairs between their classes.

But that morning those same stairs were vacant, and I knew before I'd made it to the first landing that the schedule had changed sometime in the early morning hours, and--yet again--no one had told me. Sure enough, a glance into the nearest classroom showed sixty students contorted over a ream of papers, tousling a spare hand through their hair. Another test day.

I walked up another flight of stairs to the teachers' office to learn the details of the schedule change. A geography teacher, whom I always saw in the office but never in a classroom, greeted me sleepily, and confessed he hadn't the slightest idea how long the test would last. He predicted at least through the morning. Possibly through tomorrow. He sounded like a Camus protagonist.

I sat down at a desk and waited for someone better informed. I sighed and shut my eyes for a moment. If the students were testing all morning, then I can return to bed, I thought. But the image of my students' frightened faces and furrowed brows passed through my head, and I felt guilty. Whether I returned to sleep or not, at least I didn't have to take a test.

A minute later, six male teachers, protected against from the morning cool by thick black jackets, talking over each other loudly, gathered around a laptop. I walked over to them, figuring that between the six of them they could deduce whether I could return to bed or not. I began to speak, but was interrupted by loud--and distinctly bad--music erupting from the laptop.

It took me a minute to recognize the ungainly voice of Rebecca Black. If I hadn't been introduced to the youtube sensation two weeks prior while visiting a friend, I wouldn't have known about the noisome music video making viral ripples throughout the Western world, rivaling sneezing mice and baboon farts as the worst internet video of all time. No one, I thought, could take this video seriously.

Shocked to hear her infamy had spread to China--and that her video was accessible without the censored youtube--I stood near the teachers awkwardly, wanting to make some comment so that the teachers would understand this was not a fair representation of American youth. We might be more cosseted than most, but not everyone's parents paid a few grand so their teen daughter could pollute the internet with a music video.

This was the third time I had seen "Friday", and if it hadn't been for the seconds ticking off on the bottom of the screen, I would have sworn it was the longest. I held my breath about halfway through as the video approached its nadir of shoddiness. As Rebecca sang about the days of the week (or, at least, Thursday through Sunday), I prepared to interrupt the video with an explanation I'd been working out in my head since the video began. I moved to speak, and then noticed the teachers' heads moving in what was unmistakably a head bob.

The second part of the video felt far faster, and at its end the teachers' nodded quickly in approval. "Hao! Hao!" a few said. "Very good!" I was then informed that one of the teachers had "discovered" the video the other day and wanted to use the morning test as an opportunity to show it to others.

"What a great song," said a teacher whom I didn't know well. "It's great you're teaching our students English so that they can learn songs like this." I swallowed my prepared words (and my pride), and muttered a polite thanks. "You should learn to sing this song at karaoke," said another. "It'd be a hit."

I watched in horror as the sitting teacher moved the cursor back to the beginning of the song. "Excuse me," I spoke over the opening notes, "When do regular classes start again?" The sitting teacher looked taken aback that I would interrupt the video over something so trivial as the schedule. "The test lasts two days," he said. "You needn't teach today or tomorrow."

"Thank you," I said sincerely, though I don't think he heard. I sauntered toward the door, and after a backward glance at bobbing heads, I left the office and returned to bed.