Like many things in life, I'm not sure what has transpired that night. Let me try to put into words what happened.

One of my classes invited me to a sort of farewell party. These parties are, of course, a little more than what North Americans would consider a party.

The party started at 7 at night. The class divided itself into three teams: the Banana Team, the Muskmelon Team, and the Watermelon Team. I ended up on the Muskmelon team. So, of course, I was one of the reasons for this party, but there were also two other teachers who would not be teaching them next year.

The night started with fun and games. There was the eating contest where one person would be blindfolded, stand behind the other person and use chopsticks to get food from the plate to the other person's mouth. Unfortunately, I couldn't avoid being involved in the game. Plus, I had just eaten dinner, so I was really up to an eating contest. The food was just tomatoes and melons, so it didn't get too messy.

Then the two losing teams had to do something at the request of the winning team. We lost, part of the punishment was to get one person from each losing team to perform the most romantic scene from Titanic. We got two guys to do that "I can fly" scene.

The next activity involved one person from each team to act out a story, but the actors could not use any pronouns like I, you, he, me, us, and so on. Every time that someone said a pronoun, two very eager language monitors would pounce on the head of the offender with big plush dolls. There were two rounds to this activity. The first story was a scene from "Journey to the West." One of the girls who was acting it out just kept saying pronouns. Poor girl. She must have been bonked on the head almost a dozen times. The second round was "Little Red Riding Hood." I was Red. I faired pretty well at first, but as I got near the end, I started talking faster and thinking less. I got a couple of bonks for that.

The punishment for the losers was to sing song lines, but each last word of the line must be the beginning of the next song line. Our team won, so I just sat back and listened. Of course, all the song lines were in Chinese, so I had a little trouble understanding it all.

The rest of the night involved a lot of talking and some performing. They asked each of the teachers to sing a little something. I tried to remember a lot of songs, but I could come up with was the first verse of "Amazing Grace." Go figure.

Then the students one-by-one said something about each teacher. All of them were very sweet. Some even cried or felt very apologetic for not working harder that year. A lot of them hoped that I would learn more Chinese. Understandable.

Then, one of my students played a farewell song on his harmonica. It was very touching. After that, I gave a short speech to express myself, but I tried to do most of it in Mandarin. It was hard, but I thought that it was a better way to express myself at that moment and to express my deepest appreciation to that class.

Very soon, the night was ending and I had to get back home. The party couldn't go on forever since classes weren't finished yet and that the Junior students were trying to study real hard for a test the next morning. I said goodbye and left with the in-between sense of joy and sorrow.