Tim's Big Day

July 7th, 2007

Today Tim had to go to work...he had to leave the house by eight this morning in a suit to go to an orientation for the university. Rough day and he will probably be exhausted when he gets home! It must have been from about 9 to noon and he called for a kitchen pass so he could go to lunch with some of his new classmates. They weren't just going anywhere for lunch, they were going to go karaoke during lunch. The Chinese take this very seriously and it is very popular. I will let Tim tell him of his experience and then maybe I can get an account from a classmate on Tim's singing!

Alright, Tim here. As Morgan said, I had to go to work today. It was quite fun. My MBA program has 130 students, of which I am the only non-Chinese, so as you can imagine, I get quite a bit of attention. Somehow during the orientation today, a couple of classmates called me by name over to their gathering. My name is on the top of all the class rosters in letters, then all the Chinese names in characters follow. They told me that I was in their group and that they I needed to get a hotmail account to join in their chat group. They also invited me to go to lunch with them today after the orientation. I am still wondering how I got into their group, as there are no other groups, but I'm not complaining – it introduced me to 20 great folks in the program.

Ok, back to the task at hand and talking about lunch - this wasn't just lunch, this was an adventure. You see, lunch was at a karaoke place. My only experience with karaoke was back in my flying days when I was on a mission with several jets in Japan. We all went out to dinner, then happened to pass by a karaoke place there in Okinawa. I had thought that karaoke was something people did after they had been drinking quite a bit to have some fun and make fools of themselves (and so I never went to sing karaoke because I don't drink). Well, my group of American aviators almost got kicked out of that karaoke place because the locals were upset at how the Americans were acting. You see, the Japanese take it very seriously and sing their best, and applaud good performances. My group was doing quite the opposite. Well, karaoke is wildly popular here in China and yes, they take it very seriously.

So there I am with my 20 new friends eating great food and listening to the others sing. Nobody had to dare anybody to start, they just did. Our group was evenly divided male/female, and I can't say that one liked it more than the other. I tried to play my “I don't read Chinese very well” card, but alas, the karaoke computer has American songs, too. So after agreeing to look for a song, a friend accompanied me over to the computer to find a song. I searched and searched. But the singers who have sung songs in the last 10 years were all female artists and I didn't want to sign something from Avril Lavigne, Britney Spears, Celine Dion, Shania Twain, the Spice Girls, etc. There are some guys, the Beatles, but unfortunately I'm not a big Beatles fan and the few song I know, they didn't have. I was getting desperate. It was five minutes that seemed like an eternity. What song could I attempt to sing that wouldn't be to tough? Finally I settled on the '80s band Air Supply and their ballad “I'm All Out of Love.” I still can't believe that I sang Air Supply in front of 20 people, but I was desperate. Thanks to listening to my brother's and sister's albums when I was little, I was able to belt out some great choruses! I was laughing, but then I really had to laugh as I got a couple of compliments afterwards for singing very well. If anybody has sit next to me in church, they know that I sound more like a subwoofer that just puts out unrecognizable bass in the hopes that it can tie in with the rest of the music, but by itself is not music at all. So I was relieved for a while that my turn was over, but then it hit me as the group was talking about getting together next month that this wasn't an isolated incident for me in China, but rather a beginning?!

But despite my butchering of Air Supply, it was a great time! I was able to have good conversations with the folks there. I'm really impressed by their backgrounds, where they're currently employed and what they're doing (Intel x3, LSI, UPS, NuSkin to name a few), and I'm especially impressed (and grateful) by how friendly and accepting they are of me. I am so excited for this opportunity – this is truly a chance of a lifetime opportunity!

Enough from me, back to Morgs....

That just makes me smile!