When I entered high school--specifically, the cafeteria with it’s misspelled entrees and flaccid salad bar--I had an epiphany. I turned to the person beside me and made a bold prophecy; “One of these days, I’m going to find a severed chicken head in a school lunch.”
In my alma mater’s defense, their chicken nuggets were actually pretty tasty.
And to be fair, it was Kyle who found it. “Ew.” And we were in China.
“What?”
“Look.”
And look I did. “Is… is that a…”
“Yeah.” Kyle was, actually, an expert on chickens, having raised them back in the US. “It’s a deep-fried chicken head.”
Even a non-expert like me could deduce that. There’s really no mistaking a chicken head, deep fried or not. “Wow,” was all I could say. (‘You gonna eat that?’ was a little too much to handle at that point.)
Kyle picked up the chicken head, turned it towards me, and made the beak move to match his up-beat, Dick Clark-esque voice: “‘Welcome to China!’”
We all laughed. Then grew silent. A feeling of acceptance passed through the foreign teachers’ lunch table; this chicken head welcoming us was basically summing up our entire experience in China thus far.
Someone tentatively suggested making an orientation video for future teachers, with Chicken Head as the official spokesperson. To be completely, one hundred percent honest, it just made sense, and for a few minutes we genuinely thought about what kind of production values we could afford on our salaries.
It would probably be the most honest, straightforward orientation video ever made in the history of ever. Imagine, sitting in a little classroom a week before school begins. A dusty reel track plays--for nostalgia’s sake--off the LCD projector, and suddenly, Chicken Head pops up with Kyle’s upbeat voice: “So you’ve decided to come to China! Congratulations, you have just begun the weirdest year of your life!” With a chicken head declaring it, you can’t help but believe that it is going to be a strange year.
There was a teacher from New Zealand who missed our actual orientation due to his ‘asthma,’ for about two or three days. And then one of the Chinese teachers on a plane to Hong Kong just happened to see him--on the same plane, heading to Hong Kong to catch a flight back to New Zealand/the hell outta China. There’s also the story of the woman who flew back to South Africa in the middle of the school year without telling anyone. Some people land in China, step off the plane, and basically come to the conclusion that they have made the worst choice in their life by coming here. And this is before they even get a deep fried chicken head in their lunch.
I truly, in my professional opinion, think that if they showed Chicken Head’s orientation video before hiring teachers, there would be a lot less westerners freaking out once they got to China. After all, if you can get through Chicken Head Welcomes You to China Part Deux, you probably have the moxy to survive it here.
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