For the love you bring won't mean a thing, unless you sing, sing, sing

Perhaps I should say a little bit more about my birthday celebration. The night of August 30 began at a local restaurant called Barbarossa. The menu was very Western and actually written in English. This often presents a problem, because although you speak English, and the menu speaks English, the waiter often does not. So, suppose you settle upon the Spaghetti Bolognese (which I did). You will then have to figure out a way to communicate to the waiter that you want that item. Thankfully a number of Chinese people were at the dinner and helped me out. Usually you just ask for a copy of the Chinese menu and find an item that costs the same price as the spaghetti, and hope that's it. So far this method has worked for me.

After dinner, we had a karaoke room reserved. I had never done karaoke in my life, let alone Chinese karaoke, so I didn't know what to expect. We arrived at a decadent lobby, full of marble floors, gold things, and hand-made furniture. Honestly, it looked a lot like a place a king might live, or at least Donald Trump. We got on an elevator where I noticed that the building had 36 floors! I really hope that there is karaoke happening on all of these floors, though deep down I know this couldn't be.

Our room, number 512, was confusingly on the fourth floor. The helpful employees shepharded us in to the room which consisted of: a rather large tv, a rather large couch, two microphones, and an excellent sound system. One of the natives amongst our group began to fiddle about with the karaoke computer. We mistakenly believed that, because he Chinese, he would have an innate understanding of how it worked. We would soon regret putting Yang Zhun at the helm.

In the meantime a cake was brought in, in addition to some Chinese beer (as it was my 21st birthday). Everyone sang happy birthday. This would not be the last time.

After enjoying the delicious cake, and watching the Chinese chess players on TV for many minutes, we began to grow impatient with Yang Zhun. He kept asking for one more moment, and eventually the karaoke system whirred to life. His first song choice: Happy Birtday.

Everyone sang along again, laughing at the strange video playing in the background, which consisted of a bunch of people running around in giant bunny suits. As it turns out, this would be one of the more normal videos of the night. (The least normal video of the night was the three minutes of rugby footage that played over a Chinese song called "Friendship")

Just as we finished singing Happy Birthday for the second time, the song's tempo picked up and started again from the beginning. At this point we were beginning to grow weary of its simple melody and lyrics, but sang along anyways. The happy birthday song proceeded to play 6 more times. Towards the end of the last rendition, Yang Zhun pressed a button and the machine skipped to the next song. It is unclear why he did not press this button much, much earlier.

After that, the karaokeing improved dramatically. I did many songs that night including a couple of Backstreet Boys numbers as well as "Drop it Like it's Hot" and "Dancing Queen" which, I've decided, is the world's hardest karaoke song. I learned a number of important karaoke lessons that night:

a) Do you know the VERSE of the the song? It is not enough to know just the chorus, as this will result in lengthy periods of embarassed mumbling.

b) Does the song contain high notes that you will never ever be able to do justice to? Coming upon a note like those found in many BSB songs presents a decision: do I go for it, or do I switch over to the falsetto. Either way, it's probably not going to go well.

c) Is the song a rap song? It's pretty much impossible to do a rap song well on karaoke. Dont' think that I didn't give "Drop it like it's Hot" everything I had, but the words on the screen came with such speed and persistence that I was doomed from the beginning.

d) Is the song in Chinese? I can read Chinese fairly well, but definitely not when it's Taiwanese Chinese, which means infinitely more complex characters. I would say I had about a 10% hit ratio on the Chinese songs, and that was only because of the occasional English word that cropped up. As for the melodies, I probably hit an average of two notes a song, under the theory that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

So that was karaoke. It was extremely fun, and I'm so glad that my boss, Fay, was able to organize it.

The next day I was hoarse from singing. A Chinese intern named Kevin invited me to an intern celebration and on the way over explained that we would be singing the Weird Al song "I Bought it on eBay" (to the tune of "I Want It That Way") in front of a crowd of roughly 200 people. It was the sort of pleasant surprise that makes living in China such an adventure.

The event that day was a send-off for the roughly 100 interns who had worked at eBay that summer. The crowd was done with the work, and giddy with excitement. Even the lamest joke got a big laugh. At one point, an intern showed a video presentation and the crowd erupted. I was confused, he hadn't even told a joke. I asked Kevin why people were laughing.

"The lighting in the video was not very good".

It was in this environment that I decided to do some Backstreet Boys dance moves in front of a crowd of 200 chinese people that I had never met before. As the Weird Al backing kicked in, I began the pointing and shimmying that had made all the girls scream in the "I Want It That Way" video.

The Chinese reaction was substantially more subdued. Not a single person laughed. Or even reacted. It was as if they had all decided to pretend that the lonely American up front was not doing hilarious things, WHICH I WAS! I quickly gave up the dance moves and finished the song with the rest of my group awkwardly.

I sat down dejectedly as song finished, and another act took the stage. An eBay intern played backing on an out of tune guitar, while his friend sang cheesy pop songs. The crowd loved it.