Chinese Graduation

At the end of last semester the senior students, including friends of mine like Carrie and Qin Chen, graduated from the school. I didn't go to the ceremony, actually I don't know exactly when it was but besides the fact that the school never tells me these things I think I was in Korea at the time. From what I hear the ceremony was pretty short only one person from each school comes up to receive a diploma, symbolizing all the rest. For a place where celebrations are so big and where graduating from college is still a pretty new thing, a good number of our students are the first person in their family to go to college, it's pretty interesting that graduation isn't really a big deal. Parent's don't really come down for it or anything. In fact student's don't even really dress up. The whole cap and gown thing is only done in these little rentals where people dress up for about five minutes take some pictures and then give them back. Literally the whole school might be wearing the same cap and gown in their pictures. In China they always seem to go for appearances even when the reality is lacking. It's OK that they didn't really walk down in cap and gown because there picture shows they did. Some couples even go for the big fancy wedding pictures when they just go for a quick marriage at the court house.

The students also have a graduation banquet which I'm told was pretty fun, I'm actually sad that I missed that one since I only arrived back just after it was finished. Banquets can be the most important part of some traditions in China, a wedding for example is pretty much just a big banquet. The students though had to pay for the banquet themselves. Since I didn't get to go to any of this stuff and since I wanted to congratulate my friends who were graduating I asked Carrie to invite some of her friends and me and the other foreign teachers would take them out to dinner. We went to this nice Thai place which while being good was not really that expensive. The funny thing they did at this restaurant was that from time to time a few people would come around singing songs at different tables. I didn't know all of the songs but some, like the one they sang at our table, were quite familiar. I got this great video of some of the people dancing with them. From left to right in the video you can see Carrie, Zhao Min, and Amy dancing. Qin Chen is sitting at the table. Not on camera were me, Dave, Ken and Peter, who now teaches here.