6 Foreign Teachers' Day

In my senior one year, we had SARS in Beijing. We were off school.

We had foreign teachers at the beginning of the school year who taught us classes in English. I was first introduced to the TV show Friends and Avril Lavigne, both of which I loved. When SARS struck, I had only a few Friends episodes back at home but I just watched them over and over again. Oh, if I could meet Jennifer Aniston, I promise I won't cry. When the foreign teachers came back after SARS was gone and school resumed, I know all the trivia in Friends and I could recite to you what happens in every episodes or even line for line. And my English went to a new useful level too. I could have some real English conversations.

Then, because of my fond of Friends, I made a TV show episode based on our foreign teachers' life here in Beijing, their adjustments, their cultural shocks, how strange they appeared to us. I became very good friends with many of them probably due to my ability to be able to talk to them and they tried to reach out to us too. The show was sitcom style just like friends even though I have only a few scenes. In spite of my little humors, I really did searched to convey something deeper. One of the thematic sentences I had was "universal similarities go deeper than universal differences".

The filming of the show was a big challenge to my leadership skills too. I had many great classmates, and foreign teachers to help me out. I wrote the script, directed most of the work but they went through my script several times, added after-effects, subtitles etc. We showed it in the school multimedia room several times. I didn't dig too much into the significance because another major event in my life came along.