Xiao Mao

This past Saturday Nathan and I went to a gathering of some of his students. We walked over to the sports stadium on campus to meet up with them, not entirely sure what to expect from the afternoon. Tesla, the student who had invited Nathan and me to this event, had simply said in his message that their class was meeting to play some games and do some activities. It is worth noting here that the classes in school are structured a bit differently than in the US. When you enter college as a freshman, you are put into a “class” with other students with your intended major. You then have all of your classes with this same group of students over the course of four years. So suffice to say, they get pretty close. This group of Nathan’s was one such group of freshmen students, intending to major in physics and looking to schedule some bonding time to get to know each other better and all that.

When we got to the stadium, we were met by hundreds of students who were rollerblading around the large concrete field that surrounds the stadium itself. They skated with impressive footwork around mini cones they had set up in various line formations. Chinese pop music blared from the large stereo speakers that stood amidst the hundreds of pairs of locked up shoes lining the area. We think it must have been some sort of competition event, but whatever it was, it was quite fun to watch as we dodged skaters whizzing by from all directions. There were also two large, white fluffy dogs watching the spectacle, which of course made Nathan and my day infinitely better.

We finally found Tesla, one of Nathan’s male students, amidst the crowd and he led us around the skating event to a field on the side of the stadium. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, just chilly enough for a sweater but warm enough that a coat was unnecessary. His class was all there—maybe twenty or twenty five students—sitting in the grass, eating sunflower seeds and chatting. As we approached the group, they all stood up and clapped for us, something we are getting to expect when we encounter any students, either in the classroom setting or outside of it. We went through some introductions for my sake and then jumped into the games. Tesla and another boy, Leo (who Nathan gave the name to because the kid apparently likes Leonardo diCaprio movies a lot), helped us by translating the rules and such.

           

We played a couple of games familiar to me from my time working as a camp counselor, including The Human Knot and Red Rover. But perhaps the best part of the afternoon (aside from the dogs of course) came at the end of the “Xiao Mao,” or “Little Cat,” game. The game basically consists of one person in the middle, the little cat, who has to go around to different people in the surrounding circle and try to make them laugh by saying “Meow” as creatively or goofily as possible. They have three tries to do this. The person they are trying to make laugh has to pet the meow-er’s head in between each attempt and say something along the lines of “Poor little cat,” all without smiling or laughing. You can imagine this game is right up my alley. Anyway, after several rounds—one of which consisted of Nathan being the one in the middle and merely having to walk up to one of the girls before she collapsed on the ground laughing—one boy was stuck in the middle, unable to get anybody to laugh time and time again. By the loose rules of this game, that means he lost. And as we had found out from the few games we played before Xiao Mao, when you lose at a Chinese game, the rest of the players pick your punishment, and this generally takes the form of having to do something embarrassing in front of the group.

Of course, the conversation in which they were discussing possible punishments was all in Chinese, so I zoned out and started watching adorable and tiny, brown-curly-haired puppy that was prancing around the field behind us like a rabbit. After a few minutes Tesla, who was standing next to me, leaned over and said they had decided to have the boy ask someone to marry him and they were deciding now who that someone would be. From the way they were gesturing in Nathan and my general direction, we inferred it was between the two of us foreigners. Sure enough, after another couple of minutes of discussion, the boy walked over, with the rest of his classmates giggling in a semicircle formation around him. Everyone pulled out their phones to take pictures and videos of the coming proposal. He stood in front of me, looking like he was attempting to gather his thoughts while a few girls to the side kept pointing to the ground saying “Get down on one knee! That’s how they do it!”

And so he did, and the proposal was far more elaborate than one would expect from a dare/punishment. I think the highlight of the whole thing would have to be a tie between the non-stop giggling by his classmates (and by the proposer as well—I don’t want this encounter to come off as a malicious punishment he endured for he, having a class clown-like personality, was getting a kick out of it as well) and him saying “I know I’m not as tall as Nathan…but I would always do everything I could to make you happy.” The whole speech was four or five minutes long and ended with ample applause and laughter. Certainly an unexpected scenario for the afternoon out with a bunch of students, but I think that Nathan and I got just as much joy out of it as they did.