The Speech Festival: Professor Weiser or How I Learned to Loathe the Bomb

I prepared myself for the speech festival. I had written it and memorized it four days earlier, but for some reason the flow was off. I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and preformed it over and over again. All three minutes or so of it, but I couldn’t figure out the problem, when Ma called me to eat dinner. I sat at the dinner table across from Ma, hearing the faint sound of the music I forgot to turn off in the background. There were some scrambled eggs in front of me and a pork and cabbage soup that looked like the trash compactor scene from Star Wars: A New Hope. She placed a white puff of bread, called man tou, in my bowl and we began talking. We got to the topic of weddings and divorces. She said that it’s not seen as acceptable for woman to divorce as often as they occur in America. Before 1927, there were no divorces. They started when Mao was sent to Hunan and made the peasants rise up, as it goes in Marxist theory to get to communism. Women worked in the fields so they had more power than women in the cities, thus creating gender equality… more or less. Divorces were originally seen as a fad and there were a lot of them, but died down and marriage became a thing about commitment. But nowadays, they’re still frowned down upon. If a divorced woman was to get remarried, she’d lose some face. Dinner rolled on and I prepared for my speech even more. It was as good as it was going to get. Time for a good night’s sleep.
I rolled into school earlier than normal. I tend to do that when I’m slightly nervous. The walk to school was almost completely black except for an occasional orange glow flying towards me, only for it to rise up and I would realize it was a biker smoking. I paced the empty halls of the school reciting the lines for my speech. “Lai zhongguo yi qian…” I wanted to fix that because it seemed that almost every single person’s speech from the day before started that way, but it was too late. It was branded into my brain. I passed by the grey lockers countless times, muttering to myself until we met up at the small auditorium. The speeches started up. Jamie gave a good speech. Everybody was giving good speeches. I was starting to get that feeling in your stomach where it feels like something is pressing everything in your torso together. Shi Xiao Ning, or Tsechi, gave her speech and then they called my name. “Shi Hualin from Class four is now going to give his speech.” I walked up to the stage and realized I shouldn’t have listened to the speeches and instead focused on mine. I got up to the podium and looked out at the faces in the crowd. I saw my friends, my teachers, my host mother, but I wasn’t focusing on how many people there were. I began to focus on the empty seats. The places where there weren’t people. I began my speech and shifted from one empty spot to the next so it made it seem like I was looking at people. I had started planning hand motions so that the people wouldn’t see my leg shaking violently. I knew it would, it always has. From my Bar Mitzvah all the way down to my presentation on La Alhambra in Spanish class, it shakes. I got to one line, “And my students were especially loud,” and I couldn’t remember what was next. So I let out a long, soft, “Aiiiyoooooooooooooooooooooooo,” to let my mind think. My mind went back to the hallways from an hour earlier. I was walking right behind myself in this dream, listening to what I was saying. “So I had no choice but to teach them the alphabet…” I waited nervously, still on the tenth or eleventh “o” of aiyo and staring out to a crowd of waiting faces, while walking the halls of the school in my mind. “I found a teacher and asked her to help me.” I was back on topic and finished it up shortly after with, “So my story’s moral, [if you will,] is you should respect your teachers.” I whipped off my glasses and said a few Xie Xie’s and pretended to shoot them off to some of the audience members and tried to walk back to my seat as smoothly as possible. It’s hard when your legs are just beginning to recuperate from being Jell-O, but I managed. We had a ten minute break and I went over to congratulate Nick S. on his speech; it had been funny. He gave me one in return saying my speech had been like poetry to listen to. He had thought my brief relapse into my mind had been me acting on the stage. That worked out a bit better than I hoped. I guess being a recidivist to my thoughts, as I tend to be, made it seem normal. But no matter, I was still on the “finished-with-the-speech high.” We returned to our seats and listened to the rest of the speeches in Chinese. Sam had an interesting speech and soon the festival was over. They dismissed us and we were off to our classes. I had prepared for two days and it was all over in less than four minutes. But it felt good, even if my content lacked… content.