Halloween

Tracy Chapman: Going Back

Last night the SST group hosted a Halloween party. It was a bit chaotic, but really fun, and the 200 plus Chinese students who came seemed to really enjoy it. We had a few performances, some games, and a haunted house. The performances included our small percussion group doing a piece written by J.D., the witch’s piece from McBeth, the Jack-o-lantern song (I helped with that), and a costume contest. The games were bobbing for apples, three legged race, blowing a Ping-Pong ball from one basin full of water to the next, and helping to carve pumpkins. The pumpkins were not like the ones in the states, but Meryl and Zeb did an amazing job working with that, and improvising. The haunted house was actually really good for the short time and limited supplies we had. The Chinese students who were planning with us were able to provide enough fabric to somewhat divide up the room, and the guys bought cool masks from the underground. Britch was particularly scary in his. It wasn’t really scary by US standards, but the Chinese in general are easily scared, so they found it really scary. We had to tone it down part way through because it was too scary for many of them. One girl threw up afterward. I enjoyed chatting with random Chinese students, and going through the haunted house with a few girls that I met.
I was dressed as a cat (big surprise). Saturday, Jess, Meryl and I went to the underground and to “woman’s” street, and I got a small headband, a couple black armband things, and a black tie. I cut out ears from the armbands, and sewed them together, and then stuffed them and sewed them to the headband. I also stuffed the black tie and used it as a tail. then I also found this perfect chocker to serve as a collar. I used eyeliner as facepaint. It was fun. As proof of how easily scared Chinese can be (especially girls) I have a little story. After the party I went to visit my roommates because I they had class during the party. On my way back across campus after discovering that they weren’t in, a scared several students just by passing them in my cat costume, most of them kind of didn’t notice me at first and then suddenly saw me when I was close, but one girl saw me in a well lit area and from a distance and still freaked out a bit when she looked up and saw me. Another girl was so scared that she practically fell down. Because I decided to see my roommates, I had to go back to main campus by myself, I had sort of gotten used the the staring here in China, but this was torture.

Advertisement