Speech on Science of Invention

So this one evening, I happened to pass by our school principal, Mr. Zhang. He mentioned that he just got off the phone with a principal from another school in Cangzhou and would like me to go to that school the next day and give a speech about the science of invention. With little chance to answer any more questions, he was off to other business. The next day, I was patiently waiting to hear more about when the speech would be, how I would get there, and what the speech should actually be about. I bomboarded our liaison with questions about what, when, and where, and wrote a few paragraphs on what I would say, and sent it in an email to the school so their interpreter would be ready to translate when the time came.

I (Tom) was allowed to skip a couple of my classes in the afternoon and was taken in a car with Rex, and the other school's representative, who ended up being my translator.

I was bummed that Alicia wasn't allowed to come with me, because it was very interesting to see a public school with 3,000 students instead of our school which is private with only a few hundred students. The building where they had school was really really old and the paint was chipping off the walls. The concrete floors were marbled with the passing of students' feet over so much time. I was whisked away to the second floor into a conference room with a large table. I was offered cigarettes and tea, of course, and a few plates of fruits. I accepted a banana and some hot water.

After a while of waiting, a bunch of official looking men came into the conference room and sat at the table to wait for the event to start. No one tried speaking to me, which I was grateful for because my Chinese is extremely basic. Even though there were empty seats on both sides of me, Rex, and the translator would not sit down. They loomed over me, acting as my assistants the whole time. I felt like an honored guest, but it also made me feel uneasy. I think status and appearance and very important in China.

When the time came, all of the people in the conference room shuffled out in single file to the assembly area and the important people were seated at a long table with a purple velvet tablecloth and personalized name blocks. It was funny because all of the names on the table were in Chinese characters all the way down the table until it came to mine and it said, "TOM". There were elementary school kids lined up all the way along the corridor, carefully watching to see the foriegner. Remember, Alicia and I are still the only white people we've seen in our city of 1 million people.

When it was my turn to give a speech, they called me by my official name, "Tom Teacher" (in Chinese), and I took the microphone. Up to this point, I still didn't know exactly what the topic or theme of this whole event was, so I gave my speech hoping that I was somewhat on topic. I spoke about creativity and thinking "out of the box"\(which I thought was a funny concept in a communist country), and used George Washington Carver's example of finding 300 ways to use a peanut. I didn't get much of a reaction out of anyone, and found out later that my translator didn't know how to translate some of my speech. All well, it was an interesting experience.