The American Team: or when Anne, Nick, Ben and Yue get to pretend they are super 厉害（lihai)

(For those of you who don't know, lihai sort of means really amazing or awesome at something. Basically it doesn't have a really good English translation, which is why I used it.)

So we heard there was a large martial arts event being held at a High School in Taigu. It was for a special kind of marital arts, similar to Taiqi that had been started in Taigu. (I believe it is called Xingyi quan.) Ben, Nick, Yue (my Chinese teacher and new friend), and I all decided to go see the opening ceremony.

At the gate to the field, everybody was crowded and pushing and nobody was being let in. But the moment the guards saw Ben and Nick’s face, they asked what country they were from. “America” they responded, to which the guards let them in and pointed to a side of the field. Yue (my Chinese teacher and new friend) and I quickly yelled that we were with them, and with my foreign-looking face and Yue locked on my arm, we made it in too. The organizers pointed us to a series of High-school aged girls dressed in pink, sparkly short dresses holding signs with names of countries and Chinese provinces on them. We were pushed behind the United States sign. Ben and Nick were smiling, Yue and I were horrified. They thought we were participants! We got to march around the stadium representing “The American Team.” Yue hoped that no one who knew her was in the audience, I reassured her that she spoke English well enough to be an ABC (which was true) so she might as well march with us. It was entertaining, until we had to stand in front of the bleachers and listen to 5 officials give speeches about the significance of the event. Then things got exciting again as the fireworks went off, hundreds of students did a large performance on the field and the competitions began.

It was fun, for sure, but it felt really strange to have the doors wide open to us just because of the faces we were born with, when the people who grew up in the city were not allowed into this exciting event unless they had special invitation. I wanted to take the almost one hundred patient, ordinary Taigu people standing with their faces pressed against the fence and tell the guards they were American so they could also use the strange backseat passes our faces allowed us.