Silent Night

December 24th, 1997

Most of my students students at Xijiang University in mainland China did not understand the meaning of Christmas, but they adored any excuse for festivity. Hotels in downtown Zhaoqing embraced the holiday with a kind of unrestrained enthusiasm, decorating the way a child might ice a cake—lavishly and without concern for proportion. Tinseled trees appeared in every lobby, their plastic branches sagging under the weight of mismatched bulbs, blinking lights, and tinsel that looked as if it had been applied by fire hose.

The trees were often too tall for the room, crammed into corners where the star on top scraped the ceiling tiles. Garlands looped around pillars in dizzying colors—neon green, magenta, metallic gold—more reminiscent of a disco than a holy night.

Speakers hidden behind reception desks played “Jingle Bells” on endless loop, but always the same synthesized version, slightly off-pitch and punctuated by static. Electric snowflakes flashed on and off in patterns no one could predict. Some hotels displayed cotton batting drifts along the floors to simulate snow..

Students did similar decorations in their barren dorms. The staff at the university where my wife and I were guest professors put up a tree in front of the administration building. This one was more tasteful with only flashing light and Christmas globes.

For all their garishness—maybe because of it—the decorations radiated a kind of sweet, earnest joy. It was Christmas interpreted through the lens of curiosity rather than tradition, a patchwork of symbols borrowed, reinvented, and proudly displayed.

For a full week, our classroom echoed with earnest attempts at the basics of Western Christmas carols. They bellowed out “Silent Night” sung with soft, careful vowels and “Jingle Bells” delivered with an enthusiasm that more than compensated for the unfamiliar consonants.

The students threw themselves into the present ceremony, organizing a gift-exchange grab bag with the same excitement they usually reserved for Spring Festival. My wife and I were endlessly amused as the presents emerged: handfuls of sweets wrapped in bright foil, a tiny Chinese flag no larger than a postcard, a set of commemorative stamps, and an old Mao-era food-ration card.

The students excitement didn’t end when the school day did. Long after official hours, students gathered in the dim hallways and dorm courtyards, rehearsing the carols with the help of a battered cassette player whose music warbled in and out of tune. Their voices floated through the campus auditioning for a holiday they didn’t fully understand but were determined to celebrate.

On the evening of December 24th we gathered with fifty students at the edge of campus, each holding a candle and a freshly printed lyric sheet my wife had worked on all afternoon. When we lit the candles, a soft halo shimmered around the group, as if we had summoned a small constellation to earth.

Our first stop was the faculty and staff housing. The moment we launched into a rousing “Jingle Bells,” two teacher couples stepped outside smiling, pressing sweets into the students’ hands. While we sang “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” at the next building, I noticed movement in the shadows. Ten students from other classes had drifted in with candles, drawn by the lights and the novelty of the music. They didn’t know the words, but they hummed along, swaying, grinning, letting their candles drip wax onto their sleeves.

As we continued down the path, something extraordinary happened. At each place we stopped, more students emerged. Candles flared to life like fireflies. They ran over with the wide-eyed excitement of children witnessing magic. None knew the carols, not a single verse, but at the end of each song they exploded into cheers as if we’d just completed a triumphant concert performance.

Within minutes our small band had become a procession that stretched for yards. Flickering flames bobbed and danced as students poured in from alleyways, courtyards, and balconies. The crowd grew until we were three hundred strong, the glow of our candles reflecting in many faces.

Our next to last stop was the male student’s dorm. As we gathered on the sidewalk outside the eight-story dwelling to begin another carol, a roar went up from above. The balconies were packed with students leaning over the railings, shouting greetings, and waving. In a joyous, improvised celebration, they tossed down showers of homemade confetti, scraps of notebook paper, bits of colored wrappers, and pieces of tinsel scavenged from decorations. It rained down like a blizzard, catching in our hair and glimmering in the cold air.

For one moment, under that swirl of confetti and candlelight, it felt less like a university campus and more like a festival that had conjured itself from pure delight—an unplanned, unforgettable Christmas born out of the shared magic of a night no one fully understood, yet everyone embraced.

The exuberance of the night took a sudden, dangerous twist when our amoeba-like choir drifted magnetically toward the front of the girls’ dormitory. For a moment, the crowd hushed, sensing the invisible tripwire we were approaching. Everyone knew the rule: male students entering the female dorm was absolutely forbidden, the kind of ironclad policy that got you expelled, shamed, and packed off on the next train home. Even stepping too close to the doorway could earn a fine. The place radiated taboo for male students.

That only made the moment feel more electric.

            A bold male student stepped forward and addressed the two stunned female attendants at the gate. He gestured dramatically toward my wife and me, the lone foreign teachers bobbing in the sea of candlelight.
            “If we can’t go in,” he pleaded, “the foreign teachers will lose face!”
            The crowd gasped. Lose face. The magic cultural phrase. An improvised passport to the unthinkable.

No one in their right mind would ever allow one hundred and fifty male students into the inner courtyard of the women’s dorm. It simply did not happen. Ever.

Until this Christmas Eve. Until a mob of emboldened students decided tonight was the night to poke a hole in the rules, and we, the unsuspecting foreigners, became the ceremonial excuse. We were the match held the dry tinder.

On cue the group launched into “Silent Night,” voices trembling with excitement. We were halfway through the first verse when the dormitory exploded to life. Hundreds of female students poured onto their balconies, leaning over railings, waving, cheering, and screaming, like we were the Beatles arriving at Shea Stadium.

A shower of homemade confetti, sweets, and tiny gifts rained down on us. Then the real breach happened. One girl, then three, then ten raced down the stairwells clutching lit candles, bursting past the attendants to join the growing human river below.

The crowd swelled to over five hundred students, packed into a courtyard that moments before had been patrolled like sacred ground.

From the edges of the campus, more male students came sprinting in, laughing wildly, exulting in the sheer thrill of crossing a forbidden threshold.

For one impossible hour, the rules bent. The boundaries blurred. The forbidden became a festival. We, the two foreign teachers, stood at the heart of a joyful rebellion.

As the final notes of “Silent Night” drifted into the cold air, the courtyard erupted with the furious echo of boots slamming against concrete. An enraged university official, the director of student activities, burst into the courtyard. He dragged a heavy iron chain across the exit gate and snapped a padlock shut, the metallic clang echoing off the dorm walls. We were trapped.

He barked an order. A rifle-bearing guard jogged over to stand sentry at the gate, blocking any hope of escape. The official spun toward us, face flushed crimson, eyes glassy, and breath rank with alcohol I could smell it from several feet away. He jabbed a finger at the students and unleashed a torrent of obscenities, the kind that needed no translation to understand their venom. Later I learned he had been in the People’s Liberation Army and despised everything about our gathering—the Western carols, the candles, and what he considered a forbidden breach of the women’s dormitory, permission or not.

His threats were jarring, expulsion, disgrace, and families notified. Panic broke loose. Half the male students bolted toward the back wall. One after another, they scrambled up the brick side disappearing into the night.

Others stayed.

A ring of students formed around my wife and me. They shouted back at the official and the guard, insisting we had permission. They said we were guests of the Chinese government, that this entrance was not a crime. Their courage hit me hard. My throat closed and my breathing quickened. As I write these words, I can feel the sting of tears from that night.

My wife, level-headed under fire, pulled out her small university-issued phone and dialed the Communist Party official who oversaw campus policy. She rushed into the courtyard and endured a minute of his furious ranting. She spoke calmly back to him, every syllable precise. She reprimanded him as if she were talking to a child.

“If you do not unlock that gate immediately, China will lose face in front of two foreign guests, and the consequences will be on you.”

The shift was instantaneous.

Within minutes, the padlock was opened. The guard lowered his rifle and slunk away. The director, suddenly deflated, stumbled back as another party official arrived to escort him off the premises. The Communist official apologized to my wife and me repeatedly, insisting everything was “being taken care of.”

By the next morning, it was. The director was dismissed. The guard was formally reprimanded. And the students—those brave young men and women—returned to class.

December 25th , 1997

The next morning, rattled, but determined to show respect, I wrote formal apology letters to the university president and to the dean of the English Department. I explained the misunderstanding, took responsibility for the chaos, and assured them it would not happen again.                           I handed the envelopes in with a knot in my stomach.

When I walked into my classroom, a hush fell over forty anxious faces. A few students told me about the swirling rumors: that we were going to be fired, fined, detained or expelled from China. My wife and I weren’t alarmed. The Communist Party official had reassured us the night before that we were in the clear. Still, seeing the fear on my students’ faces made me realize how much they were concerned for us.

That afternoon, the dean strode into my office holding my letter. He placed it on my desk, still sealed.

“No need for this. The matter is resolved.”

He explained that the university leadership determined we had done nothing wrong. On the contrary, we had fulfilled our role: to introduce Western culture and traditions, as we had been invited to do. Then he added in a characteristic declaration of Chinese diplomacy, “And as for last night’s incident… it never happened.”

For the next two months, we were celebrities to the students and some faculty.

Students from departments we had never taught would flash us covert high fives. Others walked by humming “Silent Night,” just loud enough for us to hear. Sometimes groups of them would ambush us between classes—circle around us, giggling—and burst into the “Silent Night,” like a flash mob long before such things had a name.

Eventually, like all campus legends, the fervor faded. Exams approached. Winter turned to early spring. New stories replaced old ones.

One of my students pulled me aside weeks later to explain:

“Teacher, your story is famous in the university. Everyone tells it. Everyone likes it.” He tapped his chest. “It gave us courage.”

We had come to China to teach English, to share Western ideas, to broaden perspectives. But we learned much too. And in that courtyard, on that cold December night, singing a Christmas song beneath a sky full of flickering candles,  the world felt small enough for a song to change everything.

DR. NEIL WEINER

Dr. Neil Weiner has published articles in a variety of professional journals and literary fiction in over forty magazines. His works include the psychology books Shattered Innocence and The Curio Shop and the non-psychology publications Across the Borderline and The Art of Fine Whining. He has a monthly advice column in a Portland, Oregon newspaper, AskDr.Neil.