The Wake Up Call

I was awoken terrified this morning by what could only be described as eerily similar to the presumed voice of the devil. This deep, sinister baritone ricocheted off the walls of my apartment, shouting commands in Chinese that I could not decipher because of the sheer volume.

The voice was not actually satanic but that of one of the local school’s gym teachers; however, when I’m unceremoniously plunged into consciousness, the culprit certainly feels demonic in nature.

The man who invades the sanctuary of my dreams each morning is responsible for waking the local school students up at 6:40am. I have the misfortune of living across the sidewalk from the boarders' dormitory for high school boys.

Given, high school boys are notoriously hard to wake, but the gym teachers already sound a fire alarm that is so loud I never have to set my resilient travel clock, which is daily flung across the room from the terror of the Chinese courtesy wake up call.

The converted air-raid siren must not have been satisfactory since halfway through the year additional bells and banging were added. I’m fairly convinced that the dorm chaperones walk along the open-air hallways ringing cowbells and pounding pots and pans.

In China all students have morning exercises at the precise same time. While the country is roughly the size of the United States, the only recognized time in China is Beijing time. In other words, time zones don’t exist.

The need to promptly wake the students is paramount, and today it must have also require the furious disturbance of one deep voiced man.

Even after the students were shell-shocked into alertness and the man ceased his barking, a new raucous kept me from falling asleep. The sound will be permanently branded into my mind: “YI! ER! YI! ER! HUUUUUUP!”

Repeat.

I glanced out my window to see the students slowly lifting and lowering their arms in time with the counting. I sighed knowing that I would not fall back asleep and jumped into the shower around the time the Chinese National Anthem came on over the loudspeakers.

I walked into the kitchen to make breakfast to the accompaniment of the students jogging in perfect lines passed my window as their “drill sergeant” for their morning ritual yelled what foot they should step with in English. The Chinese words for left and right do sound remarkably similar when screamed at auctioneer levels

The racket only ceases when I was alert and reading the morning news. I had peace for the next 45 minutes until I entered the jungles of the middle school, but even that diversity of sources of future hearing loss was short live for the ringleader that wakes me from my deep sleep will be back again tomorrow.