My campus holds many activities every year, and there is this activity named New Year Gala. The activity was held by the end of the year just before we finish our exams for the students and teachers to celebrate Chinese New Year (新年, read: xīnnián). The show basically contains performs like dancing, singing, reading poems, culture show, and night awards. The audition usually opens a month before the activity start. 

Me and my friends wanted to volunteer at the event, so we decided to start a band. Our band consist of 9 people in total, all of us are Indonesian. There are 4 singers, 2 guitarists, a keyboardist, a bass player, and a cajon player. After we assembled the band, we discussed and chose a Chinese song called Will Never Lose You (绝不能失去你, read: jué bùnéng shīqù nǐ). It was an old song sang by a boyband “F4”, and it was from an old Taiwan drama called Meteor Garden (流星花园, read: liúxīng huāyuán) that was airing from April 12th, 2001 to August 16th, 2001.

We prepared ourselves pretty well so finally, we passed the audition. After that, we keep on practicing around twice to three times a week at night for the New Year Gala. Sometimes we rent a studio so we can practice more, but most of the time we just practice in a friend’s dorm room. We had a lot of fun, we enjoyed it very much. We were diligently practicing for 2 weeks straight, then we have to do the rehearsal with an assist from a teacher to help us improve.

There are approximately another 20 participants to perform. Some are dancing modern dance, Chinese traditional dance, singing opera, singing an English song, dance their own country’s traditional dance, a drama, and many more.

The rehearsal was very fun because we get to try performing on the stage, and we can watch each other performing. The teachers also very supportive and always help us when we had minor technical problems, and also the teachers always provide us tasty food. Usually, the school will provide us a costume, either the teachers let us bought it ourselves or the school will buy it for us. But for this year, we decided to have our own costume by wearing red-theme clothing.

The day for us to perform has come, the audience’s chairs are fully booked. I was feeling a little bit nervous since that was so long since I last performed in front of many people. We were on the 6th place to perform, which actually wasn’t that long for us to wait.

When we finally got on the stage, all the lighting was so blinding to the point I couldn’t see the audience. But for some reason it was calming for me, I was less nervous. When we start singing the audience were clapping, some of them were raising their hands up and cheering us up. I immediately forgot that I was so nervous and instead was so happy. We performed well until the end and received much attention from the audience. It really was one unforgettable memory of mine.

I can’t wait for this year’s New Year Gala audition and I would love to volunteer again.