“We have an unexpected class starting tomorrow. Do you want it? Three weeks. Five hours a day, Monday to Friday.”

“Uh, sure. But what should I teach them?”

“Don’t worry. We have a workbook.”

A workbook? Excellent!

I arrived, beheld this workbook, and found it aimed at native speaker 8-year-olds.

Then I entered the class and beheld my students: four intelligent, articulate, and engaged Chinese teens who, according to the workbook, were going to spend the day learning to write the instructions for an egg salad sandwich.

Um, no. These kids were on holiday. I needed something more appropriate.

As luck would have it, I had a simplified text of Hamlet stuffed in my teaching basket.

Murder! Revenge! Madness! Moral complexity!

Would they enjoy that instead?

They did! Much fun was had and much was learned in those first two weeks, including:

• Hamlet is not like the Monkey King (Sun Wukong).
• Hamlet can be any race and gender.
• A love triangle involving an affair is called a ‘small three’ (小三; xiao sān)

By the end of the second week, we were ready to put on a mini-drama. It was sublime. Hamlet was pensive and mad, Claudius gloriously over-acted, Ophelia tossed plastic tulips at dead Polonius, the Ghost forgot to bring his sheet, and everyone died with gusto.

But after two weeks of Danish tragedy, I was ready for something lighter, and Much Ado About Nothing also happened to be lurking in my teaching basket. We spent the first day going over the setting and the characters, seeing if we could predict what would happen.

“Teacher, does anyone die?”

“No.”

I couldn’t tell if they were relieved or disappointed.

To aid our predictions, we made a character chart with a ‘love’ arrow between Claudio and Hero and a ‘hate’ arrow between Beatrice and Benedick. But when we looked at the movie poster to help visualize the characters, we saw that the latter are clearly a romantic couple.

“Why?” they asked. “They hate each other but they marry?”

Cue me awkwardly drawing stick figures on the whiteboard to explain the idea of sparring partners who have an underlying fondness for each other. I even wrote the ghastly word frenemies.

“Oh!” Their sudden excitement lit the room. “May we use a translator?”

“Sure!”

Tap…tap…tap…欢喜冤家…huān xi yuān jia

“Joyous enemies!” they cried. “Beatrice and Benedick are joyous enemies! This relationship is very often found in Chinese literature.”

With an immense sigh of relief, I wiped frenemies off the board.

Thank you, girls! 太谢谢了!