Away In a Manger- A Chinese Christmas Cover

Hello and welcome once again to my blog!

As I mentioned in my first blog, Let’s Start At the Very Beginning, I went on a Mission for my church. However, I didn’t mention that I went to Auckland, New Zealand or that I was called to teach Chinese people in their native tongue of Mandarin Chinese. 

Now don’t get carried away thinking that my Chinese is perfect, I still have a lot to learn. Since New Zealand’s overall language is English, I haven’t had the opportunity to be fully immersed in the language. But I have had plenty of practice speaking it. 

Even before my Mission, I was taking Mandarin Chinese classes in Middle School and High School. It never got very advanced because every year our teacher would leave for one reason or another to go back to China and we would get a new teacher. 

Looking back, I’m realizing that it was just like in the Harry Potter series where the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher changed every single year! I was pretty frustrated that each year my new Chinese teacher would start from the beginning and teach the alphabet and numbers. It was frustrating, but it helped me become a good speaker of the language.

But let’s get back to my first thoughts of being a Mandarin speaking Missionary. Though I’m very good at speaking the words that I have learned so far, I’m not very good at reading the Chinese characters. That became a problem when I was at church and all the Hymn books(books with the church songs we sing in them) only had the Chinese characters. 

Lucky for me, one of the Missionaries was going back to his home in Taiwan and he had a small Hymn book that had both the characters and the pinyin(pronunciations) of the words. I’ve had that Hymn book ever since he gave it to me.

Last December, I was up late one night about a week and a half before Christmas debating whether or not I should clean my room. Before I had made up my mind, I looked on the top of one of my bedroom tables and saw the Chinese Hymn book laying there. I started to get curious if there were any Christmas songs in it, for not all songs in the English Hymn book were translated into Chinese. 

As I looked through the section where the Christmas Hymns would be, I was surprised to find that there were quite a few! I turned the pages, softly singing the first verse of each song before moving on to the next Hymn. As I did so, I had this thought come into my mind, You should do a YouTube cover of a Chinese Hymn. I acknowledged that thought but continued singing through the first verse of each song. 

As I continued singing, I kept thinking over and over about that thought. I also realized that the song Away In a Manger kept coming into my head. I love lullabies, so I thought it was a perfect song to focus on for my YouTube video. So that very night while I was still awake, I started brainstorming and recording the song in Chinese.

That’s how I ended up starting up my YouTube videos earlier than I planned and that’s the backstory of how this song became my first YouTube video. If you want to know the continuation of this story on how I dealt with the frustrations of making my first video, as well as the miracles of how everything came together, comment and let me know down below! In the meantime, I’ll be writing another backstory.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end!