A team of 16 young Chinese acrobats arrived at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport on one-way tickets this week, expecting to cartwheel their way across the country on a 10-month US tour.
Instead, they were stranded at a homeless shelter in Dallas until Wednesday, two days after their Wisconsin-based circus promoter failed to meet them at the airport.
"From what I know, it seems to be poor planning more than anything else," said Bill Thompson, the executive director of the Union Gospel Mission homeless shelter.
"Somebody didn't take care of business, the homework."
Thompson said he picked up the group on Monday after getting a phone call from a mysterious circus promoter who referred to himself only as Gary and declined to give a last name. The man, who lives in Wisconsin with his mother, told Thompson he had run out of money and needed someone to pick up the acrobats, who range in age from 13 to 20.
"He sounded desperate, no doubt," Thompson said.
Thompson and other shelter workers arrived at the airport in three vans and broke through the language barrier by saying "the one word we could all agree on: acrobat."
After dropping luggage and circus props off at separate shelters for men and women, Thompson took the Shanghai-based Guanhua Acrobatic team to a McDonald's restaurant.
"They all ordered the No. 9: grilled chicken," Thompson said.
Then the acrobats settled in for two nights at Union Gospel Mission, which claims to be Dallas' oldest homeless shelter and once housed refugees scattered by Hurricane Katrina.
The troupe put on an impromptu show for reporters on Wednesday, tossing straw hats like boomerangs and performing backflips, cartwheels and building human pyramids with ease.
They also seemed remarkably sanguine about their situation, saying it was status quo for circus performers.
But a former chaplain at the homeless shelter was puzzled that the accommodations were the best Dallas could offer. She wondered about the reaction if "a group of American kids go to Beijing, China" and met a similar fate.
"To me the whole arrangement is weird," Candy Yeung told The Dallas Morning News, which first reported the story on Wednesday. "How could it happen to this group of kids?'"
The circus promoter refused to give his last name during a telephone interview.
He called the mistake "a little scheduling snafu", saying trailers he purchased for the group never arrived in Texas because of recent snowstorms in the Midwest.
(China Daily February 15, 2008)
