Worst Kept Secrets

Well, Friday was the big day - the first time I’ve ever been on tv. I was wrong earlier; it wasn’t really national television. It’s the Jiangsu Province educational network. Anyway, the show consisted of various acts from the large family that is the Jiangsu Ministry of Education (I think). There were twenty performances altogether, and we were the nineteenth to go. Hopefully I’ll be able to figure out a way to get a video on the internet. I stupidly forgot to bring my camera, so I don’t have any pictures of the madness.

Friday classes were canceled due to the snow and our students’ need to travel over the weekend, so I slept in until around ten. Then I woke up, made my hair pretty, and abruptly remembered that I hardly brought any clothes with me, let alone an outfit appropriate for appearing on television. I have a nice black dress, but it smelled like Castle Bar (meaning the scent of smoke, tequila, and shame), and I didn’t think cleavage was a very good idea for China. I pulled together a passable, chaste ensemble, though, and away we went.

The group met at 11 on the 23rd floor of the organization’s building. Our college is a subset of this larger organization, which has a really fun space-agey elevator. We then sat around and ate prepackaged Chinese lunches while everyone got their makeup done (a Chinese prepackaged lunch is apparently rice, veggies, beef, mushrooms, and soup powder). Some of our more prominent performers got the full Chinese opera facial treatment, but I was let off with a little bit of blush, some eye shadow, and enough sticky lip gloss to drown small mammals in. We rehearsed a little bit more, and my line had a fast, panicked conversation regarding the issue of swaying. We finally agreed that Monica had the most swaying talent, and the rest of us would just watch her.

Then we hopped on the bus and drove over to the television studio in blinding snow. I feel like I’ve been on a bus to the JETV station every day of my life at this point, and every single time I get flashbacks to high school band trips. I feel like I should be fighting to get a coveted back of the bus seat, or at least making out with a puzzled trombone player during a game of truth or dare, or maybe making huge startled eyes at the baritone guy who snuck a bottle of vodka on.

Once we got there, we got to rehearse yet again before it was time to find our seats and settle in to watch the show. We had little score cards, pens, and a bottle of “Rave Party” water on our seats, and the Chinese vice president of my school explained the different categories: best overall performance, most creative, and the performance I enjoyed the most. “Of course you will put 19 for all of them,” he said (we were number 19), and I laughed and said “of course.”

Of course, indeed. Minutes later, someone on our team was collecting the ballets and checking to be sure that everyone had voted for our group in all three categories, before we’d even seen anyone else’s performance. Plenty of people were really puzzled by Chris and my obvious hesitation - why wouldn’t we automatically vote for our team, anyway? And that’s the dark side of collective thinking, right there. Incidentally, we won, but I should point out that it might have more to do with the fact that we were one of the largest groups performing.

Things kicked off with the entrance of what I assumed were government officials - they were all older men and wore traditional Chinese jackets, I guess? My first ignorant thought was that they all looked like they were wearing tacky couches. We all clapped for them and I hurriedly replaced “tacky couches” with “cultural niftiness” in my mind. The show itself was something else. There was an awful lot of Chinese rap, which sounded exactly the same, every single time, and a lot of sexy dancing. I mean, sexy dancing. I saw a little bit of this at our student Christmas show too, and yet, I have yet to see a Chinese girl in a dance club breaking out such super confident, catlike moves - they always seem really jerky and a little awkward. Any answers to this? Can they all move like strippers, but only like to do it when they’re actually on a stage?

And then there was the skit about teaching foreigners Chinese. I couldn’t understand a word of the skit, but I got the gist of it, and that was the first time in China (and really in my entire life) that I felt offended on the grounds of my own ethnicity. The entire point of the skit seemed to be that foreigners are very stupid. And fair enough - god knows American pop culture has more than a slight trace of Asian stereotyping running through it. But not ON THE EDUCATIONAL NETWORK CHANNEL. Sheesh. It was a really weird feeling. I didn’t get upset upset, it was just the first time that I ever got rubbed that particular direction. Oh yeah, and the skit included a black guy. And that involved makeup. It was a huge cringe fest.

The emcees looked exactly like television personalities, which I guess makes sense, and there were cameras swooping around all over the place and the occasional nerve wracking crowd shot, which caused me to spend the two and half hour long program terrified I would get caught yawning, checking my watch, or sleeping. The whole thing was such a huge reality check: “Ok, so I’m in a tv station in China sitting next to Chris Clanton… wait, hang on, when did all this happen?”

Things were fine during our performance. I didn’t fall or forget anything, and we got a very good reaction from the crowd. I also managed not to look warily at the moving camera the entire time. I was really scared by our first practice at the station, because the camera parked itself right in my face, and I was terrified that they intended our thing to be the Anne Gresham Show, which I was not ok with. And we ended by flinging little stuffed animals into the crowd. And they went wild for little stuffed animals. If you are a stuffed animal, by god, you want to live in China. Remember those government officials I was talking about earlier? They were the ones on the front row pushing each other out of the way for the sake of plush hippo key chains.

And on the way out, we got huge JETV tote bags, filled with delicious treats like “delicate fragrant love plums” and even a box of Hershey’s chocolate, which came in bubble wrap. And that was my Chinese tv experience.