Foreign celebrities in China, such as Da Shan or Mark Roswell, served as the bench mark for me to achieve fluency in Chinese. There were many ways that could happen, whether that be through the awful practice of daily quizzes or Ting Xies (听写) for the painfully inducted few, or through some of the more common and fun (depending on the venue, competitors, and your individual level of love for self torture) singing and recitation.
The positives of these activities are numerous including comradery, a renewed love of learning, a notch on the “Done in China” belt, and a needed break for Chinese teachers. Each side of the equation the performing foreigner and the Chinese audience each took something away from the performance.
For the Chinese audience there is a sense of pride and perhaps a tinge of embarrassment that is a celebration of the increasing openness of Chinese culture and language and a strong competitive spirit. Yancey Lu, a Qingdao native and Boston-based working professional told The Nanjinger, “I feel proud of course, seeing foreigners like Chinese culture. [And in] one show called China Poetry Competition (中国诗词大会) [which is] even difficult for Chinese people, there are foreigners in it! Unbelievable! After seeing that, I feel ashamed that foreigners know better about Chinese poets and history than I do!”
My Personal Jaunt Through Competitive Fame
My second year of graduate school in Nanjing brought me the opportunity to really experience the life of a celebrity in the middle kingdom. Via a friend’s recommendation, I joined a menagerie of Jiangsu based foreigners in a very locally produced and televised version of “Got Talent”, aka “Jiangsu’s Got Talent”. It was a two-and-a-half-day adventure that included friendship, conflict, and laughter.
Soon after, all the international participants were whisked into some back rooms to be dressed for the main event. My curvaceous not so ideal in Chinese fashion body was forcefully pushed into a gold and white short number that fit two singers from Uzbekistan and India quite easily, but definitely not a suburban Wisconsinite (or less colloquially, a curvy girl from the American Midwest). Eventually, someone made an authoritative decision to change all of our costumes to various shocking red and green numbers that fit all three singers and was reminiscent of Christmas poinsettias. We performed our pre-recorded, lip synced performances to the best of our abilities with the bare minimum of practice and many last minute changes. Despite everything being prerecorded and the absence of judges or individual comments, a winner was chosen and last year’s reigning champion from the Ukraine was re-crowned. I was at first perplexed and then reverted to the natural thoughts of a foreigner in China: TIC, This is China. I was happy to make new friends and have a new notch that belt; yet I was completely flabbergasted by the constant changes and lack of organisation (yes, I knew I was in China, but for some reason I thought a mass media event would be organised. Can you blame a girl for dreaming?).
Academics
As I sang my way through moments of personal growth and friendly competition, another Hopkins Nanjing Center alumnus, Daniel Kollar, was advancing in the ranks of International Moot Court despite a negative response to his presence.
“During [my] first year at HNC, I participated in the Moot Court Arbitration competition. We went to the venue in Beijing, and I was the only foreigner participating in the competition. We were a team of three, the other two team members being Chinese. Although Moot Court is an international competition, and the only thing you need to qualify to participate is to be in a Chinese graduate program, people [were] a little upset that a foreigner was participating in a ‘Chinese’ competition.”
Daniel didn’t really see himself as worthy of the “stink eyes” he was receiving from students, coaches, and judges alike, as his academic emphasis was not even focused on international law. Despite he and his team’s hard work and the clear progress they made through qualifying competitions, the Hopkins Nanjing team failed to make the finals by a small margin. “We missed qualifying for finals by like 0.01 points. We were beat out by some schools that we already competed against, and…obviously beat out. So that was that. Didn’t participate the next year”. While I was experiencing the benefits of an obvious foreign appearance and a somewhat decent voice, Daniel was experiencing competition completely differently in the sense that his appearance and perceived lack of belonging were being critiqued and judged negatively alongside his intellectual performance and ability.
Everyday Life
Lars Ojukwu, past English language teacher and cultural examiner extraordinaire, experienced the thrill, and sometimes bother, of competition from all angles.
“Perhaps it’s because of the Imperial Examinations that took root in Chinese culture as early as the year 605 CE and lasted up until 1905. The practice that showed a people that if you could best someone in test, you were their superior and had earned the right to have a ‘better’ life. Perhaps it is due to the general aesthetic homogeneity of everyone most people in China have ever known until they meet a foreigner. Perhaps it’s due to something else altogether, but in my experience, (get ready for a gross generalisation here) China compares EVERYTHING (there it was).
“During my time in China, comparing everything to every other thing, while annoying, was not a huge problem. Look, my skin was darker than hers, my arms were bigger than his, I made more money than that guy; they were truths. I didn’t want to be the one to focus on them, but if you wanted to state facts, I would.
From flexing his physical prowess to drinking the night away, Lars felt the pressure to compete in various ways throughout his time in China. “‘How many pushups can you do in a row? I can do 50, ready? Let’s go! How many beers can you drink in a row? I can drink 9, ready? Let’s go! Both of you speak Chinese? Who speaks it better? Speak, I will judge! You can dance? Can you dance better than me? Dance battle. Let’s go!’ China, if nothing else, taught me that competition was embedded into the Chinese culture. It was a country hardwired to compare, contrast and verify.”
Lars’s performance talents also got him into a competition of sorts that started in a fierce tete-a-tete but later ended in a shared love of singing. “One night out, I was with an American friend, doing my thing as a wingman, as a good friend should, and we had attracted the attention of a few ladies whose English was strong enough to hold a pretty good conversation.
An over-confident Chinese man showed up to throw a monkey wrench in our game. Through our conversation, all he needed was confirmation for my love of music. He grabbed my arm and brought me to the front of the bar. The song playing was coming to an end, and the man spoke to the host of the night’s event, which happened to be karaoke, and must have put in his request. The familiar tune of Backstreet Boys’ ‘I want it that way’ came over the speakers and this man had a microphone. ‘You are…. my fiiiiiyerr’, he started. He had clearly practiced this before because his accent almost entirely disappeared. He wasn’t singing to me, he was singing to the bar and everyone in it to show how bold and talented he was. He finished the last note, dropped his head and breathed, satisfied. He came over to me and said, ‘Now, for you’ and pointed to the DJ booth. Well, the gauntlet had been thrown down. I was not to be bested. What my new ‘friend’ didn’t know is that I have been singing since before I could remember. I was NOT about to lose this competition. To put him out of his misery quickly, I chose a song by Cee-Lo Green with an unprintable title. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rocked the mic like a vandal! The audience was paying attention (maybe because I was black, maybe because of the golden glow I was exuding, or maybe because I was that good, who knows) and clapping along by halfway through. The song wrapped up and I walked up to my ‘friend’ as if to say, ‘Your move, bruh’.
After a second round of each contestant choosing and nailing a Chinese song each, Lars saw a quick turn around in his “friend’s” behaviour. “I finished the song, came to see my new “friend” who immediately asked if I spoke more Chinese than just that song, to which I laughed and said, of course! So the rest of our communication was in Chinese.”
Lars had turned a tense moment of cultural level American vs Chinese tension into a bonding moment that truly gave him and his new friend the opportunity to bond and learn while singing the night away.
Personal Achievement
Stephanie, previously an English language teacher in Taiyuan, competed in a very literal way to achieve a personal goal. “In May 2013 a British friend of mine in Taiyuan said to me ‘it’s good to have goals’, and so the idea of competing in the Beijing International Triathlon was planted.” Despite being in excellent physical condition, training in China provided a number of obstacles for Stephanie.
“It took until my second year for the air, thick with coal dust to put the kibosh on running outside and inspire a gym membership that had a pool, quite the luxury in Taiyuan. And so, I ran on a treadmill and I rode my bike, sometimes with traffic and other times out long distances with bike groups, there was a surprisingly (to me) large mountain biking group that I may have come across if I had not been off the city roads. Training in Chinese swimming pools was by far the most frustrating. From the gawking at me in my bathing suit, to the questions as to why I was in the pool for such long periods of time, to my freestyle stroke; anything other than breaststroke is a marvel to most. Did I mention that breaststroke was done not in lanes but in circles around the edge of the pool, and that my swimming lengthways in was only tolerated on the days I took longer swims in one of the city’s only pools with roped off lanes?”
As race day arrived, Stephanie was both excited and impressed with the crowd the event attracted and how organised the entire thing had been, “Leaving central Beijing, bike intact, for the race venue in the district of Fengtai with hundreds of other competitors was exhilarating. The race drew triathlon greats such as Laura Bennett and Javier Gomez and from a rough guess as many non-Chinese competitors as Chinese ones.
“I must say that I was pleasantly and completely surprised with just how well all of the logistics throughout the entire race event were planned out and executed. So many of my experiences in China required knowing the right person, for example in order to send mail overseas or having to come back the following day to buy something from a store. Buses arrived and departed as scheduled, bikes and other race gear were securely kept overnight out in the open race areas, trophies were correctly engraved, the lake was (mostly) free of pollution, the roads closed down and course clearly marked out, everything was as it said it would be. You can’t ask for more than that after grueling months of training and a tough race day!”
For Stephanie, a personal goal came in the form of one of China’s biggest competitions that gave Stephanie a clear focus and an accomplishable goal that truly coloured her experience while living in China.
Showmanship
In our final example, Luo Han, a past American Exchange student in China, found himself competing and performing a style that is known to most Chinese and Foreigners alike who live the urban life; the performance art of bargaining.
“At the end of my first summer in Beijing, I went to the pearl market to buy various souvenirs for myself and family. When I barter, I go in knowing that the stall vendors look at me as a cash grab (I had enough $ to buy a plane ticket over, that’s a lot more than most people). So I go in hard, laughing at the first offer the lady made, which makes her want to save face and drop the price faster. But she was also in good spirits, and started calling me “帥哥” to counter me being so harsh. So we’re almost settled on a price for 2 fans, but she won’t give me the final ¥5 I want off, so I tell her (in Chinese), “look, I’m a 帅哥 (handsome guy), you’re a 美女 (beautiful woman)… Can I have the ¥5 off?” She starts busting out laughing and gives me the discount. It’s hard in any culture to stay competitive when your laughing and having fun.”
As many of us who are living or have lived in China have experienced, bargaining can be a joyful hoot or a painful disaster that makes you question the actual importance of saving money. Yet, Luo Han found himself competing in a way that was bringing joy to both himself and the shop keeper as well as getting those necessary items to put the seal of success on his trip. This interaction truly shows that despite the severity of any competition, there are when that everyone can turn out a winner.
This article was first published in The Nanjinger Magazine, August 2016 issue. If you would like to read the whole magazine, please follow this link.
