(To have been posted on August 15, 2010.)
Last night’s “中文之夜” (“China Night”) brought together all ACC teachers and students in a huge assembly displaying our different talents and abilities. Each performance, whether displaying Chinese culture or not, offered a traceable cultural exchange between us (American college students) and Chinese people (our teachers and host families).
I was chosen to be one of four of the 主持人 (MCs) among several other performances for China Night. My friends and I opened the show with the Mulan song, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” in Chinese. We tried to add dance moves to it, but our teachers told us to focus on the singing because, according to the teachers and the ACC field director, we all 唱得很棒（sang extremely well). She even added one more really popular Chinese love song called “看过来.” Apparently we sang so well that we could knock out a sufficient rehearsal for this song with just four hours before the show. (Ahem, I think we students would all beg to differ seeing as though we originally spent most of our Mulan rehearsals focusing on coming up with awesome masculine poses/gestures instead of finding the right key for the song.) Either way, when performance time came, the audience loved it.
My next performance was part of the larger performance by the second-year students. The first section was a rewritten version of a Chinese sitcom called “贫嘴张大民的幸福生活.”It was hilarious watching this be performed and was also really interesting because my teachers basically wrote most of the script, however, coupled with a two-day lesson on this sitcom (one film-focused day of class and one textbook-focused day of class) gave me a good sense of what Chinese comedy is like. For the most part, sarcasm is really difficult in Chinese because it’s a tonal language, so you can’t really inject your own tonal inflections into Chinese and expect to be understood. I think this is actually a privilege English speakers share that many tonal languages like Chinese and some West African languages lack. Nevertheless, sarcasm is difficult to pull off in Chinese. Future Light Fellows, if it’s your first time to China, you’ll want to crack jokes with classmates or teachers or Chinese friends, and they will just stare at you and take what you say seriously. So, be careful. Haha. Remember to laugh after you make these kinds of jokes, then they’ll realize you’re kidding…
What I learned about Chinese comedy and humor is that it is filled with rhetorical questions (or 反问) and very blunt (or 直爽) comments or insults. Although there is no room for the ever-so-pleasant sarcasm that shows itself most often in SNL skits, I can still appreciate Chinese comedy for its differences. For example, they can use words with similar tones to crack jokes. During one part of the skit, the brother of the main character invites his foreign girlfriend over who speaks really poor Chinese. She offers the mom what is supposed to be a“漂亮的表“（pretty wristwatch）, but she actually calls the mom a “pretty [insert harsh swear word that involves females and dogs].” Get it? Right. Chinese humor is very very direct (and indirect at the same time). That’s why I like it.
My part in this larger performance was to mock a few of our second-year teachers in a skit about Chinese class at ACC. It was so so so funny. The teacher’s were all good sports about it, and even helped us make fun of their teaching habits before the show. We made sure to let them know after the performance that “我们讽刺老师教学的习惯是因为我们想开他们的玩笑，而且是因为我们想对老师表示感谢。“(We mock our teachers’ teaching habits because we want to make fun of them and also because we want to show our thanks to them.”)
Me and Eve. She goes to Smith College and put on a hilarious mockery of Jiang Laoshi during the show. Miss you, Eve!
Me and Wu Laoshi. He was one of my favorite teachers and was very chill pretty much all the time.
All in all, China Night was a success. Even though there was very little time to finish homework thoroughly and practice for performances all in one week, I think ACC students and teachers pulled together to make it an awesome event. My major issue involved the organization of the event. Students officially informed the ACC Office of their performances two days before the show which gave people not much time to polish their performances. Regardless, it was a ton of fun, and I’m feeling really mushy inside because we only have one more week of ACC…
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