Teacher’s Day in China is September 10, which was my first Friday after arriving. This was celebrated at my school by paying the teachers a bonus and requiring us to attend a three-hour performance. It featured mostly students with a few teachers and a few professionals thrown into the mix.
Prior to this event I had underestimated my workplace’s grandiosity. Having missed the commencement ceremony the week before due to visa issues, the Teacher’s Day event was my first real exposure to any kind of organized Chinese performance. Having now attended the Beijing Opera and watched a little CCTV, the school’s antics fit snugly into place.
I arrived at the bleeding edge of on time with another foreign coworker. Upon entering the school auditorium, we found it to be boiling over with upwards of a thousand students, parents, teachers, administrators, and CCTV cameramen. Epic music blaring (think Olympics-style tunes) and lights flashing, the only two free seats we could find were front row center next to the school’s multimillionaire owner and his buddy. Our rumps found our seats as the curtains opened and assistants brought us programs, bottled water, and snacks.
The thing was run a lot like a game show. A male and a female student hosted and bantered with the audience between acts and ensured the vibe never strayed too far from a CNN evening news meets dating show vibe. The biggest similarity between all of the acts was how painstakingly well rehearsed they were. Whether it was a pair of twin teachers lying on their shoulders with their feet over their heads with backs facing the audience while they painted faces on each other, or a b-boy hiphop dance crew, or Chinese traditional dancing (some of the most middle aged dancers I have ever seen), the incredible amount of preparation time was evident in the choreography and line memorization. This aspect of it was almost as striking as its diversity.
The clash between the presence of traditional(ish) Chinese and Western popular performance acts was astonishing. Our school actually flew in two performers from the 四川(Sichuan) opera – they blew me away. The final act was a professional stage magician who put whoever is on TV in the U.S. to crying shame. There were multiple dancing troupes comprising over twenty adult individuals. Three of China’s current pop stars sang hilariously sentimental hits (to be brief: pop singers are a big deal over here relative to the West – everyone loves karaoke… to the extent that they practice it on their own to impress business partners, potential girlfriends, etc). All of this alongside student acts that were mostly falling into the Western pop genre. The already mentioned hiphop male dance crew performance in addition to a pair of scandalous hiphop female dancers (not suggestive like cute, suggestive like on their backs doing pelvic thrusts towards the audience – they were nonetheless skilled dancers), a rock band covering pop-punk hits, a boy band, a folk singer and others all demonstrated a ravenous appropriation of Western pop culture by the progeny of China’s elite. All in all, the students performed better than anyone at my (larger) high school ever did in the same styles.
Having said that, it wasn’t as simple as the young loving the West and the old loving the past. There were at least three different acts featuring students performing traditional dance. Each was excellently costumed, choreographed, and rehearsed. One, in particular, impressed me when a girl managed to balance a chandelier with nine burning candles on her forehead and one in each hand as she transitioned through a variety of poses I could never assume no matter how much I keep at yoga. The others, while lending themselves less to sensational description, were equally adept. The students’ appreciation for these acts was indiscernible from the others in enthusiasm.
I still don’t know what to think of this cultural duality in the teenagers at my school. The positive reception to America’s cultural exports to China are evident in every class I teach and in many of the conversations I have with students and others. I’m not just talking about pop movies, music, and fashion. I’ve talked to kids at my school and adults elsewhere that love jazz music, indy music and indy (read ‘hipster’) fashion. The language and media barrier are not stopping these facets of American culture from quickly diffusing over here.
Not surprisingly, so do the concomitant values. The mainstream here is on par with the U.S. in its materialism despite the fact that the possibility of being rich is a relatively new thing. The existence of a school like mine wasn’t a possibility more than a decade ago because there simply weren’t rich parents to send their kids to prep school. Now Beijing has rich kids who are just as spoiled as one would find in Manhattan. Daily example: if I take an iphone or ipad away from a student they usually have a backup. Most well-to-do-people – teachers are well to do in this country, in a relative sense – see no need to care about egalitarian values and lessening corrupted government control. After all, China’s governing system, while remaining not participatory for its citizens, has overseen the greatest leap forward in living standards for China’s population in its history. Personal vehicles, personal fashion, and smartphones conspicuously indicate modernization; making consumerism a modernizing act.
The opposing forces might be more interesting, though. I have a very bright student in my class (who deserves more than a few sentences in a tangent paragraph) who refuses to learn in my class and spends our class time reading high level 风水 (Fengshui). When pressed to write essays in English he addresses the topic, if he can, through a discussion of how Chinese people are, as a culture, attempting to become Western, and losing their gestalt in the process. His writing in the first week of class was foreshadowing for the preference for Western styles I observed at the Teacher's Day performance. While I don't think any community can exist in a culture that is not in some way its own, my observations lead me to agree with him to the extent that Chinese artistic traditions - which were already struggling for survival after the Cultural Revolution - seem to be becoming increasingly ignored in favor of Western styles. The interesting (read 'hopeful') part is where the counter culture comes in to say "we can be modern without appropriating Western culture."
Ok, before this post gets any longer I should wrap it up with this photo. About halfway through the performance, the friend of my school's owner had an assistant fetch him drawing paper and charcoal. He then spent the better part of half an hour producing the image below of myself and the other foreign teacher I entered with. He even included my hat! I'm not so sure about the sizes he chose for my neck, nose, and jaw, though... Upon finishing he had me sign it then and there before interrupting the performance to give it to us in front of the entire audience (including photographers, TV cameramen, etc). All very embarrassing and I think at least partially intended to make us feel more important than we actually are.
