Last week we had a class activity to go along with our textbook chapter highlighting the Chinese dating show 非诚勿扰 (Fei Cheng Wu Rao; If You’re Not Sincere, Don’t Call On Me). The show, where twenty-four female contestants attempt to out-nitpick each other to choose the man of their dreams, is famous in China for its supposed display of moral decay and the high ratings that come along with such a display. In a country where most TV shows are dramas re-enacting Tang Dynasty court intrigue, an infusion of skimpy clothes and vapid conversation under bright lights is just what the doctor ordered.
To ensure we learned all the relevant vocab words from our lesson—which included gems such as “acid-tongued” and “callous and unfeeling”—my two classmates and I prepared characters so that we could act out an episode ourselves. My two classmates being pretty girls, I could prepare myself for the role of the eligible bachelor, and I set about preparing myself a character.
I settled on the persona of Zhang Qianglong, or “Mighty Dragon Zhang,” an entrepreneur from Beijing. Mr. Zhang was a toothpaste tycoon looking to expand into toothbrushes. “If you’ve used toothpaste in Beijing or Tianjin,” I told the female contestants, “it was probably mine.” The costume was completed by a haughty stance and a pair of glasses that went out of fashion after the fall of the Qing dynasty.
Needless to say, the ladies were already impressed. But I had a trick up my sleeve. If I was going to truly inhabit the character of a rich Chinese man, I wanted to show my character’s wealth though excessive wastefulness like only a rich Chinese man can. This led me to discover the most effective way to scare a Chinese person, which I put into practice just after my introduction.
As I was winding down my explanation of the fabulous wealth toothpaste had made me, I put my hand to my ear. “Is that my phone?” I reached into my backpack and pulled out an iPhone. “What is this?” I shouted into the phone. “Yesterday you said you would buy my toothpaste, and now you won’t! You thief!” Then I took the iPhone and hurled it into the ground, where it smashed into the tiles with a loud crack.
As expected, my Chinese teacher made a face as if I had spiked a baby. “Was that a real iPhone?” she sputtered.
As it turns out, it was. My roommate had gifted me a bag of broken electronics that had been cluttering her room the week earlier. “I’ve got two busted iPhones now,” she said, “and no matter what they can’t be fixed. Bit of a shame. But they’re of no use now.” At that time her words had been a challenge to me, and now, I felt as though I had completed a great task by finding one last final use for her broken phone.
Eventually, we continued with the show. I found that one of my classmates’ characters was vapid and gold-digging, which made her perfect for me. My other classmate’s character was more down to earth and uninterested in my wealth, but either liked assholes or was interested in practicing the vocab words that didn’t involve cussing me out of the room.
Still, I hadn’t made a decision yet, because I had one more important question to ask my potential suitors. “I’m raising a camel,” I told them, “and the camel lives in a house I own in Gansu province. It’s drier there, better for him. If we were married, you would need to live part time in Gansu province and take care of the camel. What is your opinion on this?”
The gold-digger character agreed so long as I furnish a private jet—done and done. The down-to-earth character seemed a little less excited about moving to Gansu, but still clearly wanted to find a way to make this relationship work and agreed. In the end, I chose the second girl, because Zhang Qianglong is a man that tries to get what is hard to get, and the second girl was clearly less interested.
I’m not a hundred percent sure what I learned from this process, but it did provide me a chance to smash a piece of technology. And, for those of us that grade our daily success based off of how close we get to becoming the guy on “Will it Blend?”, it was undoubtedly a step in the right direction.