Three weeks ago I got a call from a TV producer asking if I wanted to perform Xiangsheng on a massive Chinese New Year’s gala. With an audience of 70 million people watching, they wanted to let me perform on a huge stage. I, as well as another foreigner, would compete against a pair of Chinese performers in a “xiangsheng-off” of sorts, and the results, regardless of who “won”, would be hilarious.
I was very excited and accepted immediately. Over the next few weeks, I waited excitedly for the script to arrive so I could get cracking.
This past Friday, I received the script, alongside a message saying that the first rehearsal would be on Tuesday. Scanning the piece, I saw I didn’t have too many lines, so I planned to practice the piece in class on Monday with a teacher and put in extra work Monday night if needed.
But on Saturday, I got a phone call that the rehearsal had been moved to Sunday; suddenly I had twenty-four hours to prepare for the first rehearsal. I opened up the script again, started to read in detail—and my heart stopped.
The script was awful.
Firstly, the “xiangsheng-off” idea had been scrapped completely. In fact, every one of the original things they’d told me about what I’d be doing had vanished. In its place, the writers had fabricated an awkward wonderland of imperialist and racist overtones.
The piece was set in Congo, and it was about Chinese people on vacation talking about the behavior of the “aboriginals”. Later, one of the Chinese people brings two foreigners on stage. After the Chinese people strangely exclaim “They speak Chinese? We thought they were the natives!” They encourage us all to travel together, remarking that having Chinese people and white people trekking around the Congo surrounded by Africans was like a “Cream-stuffed chocolate cookie.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, it also irked me that the two foreigners, who were labeled A and B on the script, had all their lines listed as “A/B”, as if it never mattered which one of them said anything, so long as one of them opened their mouth at that point. The only thing that made the whole situation redeemable was how laughably funny the script was.
My mouth was wide open as I finished the script. My fabulous opportunity was apparently not so fabulous after all. The script was way past the point of salvation, and I didn’t want to be a part of anything having to do with it. After a while of nervous fidgeting, I picked up my phone and made a call to the producer. I told him my Xiangsheng master had asked me to learn to sing Henan opera (true) and that I needed to prepare for another show (also true). No Global New Year’s Gala for me.
I’m finding that even as an actor, the roles that I am asked to take on are influencing how I feel about performing them. It’s not an “I want to be the good guy” thing: I’d be willing to play bad guys and good guys both, to be people who I am not in real life, and trust the audience to understand the fiction. The issue apparently comes up when I have no character—when I am Foreigner A and/or B in the script, where my character has no purpose other than to stand and exist. At that point, I reinforce the notion that foreigners are cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional and swappable.
Because my goal is to help do away with this surface representation of foreigners, I don’t like perpetuating it. This might have just burned me some bridges in Chinese TV, but I’m getting more comfortable that knowing that bridges I don’t want to cross are impassable.