Last night I went out to dinner with a group of Chinese friends, some of whom I was meeting for the first time. In between amazing mouthfuls of hot pot, they asked me what it was like to appear on TV shows in China. I tried to explain that while filming shows was a lot of fun, there was still a big issue that made every shoot a little uncomfortable.
“It seems to me that foreigners on television can be either a clown or a scholar,” I told my friends. “China has foreigner clowns, and China has foreigner scholars. But there are no foreign clown scholars.”
In recent months, getting a chance to go on television has given me an option to create an image for myself and my project to share with audiences. Unwittingly and without much forethought, I’ve decided to try and be myself onstage. I love making people laugh, being silly, and running with jokes onstage. But my own identity is also closely tied to considering comedy and culture on a deep level. The bifurcation of foreigners into two exclusive roles with entirely different social connotations has lead to conflict both onstage and backstage.
Onstage, this conflict emerges in simple ways. Hosts will praise my singing and dancing even though, from any objective standpoint, it is mediocre at best. This is because by getting onstage at all I already succeed by the standards set for the clown role, and so regardless of the skill of my performance I have entertained the audience. Their praise shoehorns me into the role of a clown.
Backstage, the conflict is more complicated. There seems to be a mental disconnect; a denial that such a role—the clown scholar—is possible. Even when handed perfect opportunities to allow me to play this role for which I am so suited, I am bombarded with requests to change content and play either one role or the other.
For instance, last week I attended a talk show where my Xiangsheng master, Ding Shifu, was the guest of honor. A dozen of his students, representing his life’s work over the last two decades, came to the studio to be onstage or support him from the audience. During this process, a producer for the show slunk nearby, eavesdropping on our conversation, and eventually came and asked one of the students if she would be willing to help film a special part of the show: a side video backstage showing Ding Shifu teaching his students.
It was apparent, however, that this student had been selected for two qualities: she had the lowest language level (1) of any white (2) student Ding Shifu had brought. Perhaps intuiting this, she refused to film the extra segment. The reporter wheedled her for two minutes before I stepped in. “What are you looking to do? Perhaps myself or Satoshi (my Japanese performance partner) could help.”
“It’s like this…” the producer said. “We need a… foreign student… someone who won’t give a… brilliant performance… so we can show Ding Shifu teaching his students basic Chinese.”
“Well, you aren’t likely to find someone like that amongst Ding Shifu’s students,” I said, bristling that my guess about her motives was correct. “We all spent many hours practicing to reach the level of fluency we’re at. I’d be happy to help you film Ding Laoshi teaching us higher level content.” The heads of my fellow players nodded all around.
“That’s no good,” the producer whined. “It won’t be… clear enough that he is teaching you.”
Given a golden chance to show someone being funny AND scholarly, learning a craft that was interesting and challenging, the producer’s mindset was so firmly entrenched in the separation of clowns and scholars that to mix them would yield, in her words, an “unclear” result.
It angered me to be asked so openly to put on a dunce cap and literally slur my words. It frustrated me that the roundabout way the producer thought to pitch her side-segment was still, in my mind, clearly insulting to our effort and our art.
But despite this, I remain convinced that this misappropriation of the talent and energies of the foreign actors in my troupe, and of foreigners in China as a whole, represents a huge opportunity. Americans can do more than teach English; actors can do play than play roles such as “foreign policeman.” China loves seeing foreigners on TV, because they love learning about the world outside China.
This producer won’t give me the go-ahead to be a clown-scholar, but I think that the result that she fears, what she called “un-clarity,” other Chinese will call “discovery,” and the sky is the limit for what Chinese can discover about the lands outside of China if we can find a way to share it.