Last week I performed a Western-style stand-up comedy piece entirely in Chinese meant for Chinese audiences. It was quite an experience; some of the jokes I thought would go over well fell flat; others did better than I expected.
For instance, one of the successful jokes had to do with Chinese people who use their English names in the office:
我以前在中国的一家公司的办公室里面工作。我发现中国人工作的时候，连在跟英文没有任何关系的情况下会用英文名字。中国朋友告诉我是因为显得比较洋气。我想了一想，如果在美国办公室大家用中文名字会不会一点别扭。老板会这么说：
Today I‘d like to thank 小华 for giving us this presentation。Together with 贵龙 and 晓宇 I think we’ll learn a lot。
(I used to work in a Chinese office. I noticed that when Chinese people work in offices, even if their work has nothing to do with English, they will still use their English names. My Chinese friends say that this is because it sounds cooler, more foreign. I thought about this and said… what if in America, we used our Chinese names at the office instead of our English ones. It might go like: “Today I’d like to thank Xiao Hua for giving us this presentation. Together with Gui Long and Xiao Yu I think we’ll learn a lot.”)
The joke was a bit of a step outside of my comfort zone, because I generally avoid ridiculing Chinese people, and there are especially awkward power dynamics going on when one is ridiculing the way China is adjusting to and emulating the West.
But in this case, I think I hit the nail on the head, and I know because of a conversation—or should I call it, an ambush—that happened tonight.
I had attended a talk being held about life in China by a prominent ex-pat, and at one point mentioned I was going to be performing bilingual improv later that week. After the event, I turned to talk to a friend sitting in the row behind me, but before I had said more than a few words a Chinese girl broke in front of me and began to talk to me.
“I hear you are performing,” she said in English. “Do they pay you money?”
I toyed with the idea about bragging about the playboy lifestyle of amateur improvisational actors, but instead laughed and shook my head. “I wish,” I said. “我叫杰西，I’m Jesse,” I said.
“I’m Amanda,” she said.
“Nice to meet you Amanda,” I replied. “What’s your Chinese name?”
Her eyes popped open wide. “Amanda.”
Normally that would be where I left it—a name is a name is a name, and however people would like me to call them I’m happy to call them—but I was still a little miffed about having my conversation broken off so suddenly, and I was interested about the English name effect, so I pushed a bit. “Amanda is your Chinese name?”
She stared at me with wide eyes. “I just use Amanda with everyone.” She spoke only in English.
“So you don’t use a Chinese name? With your friends?”
She seemed quite uncomfortable, but bulled ahead all the same. I detected from her the air of many of the Chinese that I know who are eager to learn about foreigners, hear that foreigners are “brash” and “straightforward” and then have courtesies go by the wayside in their attempts to find new people to practice their English with. “I only use Amanda.”
I nodded, and then I had frightening thought. Perhaps she was from Hong Kong? Hong Kongers usually prefer to speak in English over Cantonese, and certainly Mandarin… “Where are you from?” I asked.
“Beijing.”
So that’s not it…
Amanda was interested in becoming an actress. But she was unusually fixated on getting paid—and soon. “Do people come and watch you perform, and then pay you to act?”
I laughed. “I don’t know if there are many talent scouts looking at improv shows. But sometimes my improv experience is helpful in acting, because it trains all sorts of acting skills. I’ve gotten some chances to perform thanks to connections through improv.”
“Is it like this for Chinese people? Or for foreigners?” she asked. While everyone knows that it is easy to get on TV as a foreigner, usually they don’t talk about it in such a way as to impugn those foreigners who do perform on TV. Amanda took a different tack, deciding to make me admit that the threshold for foreigners to perform was much lower than for Chinese people. I was happy to acknowledge the fact, but the speed with which she nodded when I did so left me quite turned off.
The conversation plowed onwards, with Amanda pushing hard on the ends of my every sentence. She also would steadfastly refuse to respond to me in Chinese when I spoke to her in Chinese. I invited her to our weekly workshops, but then she asked whether she would be paid to attend. I was interested in learning why she was attaching so much importance to getting paid to act—most actors don’t think to assume to be paid to train at a place like Beijing improv.
“I want to see if I can make a living as an actor,” she said.
“Where have you studied acting?” I asked. She shook her head. “You’ve never studied acting before?” She shook her head. “Well, then you should definitely come to the workshops. They’re free and fun and improv can give you the base skills you need to act.”
“But it won’t pay to be an improv actor.” She said.
I exhaled, exasperated. “It won’t pay this week, or the next week, but if you train…”
“Then the week after that?” She asked.
It was hopeless.
Afterwards, I explained the ambush to a friend of mine. Amanda’s English language was fine—not fluent by any means, but her accent was not bad and her pace of speaking was fine. But for all her skill, she was a terrible communicator. Language is a communication tool, and she wielded her English like a hammer, smashing me in the face repeatedly, and not listening at all to what I was saying. My offers of support, giving free training and advice, went unheard.
Further, I added to my friend, the body wielding the hammer made me very uneasy. I love China, my Chinese name, my identity as someone studying China… but to utterly abandon my own birth name and identity, and to refuse to shed light on it when asked politely by someone interested? I couldn’t imagine insisting I am 杰西，only 杰西 and nothing but 杰西.
I love that Chinese people are open to learning and absorbing aspects of Western culture. The opposite side of the coin, Westerners that come to China to learn and understand, are too few. But I also feel a deep discomfort with Chinese people who have decided that the West is so worth imitating that it is worth neglecting their own culture in the process. Worse are those that willingly shed their own culture to engage with the “other”, and then proudly display their severed ties, as if their own self-inflicted restrictions were a badge of honor.
I want to be friends with people, and some people are born in China and some in America. If you’re born in China, that’s great. If America, that’s great. Both countries are places to be proud of. But to insist upon the cultural supremacy of either is silly, and it makes me sad to see people give up their own ways—be it language, courtesy, or anything else—to try to curry a false sense of camaraderie.
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