In 2011, I spent a summer working at The Nature Conservancy’s Beijing office as an intern. I was excited to be at an office almost entirely filled with Chinese working professionals, and I was eager to begin using my Chinese in a real-world environment, whether in work or around the water cooler.
Working at the Chinese branch of a Western organization, I learned many things. Firstly, that the “water cooler” in China turned out to be a small box on the wall that would only serve hot or lukewarm water, and secondly, that environment and topic of conversation had a crucial effect on what language people spoke.
Talk about environmental preservation issues was done almost entirely in English, or in a Chinglish that bordered heavily to English.
我们的Carbon Bank Project明天在Group Meeting做个PowerPoint presentation，your slides 都OK吗？
Meanwhile, gossipy talk about which person’s boss was too strict or who was thinking of asking for a promotion took place almost exclusively in Chinese. “老张最近一直批评我的工作，烦死我了！”
Throughout my study of Chinese culture, I have found that more than anything else, environment dictates the mode of language and cultural transmission. In contexts such as The Nature Conservancy, concepts such as “Carbon Bank presentation” are Western concepts, related to TNC’s identity as a global organization. But deciding whether a boss’s treatment of an employee is fair is a naturally occurring Chinese subject. The language was chosen not to gain face through linguistic prowess, but purely as a function of the type of cultural information called upon to be transmitted.
This pattern holds with almost all topics. Consider how the topic is seen in Chinese culture, and you can guess which language people want to discuss it in. Chinese medicine, tea culture, and Xiangsheng are discussed in Chinese no matter which country the speakers are from. International relations, environmental protection, and finance are discussed in English. Whichever culture (or whatever mix of cultures) defines the environment of the topic writes the rules on how that topic is discussed, what is appropriate to say in public, and even what body language can be used to discuss it.
This is true of comedy as well. When trying to address a given topic, speakers engage the environment around that topic, and choose communicate using the language (and culture) associated with greater comfort in addressing that topic.
Being a part of both the Chinese and English-language standup comedy scenes, I have seen this phenomenon at work. Comedy can dredge up harsh truths and ask performers to bare their most vulnerable selves onstage. Delivering jokes one has written and composed oneself, regardless of the subject matter, is revealing enough; when the topics touch on taboos within one’s own culture, the pressure can be almost unbearable.
However, I have found that Chinese people prefer to tell certain jokes in their non-native language, something that should in theory add more pressure to the performer, but in actuality lessens the load. To a Chinese performer, telling jokes in English for an audience of foreigners is cathartic because it allows them to engage certain subjects along the lines of another culture and not their own. Chinese people perceive Westerners as being more willing to discuss any manner of topics onstage, from sex to personal foibles, and they want to join the party.
Last week at the English-language standup night, a Chinese woman in her late twenties named Laura took the stage. Her English was not near fluent; nevertheless she began to tell jokes personal anecdotes that would count in Chinese culture as being pretty out there. Laura’s act included an opening line about being a virgin, and later progressed to a story about stripping while doing her laundry in an American Laundromat (“I saw a sign: When the machine stops, please remove your clothes. So I did.”).
When addressing topics that have to do with sex in English, Laura would act brazen, but her character would occasionally break as her nervousness showed. Still, it was clearly a chance for her to be able to step outside of her comfort zone—or, more accurately, to step into another culture’s comfort zone. For Laura, I got the feeling that speaking in English to foreigners meant that whatever her own misgivings, the audience would not judge her on her content, and the reprieve from the judgement of others allowed her to explore her own self.
When Laura performed the same piece at the Chinese standup night the next week, it seemed to be a shadow of its old self. The virgin reference was gone, and she downplayed the sexual parts of the Laundromat joke, choosing to play up the language aspect of the joke. Her body language was smaller, and much of the boldfaced character she pretended to be in English had vanished. By speaking in Chinese, she adopted a Chinese cultural context, along with a lifetime of knowledge of which words and motions were embarrassing and which were not.
Did English allow her to be more edgy? In some ways, yes, but the idea of “pushing the envelope” is very different in different cultures. Laura may have felt like she was crossing the line during both performances; where she perceived the line to be was simply different in the two different cultural contexts. In the Western context, brazenly mentioning her sexual life and nudity was pushing herself as close to the limit as she could. In her own Chinese context, mentioning nudity at all was pushing her own concepts of what she could do onstage.
In fact, many Chinese are drawn to Western forms of artistic expression such as stand-up comedy precisely because of this—they can change language, and therefore the cultural context of their performance, thereby allowing themselves to take rapid steps forward in personal expression. I think this is why the Chinese performers who perform stand-up in English seem to almost exclusively address topics that would be sensitive in their own cultural space: government, sex, personal vulnerability. If they were to talk about regular issues, they would do so in their own language and culture, where as a whole they are much more comfortable.
For me, the opposite issue emerges. Performing comedy in Chinese cedes my performance back to a Chinese context. “The line” has changed. I find myself having to restrict myself so as to engage the more reserved cultural context. Far from an opening, performing in Chinese forces me to pare down my content, to find the essence of the joke, and not allow myself to rely on being outrageous to be funny.
Jokes I believe to be toned down enough so as not to cross the line blow by it. I once set up a joke by mentioning how some Chinese people insist upon speaking English with me so as to practice their language and not because they were interested in me as a person. Before I got to the hi-jinks of my conversation with such a person, the audience was gone. My insight into the psychology of my Chinese peers had been far too heavy-handed; after all, many people saw speaking English to foreigners as simply being polite. My own frustration of struggling through barely comprehensible English conversations with people who refused to communicate by speaking Chinese was completely outside of the experiences of the audience. Perhaps, with a bit more sensitive treatment, I could have made the audience understand how I felt, but using such a strong intro meant that there was no sympathy for my stance, and the joke was a total failure.
Ceding to the Chinese cultural environment by performing in Chinese has had another unintended effect. China is extremely sensitive to being looked down upon by the West. Some of this is legitimate—the Western media often takes anti-China stances, and even articles written with what we would consider to be fair critiques of the country are read in China as being part of a general anti-Chinese bend to global discourse about the country. But strangely enough, there is also a certain comfort born of repeatedly hearing bad things about China, and Chinese people are sometimes surprisingly comfortable with foreigners presenting negative opinions of China—that is, when it is done in English. But when the language switches to Chinese, all bets are off.
My jokes that have even the least insinuation that China or Chinese culture is bad are met with an amazing amount of sensitivity. With so few other white comedians in China, Chinese audiences project onto my stage persona their preconceived notions of what the West thinks about China, which, generally, makes them believe that my jokes are poking fun at their country’s state of development. I can’t make squat toilet jokes in China, because Chinese people simply know beyond a shadow of a doubt that foreigners believe squat toilets are inferior to western toilets. A simple mental leap makes the audience believe that such a joke is making fun of their entire country and culture. My actual views on squat toilets are wholly irrelevant; all that matters is what the audience thinks people that look like believe.
Ironically, this entire dynamic, as entrenched as it may seem, actually reverses when jokes are told in English. I have seen foreign comedians at the English stand-up night make jokes about all sorts of Chinese shortcomings, and these jokes can get laughs. Audiences seem more willing to admit flaws in their nation when being told about them in a foreign language.
Perhaps it is the sense of secrecy; that they “get the joke” because they speak English, putting them above an imagined class of lesser-educated, brainwashed Chinese. Perhaps it is the fact that the type of Chinese people that would go see foreigners perform in Chinese are the type that want to hear what foreigners think about China, good or bad. Or, perhaps the audience, like the performer, engages the English-language cultural environment, where mentioning sensitive subjects is acceptable and cultures can more freely laugh at themselves.
This discovery of willingness to look at difficult topics in English rather than Chinese gives me a clear hint as to how to develop jokes that touch on sensitive topics within Chinese culture. But here, my open-mindedness as a scholar and my personal convictions as a performer are deeply at odds. By only using English to address difficult subjects, I am moving my performance into a place where only a very few highly fluent Chinese will truly understand my jokes. Most will get only a shadow of the original joke, and in the meantime I will have wormed my way out of the truly difficult part of making intercultural comedy, which is to discover where those cultural limits are and how to subtly engage them. I learned Chinese to be able to meet those challenges, not to fade away when it turns out speaking English would be expedient.
Perhaps this stubbornness is in and of itself foolish—after all, I want people to laugh, not to be angry at me!—but in trying to find ways of addressing sensitive topics in Chinese I am learning a lot about the culture, where the lines are, and how to push them. I do so not for the sake of shocking people; rather, comedy has been my way of exploring myself and the world around me. I use comedy to see when my perceptions of the world in front of me reflect deep truth or are simply band-aids that cover patches in my understanding. I think that comedy has the power to help us discover ourselves regardless of what language we speak, and I hate the idea that the only way to find oneself is to flee to another culture and language. I think it would be much better use that cultural knowledge to expand oneself, and to create an in-between culture where one can live with the best of both worlds.
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