New Year's Competition

In the middle of December I got a call from a guy I met through a teaching interview, asking me if I wanted to judge an English competition in Ya'an on New Year's Day. A driver would pick me up on New Year's Eve around 6:30, I would stay in a hotel, judge the competition the next day, and they would drive me back that night. Ya'an is a town about a two hours' drive from Chengdu, famous for its elaborate covered bridges, high quality tea, copious rain, edible fish, and beautiful women (there's a pun in Chinese about the last three). That was about all the information I could get.

On New Year's Eve, around 9:00, a van drove up to the gate. There were already four people inside plus the driver, and before leaving Chengdu we stopped to pick up one more. I sat in the middle row next to a young couple, and we chatted for a while. I tried to ask them if they were going to the same competition, but I couldn't understand the answer. I thought maybe they were honeymooners or something and this was one of those unofficial cabs that take multiple groups at the same time.

Once we got onto the freeway I dozed, and when I woke up we were driving along a wide river. We turned down a covered bridge, at the end of which was a huge, perfectly shaped tree silhouetted against some street lights, the air around it glowing orange. Some people were strolling along the bridge and river bank with big red paper lanterns.

We went through a gate into a courtyard and got out of the van. Some other people were there waiting, but they left with the driver and the couple who had been sitting next to me. I stood by the van with my bags, wondering if someone was going to tell me where to go.

After what seemed like twenty minutes, a woman who had been sitting behind me in the van motioned for me to follow her. She was walking with two other guys toward what turned out to be the door to the hotel. Inside the deserted lobby she gave me a key. I tried asking again what was going on. Finally I learned that these three were also here for the competition. The woman, Aileen, was a singer; one guy, Liu Xiao, was a dancer, and the other guy, M_____, was a professional MC. I started to feel slightly under-qualified. They helped me find my room and said they would come get me the next morning at 8:00. It was then about 10:30.

The room was considerably nicer than the hotel room in Chongzhou (not that I'm complaining! There are worse things to suffer than being put up in an imperfect hotel room). The bathroom was big, clean, and didn't smell like sewage, the heater worked well, and the wallpaper was only peeling in one place. I put on my pajamas, but I didn't want to go to bed right away since it was New Year's Eve. Fortunately, I had anticipated this scenario and had brought some DVDs. I was just about to watch one of them when the door became the source of a knocking sound. "How did you become the source of a knocking sound!?" I asked. Actually, I think I just called out "Hello?" The voice from the other side of the door belonged to the other judges. I opened the door. They had come to ask me if I wanted to go eat something with them. I ran back into the room and threw my clothes back on, and we went.

At the entrance were a man, a woman, and two cabs. The man and woman were introduced as friends. We took the cabs across the river to a restaurant on the shore. The place seemed to be made completely of weathered wood, with gaps between the floorboards and stairs that creaked alarmingly. It was mostly empty, but we were led up the stairs to a little nook directly over the river. If not for the darkness and fog, I think it would have been quite a view. The waiter then put up a theater curtain, turning the nook into a private room. The darkness, wooden walls and furniture, little windows, and that we were sitting above the river made it feel almost like we were in the cabin of an old ship.

First beers were distributed, and "soy milk" for the ones who didn't drink ("soy milk" in China means a combination of soy and cow's milk). Then dishes quickly started appearing. My clearest memory is the chicken feet--a plate of five or six long, gnarled claws covered in brown scales that glistened under the hanging light bulb. There were also skewered vegetables and meat, sliced meat, stir-fried meat, and just meat. But there were some things I could eat, like corn, stir-fried greens, and tofu. The tofu had an interesting flavor and I asked about it. The man who had been ordering and seemed to occupy the head of the square table said it was stinky tofu (chou doufu), but it tasted nothing like the overpoweringly pungent stuff I had in Taipei.

I also got to experience Chinese drinking culture again. Even after the first toast involving everyone at the start of the meal, it's considered impolite to drink by yourself; you either have to toast someone else, or be toasted. But it's hard to break the habit of drinking whenever you feel like it when that's what you're used to. Once I caught myself doing this, but luckily, I made eye contact with someone across the table and was able to avoid a faux pas by shouting "Happy New Year!" before we both took sips. At one point the waiter brought us a big pitcher of some kind of steaming yellow liquid with flowers and vermilion things that look vaguely like walnuts. Is that tea? I asked. They told me it was beer. It tasted kind of like Dimetapp. Near midnight everyone had pretty much finished eating. I was still picking over a plate of home-made potato chips, dipping each one in a plate of powdered chili pepper and MSG. Everybody seemed to be half focused on whatever conversation was happening around the table, and half focused on text messaging with their phones. At midnight we all stood up and had another toast.

The next day, after a breakfast of cold vegetables and steamed buns (mantou), hard-boiled eggs, and milk (no coffee or tea!), I was ushered into another car. A girl got into the front seat and introduced herself as Mary, my interpreter. She was a student at the local university. Then a woman in a neon orange overcoat drove me, Mary, and the MC to a slightly dilapidated school building not far away. There we met up with the "honeymooners", Y_____(f.) and Z_____(m.), who were actually also judges. Mary, Y_____, and I were shown into one of the classrooms. All of the desks were pushed against the far wall, except for three set in the middle. We sat at these desks.

Up until this point I had an extremely faint idea of what I was supposed to do. I had pictured myself sitting at a judges' table near a stage and holding up signs with "9.7", "8.5", "9.2" printed in big numerals as crowds booed and cheered. I wasn't really sure how this empty classroom fit into the picture. I wanted to ask Mary about it, but I didn't know where to start.

A small child walked into the classroom and started giving a well-rehearsed speech in Chinese. Y_____ made a few notes, asked the child some questions at the end, and thanked him. A little girl came in and gave another speech. These children were almost offensively cute. "Am I supposed to be doing anything?" I asked Mary. She said that the English speeches were later. The English speeches turned out to be about 20 children later.

They mostly acted out stories, or gave monologues about a particular park or school or something. Most of the children from the same school had learned the same speech. And not only were the speeches the same, but they were told with almost identical intonation. At the end of each speech I was supposed to ask the children questions (that was the extent of the guidelines I received), so I usually asked them their names and ages, and then I tried to test comprehension of the stories they had told. I was disappointed that most of them seemed to have a very foggy idea of what their monologues were about.

To be continued...