I forgot to talk about the New Year's party we had at CLC last Friday night. It was an "international" theme, with students encouraged to wear their "country's traditional dress" and bring international foods. I just showed up in jeans and a sweater, because I'm American and I didn't have a kimono to pull out of the closet or anything.
But then at the beginning they got a sampling of our more exotic students to come up and introduce themselves, using the language they're learning (Cantonese or Mandarin). It was a surreal experience, sort of a weird Epcot Center with different national stereotypes on display, all speaking Chinese. There was a woman from Tanzania introducing herself in Cantonese, wearing one of those colorful African dresses; a guy wearing a crazy-tartaned kilt and what looked like the top half of a tuxedo, explaining as best he could in Cantonese that he was Scottish; a French woman with a scarf and a beret speaking Mandarin; etc. The most surprising was a short not-at-all-African-looking-guy from Madagascar wearing what I assumed was the Malagay national costume -- a straw hat and a giant sheet draped over his shoulders cape-like, with what looked like a pirate's treasure map of Madagascar printed on it. He spoke okay Cantonese.
All of us students were encouraged to "perform" in some way -- so the Japanese sang a folk song, the African woman danced to Afropop, my class performed a really bad play, and then the kilt guy got up on stage by himself and announced he was going to read a poem. Armed with what sounded like just two months of language training, he began reciting in Cantonese (with a heavy Scottish accent) a poem that Sophie (who came along for the show) could only translate as "it's something ... about a flower."
I looked up on the stage, stepped back, and had one of those "this is ridiculous" moments one sometimes has when found in absurd circumstances. A Scotsman on stage in full regalia mumbling about a flower in broken Cantonese -- I was ready to go home now.
Posted by cce at March 5, 2003 07:01 PM | TrackBack