Today was a pretty good day (bucuo 不错). I had an ordinary Chinese class in the morning, but lunch was a little different today. Instead of bringing in food for us, the program directors put money on our ID cards and we were sent off to the cafeterias to find our own food that we would enjoy. It was a really nice change of pace, and I had an eggplant and green bean dish with rice. After the midday break, we had a pretty good lecture on herbal medicine in TCM class. Our professor today was a researcher in western medicine who is testing vanadium compounds to reduce insulin resistance in people with diabetes. He will also be giving our lecture on the integration of TCM and Western Medicine. I enjoyed his lecture, his English was very good, and he had a particularly deep voice.
At 6PM, I met with four others to go to the Lao She Teahouse. We took the subway there, and it was the most crowded I have ever seen the subway. I felt pretty claustrophobic by the time we transferred lines. We got to the teahouse with plenty of time, got our tickets, and were seated at our table. There were five of us, and the tables seat eight, so a group of three including an adorable little girl in a pink outfit were also seated with us, but they came late.
Upon sitting down, we were promptly served jasmine tea, sunflower seeds, a pea flour cake, and a sticky rice and red bean paste confection. The show began with a tea ceremony, which was rather short, and then the emcee introduced the next act. We saw singing, acrobatic plate twirling, oral mimicry, Peking Opera, long spout teapot performance, Peking Repartee, face-changing Sichuan opera, and Chinese Kung Fu (zhongwen gong fu 中文功夫). My favorites were the Sichuan opera, kung fu, and long spout teapot performance. The others were a little obscure for me, and since I didn't understand 98% of the Chinese they spoke, the repartee wasn't funny for me.
The Sichuan opera was a routine of stylized movement that emphasized the changing of the design of a mask worn by the performers. It was a quick change trick, and those are always entertaining. The kung fu routine was far more performative than martial, and just as strange an art with its hard-soft fusion as it ever has been to a Tae Kwon Do practitioner, but it was really fun to watch the flipping and wrist flicking and tricks with fans and flags. The long spout teapot performance consisted of a woman and two men doing a tea ceremony, only the hip hop remix. The long spout teapots were twirled and flipped and each segment ended with some fancy way of pouring the tea. It was really cool, especially with the juxtaposition of ancient and modern in the routine.
I really enjoyed watching the audience for parts of the show. I got the sense that being a groundling at the Globe would be somewhat like this experience. The audience does not get quiet, there is constant conversation, much response to the performance including yelling back to the performers, and the constant movement of people struck me as being very zhong guo. I definitely do not want all audience experiences to be full of so much extra noise, but it was fun to be more relaxed than in the US.
After the show, I got a dragon shadow puppet. This one has rods and I got to try it out before I bought it, but this is really the last one. I am kicking the addiction before it forms. They're just so pretty!! The man at the table had a shadow screen and light set up to demonstrate his puppets, and I really like the dragon.
As we were walking home from the subway, I realized a change in my perceptions. I said to my friend, "you know you've been in China too long when you can tell that you're breathing different kinds of secondhand smoke." Indeed, I have reached that point. With the amount of air pollution here, I don't think things will phase me as much when I return. That's not to say that secondhand smoke doesn't bother me anymore; it does, and a lot, too, but I've been exposed to so much that I can tell when people are smoking different things.
Today is awesome because I actually got to see the performance at the Lao She Teahouse.
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