A Musical Night Out in Nanjing
I went to see the musical “Chicago,” as performed by the local student club “The Phantom of the Musical.” Every year they put on a well received, and very well attended, musical. The ushers had lost all control and students were sneaking in without tickets, so I was lucky to get a seat even with an advance ticket. The singing was in English but the dialogue was in Chinese; fortunately, I had seen the movie, so I just read my book during the acting and paid attention to the musical numbers. The students responded with particular enthusiasm to two of the numbers, the one in which the lawyer is treating his client and the press like puppets and the one in which semi-dressed girls are singing about punishing men for being jerks.
I was rather shocked by the excited waves of approval the audience gave the singers/dancers for being dressed in, essentially, black leather-ish swimming suits. Growing up in the West, I’m loaded down with all sorts of mixed up feelings about minimally dressed women, as we argue about what it means, but for Chinese college students who choose to see “Chicago” (a self-selected group), it was an expression of sexual freedom that their lives have been organized to discourage, from parents with high academic expectations to single-sex dorms. They spend all these years being told by their parents that there will be plenty of time for boyfriends after graduation, and then within weeks of graduation they’re pestering their kids: why don’t you have a boy/girl friend already? When are you getting married?
I was less surprised by the grumbling whenever a character smoked on stage. Cigarettes are to the Chinese what vodka was to the Soviet Union; a government monopoly that provides a hefty percentage of their revenues (not as high as the USSR, which was a third) but everyone knows is unhealthy but the political and cultural barriers against quitting are proving hard to surmount. It is hard to imagine my male students, clean cut, nice kids, taking up smoking and drinking all night to create relationships with their bosses, but that’s how you get ahead here.
I was rather shocked by the excited waves of approval the audience gave the singers/dancers for being dressed in, essentially, black leather-ish swimming suits. Growing up in the West, I’m loaded down with all sorts of mixed up feelings about minimally dressed women, as we argue about what it means, but for Chinese college students who choose to see “Chicago” (a self-selected group), it was an expression of sexual freedom that their lives have been organized to discourage, from parents with high academic expectations to single-sex dorms. They spend all these years being told by their parents that there will be plenty of time for boyfriends after graduation, and then within weeks of graduation they’re pestering their kids: why don’t you have a boy/girl friend already? When are you getting married?
I was less surprised by the grumbling whenever a character smoked on stage. Cigarettes are to the Chinese what vodka was to the Soviet Union; a government monopoly that provides a hefty percentage of their revenues (not as high as the USSR, which was a third) but everyone knows is unhealthy but the political and cultural barriers against quitting are proving hard to surmount. It is hard to imagine my male students, clean cut, nice kids, taking up smoking and drinking all night to create relationships with their bosses, but that’s how you get ahead here.