Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Sometimes the holidays bring unplanned entertainment — the best kind. Uncle Fred and Aunt Helen re-gifting to your sister-in-law the Christmas ornament she’d so lovingly handmade them three years ago. Your father and father-in-law exchanging giftcards of the same amount to the same store.But who would have thought that a holiday season show in Beijing could give us material to rival… well, let’s set the stage:

FIRE CHIEF [moving towards the door, then stopping]: Speaking of that–the bald soprano? [General silence, embarrassment.]

MRS. SMITH: She always wears her hair in the same style.

FIRE CHIEF: Ah! Then goodbye, ladies and gentlemen.

MR. MARTIN: Good luck, and a good fire!

FIRE CHIEF: Let’s hope so. For everybody.

– “The Bald Soprano” by Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco died not so long ago, 1994, without so much as a peep about what he thought of the Chinese “national event” TV special. You wonder if he would have found new material in it. Or maybe he just would have felt upstaged. After all, his own theater of the absurd, despite its so-called success, never attracted more than a handful of clove-smoking, Sartre-reading, co-ed-leching Dadaist professors.

CCTV, on the other hand, counts an audience in the millions even on the fourth rerun of “Mr. Wang pushes his cart to market,” let alone on an evening variety show the night before Christmas, which if I remember correctly is when the following clip is from:

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(transcript below)Can our chipper hostess challenge the Fireman to preeminence among non sequiturists, among empty phrasologists? Well she does spew the entire soliloquy without pause:

1. General propaganda,
2. Gratuitous but obligatory Olympics plug, then
3. Introduction of the all-female tap-dancing team to the tune of Zoot Suit Riot by none other than the Cherry-Poppin’ Daddies.

Wow. But maybe you can’t give her too much credit. This stuff is easy to pull off with a teleprompter. What about the scriptwriter? Sure, he might be just another flack in the bureau, one whose friend came by with a bottle of jīn liù fú (金六福) the night before he was supposed to finish his script. But I prefer to envision him as a closet Twain. His genius, squeezed between dimwitted censors and dull talking heads, finds an outlet in the juxtaposition of soppy boilerplate propaganda with a song that references alcohol-fueled mass incidents.

MC: Zánmen guójiā yītiān bǐ yītiān chāngshèng.
咱们国家一天比一天昌盛
Our country is growing more prosperous by the day.

Rénmīnde shēnghuǒ yuèláiyuè hǎo
人民的生活越来越好
The people’s lives are getting better and better.

Běijīng àoyùn yě jíjiāng zhàokāi
北京奥运也即将召开
Beijing’s Olympics are also on the verge of beginning.

Zhème duō de hǎo shì zài děngdài zhe wǒmen
这么多的好事在等待着我们
So many good things are waiting for us.

lǎorénmen zìrán shì yuè huó yuè yǒu jīngshèn…
老人们自然是越活越有精神
Elderly people are naturally both lively and filled with vitality…
The elderly naturally get more vital with age… [Thanks, Kaiwen, for the fix]

Band:

Who’s that whisperin’ in the trees?
It’s two sailors and they’re on leave
Pipes and chains and swingin’ hands
Who’s your daddy? Yes I am

Fat cat came to play
Now he can’t run fast enough
You’d best stay away
When the pushers come to shove

Zoot suit riot

throw back a bottle of beer
Zoot suit riot
Pull a comb through your coal black hair

Zoot suit riot
throw back a bottle of beer
Zoot suit riot
Pull a comb through your coal black hairBlow Daddy!