Nobody fakes it like we do!

If you are a cynic one of the first things you might think of when someone mentions 'China', is 'being cheated' (this word is well known to all my chinese students), and 'fake stuff'. Lets examine this last one more closely.

China is the kingdom of fake goods. Someone once said to me, if it can be made, china can immitate it (cheaply!). Think of any electrical product or brand, and you can probably find another local chinese product that looks suspiciously similar in its design and logo. In fact, the only thing that's different will be it's capabilities, and the fact it will konk out well before the original product. Heck, theres even been past cases of fake (synthetic) eggs being made in china and shipped to hong kong! dodgy businessmen here will do anything to make a quick buck.
But even though most citizens can pick the immitation from the real thing (by looking at the ridiculously low price tag), they are still willing to buy the immitation. yes, chinese don't mind a bit of pantomine.

So anyway, getting to the point, my two american collegues and I were asked to take part in the foreign language department's annual variety concert. But you might be asking, what talent does alan possess? Well appart from being able to juggle 3 balls for short stints (thank you grade 8 PE class), and being one of the best english speakers amongst the present company, no concert director in their right mind would ever want to enlist my talents. but this is china, and the people here have a different idea of entertainment.

yep, we were asked to fake perform Rober Palmer's - Bad case of loving you.
Don't ask me why they chose this song, or why we were asked to do it. TIC baby. This Is China. Just accept it.

but then it gets a bit confusing, because some of us were faking it, while some of us weren't. Britton was given the drums, and as its a bit hard to fake playing real drums, he actually did try to play along to the music, half successfuly. Our singer, Deanna, was actually enlisted to sing for real, but because she had zero preparation for it, she ended up half lip syncing half singing. Weston and I were given the guitars, so we faked the whole thing.

Now I'm not sure if the students realized we were faking it, but the organizers were going to great lengths to ensure we looked as legit as possible. We were happy to make it clear we were faking it, to make it more of a joke performance, and also because we didn't wanna come across as being frauds. But the organizers insisted we do things such as plug our electric guitars into amplifiers. Though comically, Weston's cable fell out mid-performance and he had to plug himself back in while the music continued!

I guess if one never heard the original song before theres a chance they might think it's real. but the fact there's robert palmers voice booming over the speakers but no guy singing on stage would surely give it away.

They did this at another performance i watched a few weeks back, and this one was actually being broadcasted on state television. At the end of this other concert, the whole ensemble of performers came back on stage and lip synced 'We are the world' while waving their hands in the air! Seriously, if you are going to fake a song, at least pick one thats a bit more obscure than this one! Not only is it a classic, but even most chinese people would surely be able to recognize the voices of michael jackson, lionel richie, ray charles and cyndi lauper!

anyway, coming back to our performance, the 3 of us teachers were just feeling real awful while waiting for our turn, watching the other performances by students who actually did have talent. But after it was all done the audience still went nuts and loved us. I guess our students in the audience just really enjoyed seeing us up on stage letting lose and pantomining! And it was a lot of fun too, though i must say it's one of the weirdest things I've ever done.

After the performance we were asked a few pre-prepared questions by the hosts. Just simple stuff like what do you think of nanjing, what were you first impressions, ect. bit of PR.
In all, a very strange but fun experience. I still feel like a bit of a fraud though, so perhaps i'll pick up my guitar again when i get back to australia.