Probably the biggest adventure of this past week was visiting a school here in Taipei. My company sent me there to be a guest judge for an English drama contest. This is a big deal in Taiwan, and I believe it happens at most schools across the island. The English classes will hold singing contests, drama contests, and speech contests. Teachers from the schools themselves serve as judges, and then they invite native speakers of English to be guest judges. To say that these contests can turn into quite the spectacle is putting it mildly.

For this contest, I was met at an MRT station near the school by a sales rep. These trips to schools with sales reps are the only chances I have to travel in a private car, and it is always interesting. I generally drive my scooter or take public transportation. I occasionally take a taxi, but then I’m sitting in the back seat. With the sales rep, I’m up in the front seat, and it just feels weird. It’s a new perspective on Taiwan, I guess, one that I don’t usually have.

We drove just five or six blocks and then arrived at the school. It looked pretty much the same as all the other schools I’ve been to – large and institutional. I tend to have a negative reaction to the schools here, but I’m not sure if that’s fair. It could be that I’m just not used to schools that look like this. The schools almost all follow the same pattern. They are four or five stories of solid cement surrounding a large inner courtyard. They are completely open to the outside world and students get from class to class along open hallways that run around the inside. There are wide cement stairways at every corner and in the middle. I can never make any sense out these places. Everything looks the same from every angle and I can’t get my bearings. They’re like concrete mazes and if I get disoriented I can never get reoriented.

The classrooms seem equally uncomfortable to me. They don’t have any softness or ease to them. The walls are cement. The wall facing the outside tends to be all windows and these are generally quite dirty with lots of gaps and broken blinds and curtains and that sort of thing. Another wall will face the open hallway, and there are generally windows there, too, plus two doors – one at the back and one at the front. Classrooms are crowded and they give the impression of a place where people live as opposed to a place where people study. As far as I understand it, the classrooms kind of belong to the students. They largely stay in the same room, and the teachers come and go. This is the opposite of how things work in Canada where the classroom is assigned to the teacher and the subject and the students move from room to room.

The students tend to spend a lot of time at school and in these rooms, which gives them that air of a place where people live. Students eat their lunches in these rooms. They take naps in these rooms. They hang out there. And stuff seems to pile up in the corners and edges. It’s all kind of a jumble. I also find them pretty noisy. Sound carries through all the glass and steel and cement. Temperatures can be extreme, too. Taipei can be very cold in the winter, and buildings are not heated. The schools certainly aren’t, and it can be very cold in the rooms. Then it’s hot in the summer.

Drama contests are not held in the classrooms. They are held in one of the school’s large auditoriums. Before I went there, however, I was led by the sales rep from office to office until we found the English teachers that were in charge of things. The teacher rooms strike me as very depressing places. They match the classrooms in the sense of being all concrete and dirty glass. They exceed the classrooms in clutter, though. Teachers all over the world accumulate papers, and in these teacher rooms the papers pile up and up and up till they seem to take over the entire place. Dozens of teachers are crammed into these rooms with barely enough space for their desks and papers and books. Also, just like the classrooms, the teacher rooms seem to be places where people live, not just work. Meals are eaten there and clutter just accumulates. My own teaching experiences have never been happy ones, so perhaps I’m projecting my own feelings onto these rooms. Still, they always depress me. Even though I know the school bell is not summoning me anywhere to teach, my heart sinks every time I hear it.

I do enjoy meeting the teachers. That is always the highlight of these school trips for me. They are generally very sincere people who care very much about their students. They are extremely nice to me and glad that I’ve come to be a judge and they ask me all kinds of questions and we have a good conversation. I usually wish that period of time could last indefinitely and I could just talk with them in the teacher room and not go out there into the chaos of the student world. I’m a low-energy guy, and the high energy of large numbers of students is generally too much for me. These drama contests are kind of an end-of-term event for them, and weeks of preparation can have gone into them. So the students are bursting with energy and for me coming straight from my normal sedate desk job, it’s kind of overwhelming. It’s like going from zero to a hundred in four seconds. You’ve got to strap in and get ready.

The contests also move at a fantastic pace. I’d sort of forgotten about that on this trip, and I wasn’t quite prepared for the chaos that suddenly engulfed me. It began when we walked from the main school to the back where the auditorium was housed in a separate building. Streams of students were heading in that direction, and we all gathered in front of the single elevator to the sixth floor. I expected the students to part like the Red Sea and let this group of their teachers (and honored judges) ahead of them into the elevator, but they didn’t. The students ahead of us jammed and pushed their way onto the elevator and we had to wait our turn. When we stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor, I wanted to turn and run. There was either no backstage area at this auditorium or it just wasn’t big enough because the hallways were jammed with hundreds of students preparing to perform their plays. They were in costumes and running around and yelling and getting organized. Organized chaos.

I always keep my eyes open for the bathrooms on these trips to and from the performance venues. I always need one – particularly in the winter. The auditoriums are often ice cold and there is something about shivering in the cold that kicks my kidneys into overdrive and I suddenly have to hit the bathroom. It’s like there is a week’s backlog of liquid that suddenly has to be dealt with. My heart sank again when I saw that there was only one tiny bathroom anywhere in sight of this auditorium and it was packed with screaming and yelling boys. Sigh.

The auditorium was a large traditional theater and despite its size, it came nowhere near being able to house all the students in this English grade. I lost track of the details, but this contest was for nine separate classes. I’m not sure if only those classes were there to watch as well as perform, but whatever the audience consisted of, there were far too many of them for them all to have a seat. They solved that problem by letting the audience in in shifts. One group would watch the first three plays. Then the entire audience left and a new audience came in and sat down to watch the next three plays. Then a third completely new audience came in for the last set of plays. I had no idea what was going on, but at least during the total craziness of hundreds of students trading places, there was some time for a desperate Canadian to leave his seat and try to fight his way into that tiny bathroom. Sigh.

It wasn’t easy making my way out of my seat and then out of the auditorium. It wasn’t designed for a panel of judges, and they had to make some makeshift arrangements. We judges were seated in the front row of seats. These were normal theater seats into which your body sank quite deeply. Then they put a couple of long tables in front of these seats. These were very high tables and it was quite difficult to reach them from these theater seats. The theater is generally darkened for these plays, but we judges have to fill out about eighteen billion pages of score sheets for every play (scores for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Director, Screenplay, Staging, Music, Lighting, Best Play, etc.). To do this, we needed light, and the organizers had assembled a mad collection of desk lamps. They must have scoured very junk shop within ten miles to find them. They were of every variety you can imagine, and each had a different switch and brightness, and electrical cords ran from all these different lights down off the table and then into outlets at the bottom of the stage in front of us. Some attempt had been made to tape these cords down, but people still tripped over them left, right, and center.

My seat was somewhere in the middle of these long tables, and when I needed to get out and head for that bathroom, it was a major operation. We’d had to pull that huge table right up to our chins in order to be able to write on our score sheets. Now the table had to be pushed away and all the other judges had to get up to let me past – no easy feat in those reclining theater seats.

Judging these plays is never easy, and on this particular occasion it was nearly impossible. The teachers of the performing classes had put together the various forms and papers we used to score them. However, the teachers on the judge’s panel were from other classes. They had been chosen so that they would be objective. But there was no communication between those who had designed the scoring system and those – like me- who had to use them. Normally, I just ask the teacher/judge sitting beside me to explain the complex scoring system. This time, however, the teachers beside me didn’t know either. And they didn’t seem to care. I asked them how we were supposed to score, and they just said they didn’t know. I guess we had to make it up as we went. I knew bad things were coming.

The desk lamps certainly didn’t help. We were sitting so low in our theater chairs that the lamps shone directly into our eyes and blinded us to what was going on on the stage. I tried to angle the light so that it illuminated our papers but didn’t shine in our eyes, but it wasn’t possible. In order to see the stage, I had to sit straight up and crane my neck over the lamp and shield my eyes. Then I’d have to dive back down in order to hurriedly fill out my endless forms. It was exhausting. A big problem was that there was no single score sheet. Each play had a separate sheet. Therefore, when we got to plays number 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. I couldn’t remember how I had scored the earlier plays. My thumbs and fingers went numb with the effort of constantly flipping back and forth through the pages as I compared the scores I had assigned to different plays.

Another problem was that I often didn’t know who was who in the plays. I had to assign a score to the best supporting actress, for example, but who was that? I had no idea half the time. There were as many as 40 students on stage at any one time, and they were running around like crazy in the most elaborate staging you can imagine. And they seemed to be in a race. There was never a pause between scenes. They just launched into their lines. I hoped I could depend on hearing names in order to identify various actors and actresses, but most of the time I couldn’t hear a word they were saying. Plus, to identify characters, I’d have to refer to the scripts in front of me and read along. But then I’d be missing the action on stage. Whenever I looked down at my papers, I’d be blinded by the desk lamp and it would take a second or two for my eyes to adjust. Again I’d have to wait for my eyes to adjust when I looked back up.

There was an enormous variation in the plays themselves, and that made it difficult to score them as well. Some of the scripts had clearly been written by the students themselves and the English was about what you’d expect – horrible. Other scripts had clearly been taken from somewhere because the English was perfect. No student I saw on that stage had the English ability to write it. How do you compare those two?

I’m probably expecting far too much from high school students, but I can’t say I was impressed with any of the plays. To be honest, it was hard to judge them because I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Sometimes it was because the music playing over the speakers was drowning out everything on stage. Sometimes it was because they spoke so fast and so poorly that I just couldn’t make out any words or sentences. The stories were also overly complex. Rather than tell a simple story with at most two scenes, they went for very complicated staging and plotting. I couldn’t keep track of what was going on as scene followed scene followed scene with a big new set for each scene. They put a lot of work into the backdrops and the props. However, as a judge, I’d have preferred it if they just kept it simple and clear – just spoke their lines loudly and stayed still. As it was, there was so much action and running around that the thumping of their feet on stage also drowned out the words. I started to wonder what the audience thought of all this. The audience was clearly right into it. They were laughing and enjoying themselves immensely. But I couldn’t imagine that they were enjoying the plays as stories. If I couldn’t understand what was being said, there is no way that they could. I think that all their enjoyment came from just recognizing their schoolmates on stage and laughing at their costumes. The biggest laughs, as always, were reserved for the boys in drag. It’s probably the same in high schools the world over, but it seems no students can resist the cheap and easy laugh of dressing up a boy in girls’ (very suggestive) clothing. Fair enough, but I get tired of it when practically every play has a boy dressed as a girl and prancing around. When you stage a version of Alice in Wonderland, I figure that Alice at least should be played seriously. If your best actor with the best English is a boy, then it’s fair game to dress him as Alice. But he should play it straight as a girl and not ham it up for cheap laughs.

A big part of my participation at these events is to stand up at the end and give a speech. To that end, I keep notes during the performance and then try to shape them into some kind of coherent speech. I generally don’t focus on the plays. By the end, I’ve lost all track of the plays and can’t remember what happened in any of them. There are just too many of them and they come at you so fast. So, I tend to focus on the English and English pronunciation. It has gone relatively well at other performances, but this time I had trouble organizing my thoughts. My notes refused to take shape, and I just had a jumble of random thoughts and phrases.

I was dreading when the plays ended and the final judging began. It can go one of two ways. The rational schools will collect our score sheets and give them to someone with a computer. This person enters our score into a pre-organized spreadsheet and the winners are chosen based on who got the highest scores. This makes sense. If you don’t do this, what was the point of the incredibly complex score sheets? The other way it can go is that the judges will then retire to a room somewhere to choose winners. I was hoping, hoping, hoping, hoping and hoping that it wouldn’t go this way, but one of the judges stood up and said “Shall we find another room?” My heart sank (again) and we all traipsed after him out of the auditorium.

It was chaos out in the hallways as the students were reveling in post-performance hi-jinks. We, the honored judges, seemed irrelevant. The students didn’t even seem to notice us, and we had to fight our way through the heaving crowd. It turned out we really did have to “find” another room. There was no room prepared, and we wandered the halls and went up and down a couple of staircases as we tried to find an open room that had a table and some chairs. We found one, and we all settled down in chairs and it was then that the guy who was kind of the head judge turned to us all and said something like “OK, how do you want to choose the winners?” My hopes for an easy process were dashed.

I had made a strong effort and had filled out my score sheets completely. I had a valid score for every category for every single play. I had signed every score sheet at the bottom as we are supposed to do. Some judges hadn’t filled out anything! They’d just made some random notes about each play. Other judges had filled out score sheets for some plays but not for others. The judges clearly expected us to sit down now and have a big discussion and debate and choose the winners. My brain exploded.

I could understand a discussion like that if we were choosing one or two winners. We could discuss which plays should get first, second, and third place. That’s fine. But to sit down at this point and choose first, second, and third place for all of those categories was insane. I was surprised (actually, not really) that anyone could think that was a rational approach. They actually turned to me and really seemed to want me to take the lead in this as if I was some kind of expert. I said what I believed – that we had our individual scores on these score sheets. At least I did. We should add up those scores, get the average, and those with the highest scores should win. Period. Simple. Rational.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. I won’t go into the long and agonizing process that followed. It would be too painful to recount. I’ll just say that even when the process got started and we began to add up scores and choose winners, the lead judge then said that we had to make sure that all the different classes won something. We had to spread out the prizes so that everybody won. I didn’t actually put my fist through the wall, but I thought about it. I have no problem with the idea of giving prizes to everyone. I really don’t care. But if this was a concern, it should have been taken into account from the beginning.

As we sat in this room and the minutes ticked by, two women kept coming to see if we were finished yet. I didn’t know it, but these two women were the hosts of the event. When we finally went back to the auditorium with the winners chosen, they kicked off the ceremony with a pretty good joke. They said that since it was late, they couldn’t announce the winners today and that everyone could see the list of winners on the school website. Everyone, including me, was taken in by this. The students got up to leave. I was so happy because it was over. But then the lights came back up and the women said they were joking.

They were very good hosts and presented the prizes in a very entertaining way. One class ended up getting most of the prizes anyway. It’s hard to see how that wouldn’t happen. The best Actor is generally from the best Play and that play generally has the best Script, etc. It’s not easy to divide those up. In the end, I agreed with the lead judge that prizes should have been distributed to all the classes. The students didn’t seem to care much who had the best play and who was the best actor. They were all just having fun, and more than anything they wanted to cheer for their class. They didn’t care what for. They just wanted to cheer and go crazy. It was more of a pep rally than a drama contest. I felt bad when one class kept getting to cheer over and over again. And they didn’t just applaud. They went nuts. They were reacting as if they had won the greatest prize in the history of the universe. I didn’t even think they had the best play. I had voted strongly for other plays. It’s just that their play had had a clear moral message, and teachers in Taiwan always seem to award prizes to things with moral messages. They really look for them. I was judging the plays based on the English and acting. I didn’t care whether the play had a moral, and I noticed that my scores were almost always at odds with the scores of the other judges.

My speech, I should say, was a disaster. I was exhausted and stressed out. My notes were a jumble. And I didn’t really know what to say. I wasn’t sure who was in the audience at that time. Had they seen all the plays? Were they the actors themselves or other students as well? I certainly couldn’t just speak from the heart. I honestly had liked very little about any of the plays. So I couldn’t really praise them without being a total hypocrite. So I focused on the English, and that didn’t seem to go over very well. I got a huge round of applause when I stood up and I made a joke that the applause made me feel like a movie star. That went over well. However, my comments about acting and speaking English just ran hollowly in my ears. Perhaps it wasn’t that bad, but it didn’t feel like it worked and I stumbled towards the end and sat down to lukewarm applause.

When the final prize was awarded and the event came to a close, it was as if someone had announced free iPads in the courtyard. There was a massive rush to the exit. All the other judges had vanished and I was there on my own feeling quite out of place. Again, I had the sense that the adults in the room were inconsequential, that the school belonged to the students. This was their turf and we judges and teachers were just tolerated. No student looked at me or indicated that they were aware of me as I joined the mass crowd. It was impossible to make my way through the press of students in the hall and I simply hung back for a long while until the crowds started to thin. There was no way I was going to try to take the sole elevator, and I fell in with the stream of students heading down the stairs. I had no idea how to get back to the school’s main building and then out of the school. I just followed the flow of students and hoped I’d eventually find some kind of exit. I felt bad that I hadn’t said goodbye to the other judges, but they had disappeared so quickly I didn’t have a chance. And there was no way I could find the teacher room again. I’d be lucky just to find the main exit.

After much wandering and climbing from level to level back at the main school, I looked out a window and saw what looked like the exit. I went out amongst hundreds of students leaving the school. I didn’t know if they had been part of the drama contest or not, and I felt anonymous among them. My plan was to walk back to the MRT station where this adventure had begun, but I had no idea which way to go. It was now dark and I didn’t recognize anything around me. I had even taken a picture of the neighborhood map at the MRT station, but looking at it on my digital camera didn’t help me. I didn’t have a starting point. So I walked along until I got out of the huge crush of students at the bus stops and I hailed a taxi to take me back to the office. It was raining and my feet were soaking wet and traffic was practically at a standstill. It seemed to take us forever and I kept wondering if I should just jump out of the taxi when I saw an MRT station. I thought it would be faster.

I eventually got back to the office, and I was practically bouncing off the walls with the accumulated energy from this event. Other editors from my company seem to take these events in their stride. They come back and just sit down and go back to work. They never seem to have to unload forty minutes of stories just to get it out of their system. One coworker commented that I actually looked green. I was so exhausted by the experience that my face had a greenish hue. I talked endlessly about the drama contest and finally left the office long after the official closing time. That energy level stayed with me the whole night and then until the next morning. When I went back to work, I was still thinking about it. I was glad to hear, though, that my normal facial tones had returned. I wasn’t pale green anymore – at least until my next drama contest next week. Actually, I’m scheduled to judge a drama contest on Wednesday and a singing contest on Friday. Wish me luck.

 

Tags: Best Supporting Actor, job, MRT, Red Sea, Taiwan