I went to two school events this week for my company (an ESL publishing firm in Taipei, Taiwan). I was sent there to serve as a special judge for school English contests. The first was a drama contest at a junior high school here in Taipei. If I had written about it directly afterward, I’d probably have been inspired to write like a madman. These events – as anyone who read my previous account knows – can be quite the adventure and I come out of them with my head in a whirl. This one, though even larger in scale, was well organized and wasn’t quite as much of a challenge.

All of these events begin the same way: a sales rep from my company picks me up at a pre-arranged MRT station and drives me to the school. I’ve had some crazy rides in the past, including one during which we drifted into a highway barrier and scraped up the side of the car. This time, the sales rep had had his daily accident BEFORE he picked me up, so I was relatively safe. I knew he had had the accident because as we were waiting at a red light, he dug around in the back seat until he emerged with a digital camera on which he had photos of the accident. By then, I was just wishing he’d keep his eyes on the road. He had the disconcerting habit of just drifting from lane to lane while he figured out where to go, and, simultaneously, how to get his defunct cell phone working.

Sales rep cars are as interesting a breed as the drivers. The back seats are generally filled with boxes of my company’s magazines, books, and other products. The front of the car is equally jumbled but with electronic gadgetry. These guys practically live in their cars and they can’t resist the urge to fill them with toys of every variety. There can be GPS units, video monitors showing a feed from the rear and front of the car, and every other electronic thing you can think of. A dozen or more objects generally hang from the rearview mirror. Then there are the chargers for their various cell phones, MP3 players, and other devices. Cords run everywhere and are linked together with various adapters. Maybe all cars look like that these days, but these are the only cars I ever get in.

My guy took off from the MRT station and promptly drifted across three lanes to the middle, all the while looking to the right for something. He seemed to be looking for a lane to turn down on the right, which was odd, since the car was going in the opposite direction to the left. He gave up on finding that lane and instead did a fast U-turn through an intersection. I’ve never found out whether this is a legal turn in Taiwan. Some intersections are clearly designed for this kind of U-turn. But I don’t know if that means it’s technically legal to do it everywhere.

We then started heading north through some complicated highways and byways to get us across the river. At one point, a gravel truck turned right in front of us at an intersection. My guy had to hit the brakes hard to avoid slamming into the truck. He gave the truck driver a blast of his horn to show his displeasure. At some places, my guy drove aggressively. At others, he held back and wouldn’t even make a left turn when there was clearly more than enough time to do so. This caused the traffic behind us to get backed up and blast us with their horns in turn. I was never quite sure what was going to happen, and I was more than happy to finally arrive at the school.

On the way, the sales rep asked me if I had eaten lunch. This is a big concern in Taiwan. If you want to cause total panic and concern, just tell someone that you haven’t eaten lunch. That’s a tragedy to equal anything on the planet. I assured him that I had eaten lunch (though I hadn’t). Then he asked me if I wanted any water or perhaps some tea. I’m often asked things like this and I instinctively just say no because I generally don’t understand the question. There is a strong current of hospitality in the Taiwanese people and taking someone up on one of these offers can lead to a lot of problems. I had the impression, for example, that if I told this sales rep that I hadn’t eaten lunch, he would have driven me to a restaurant and then the whole school would have to wait an hour for me to finish and then show up at the drama competition. And they’d probably wait. In this case, I made a language mistake. Instead of saying a simple “No” to his question, I said, “No, thanks. I’m okay.” Apparently he only heard the word “okay”, because he suddenly pulled into a convenience store and ran inside. He came out a minute later with BOTH a bottle of water and a bottle of green tea. I’m probably lucky he didn’t come out with a complete lunch. Turns out the school had prepared a very large and nice snack box for me anyway with a big sandwich, cake, pudding, and other goodies. I felt bad that I couldn’t eat any of this at the time. I was too busy judging.

The school was one of the more pleasant ones in my experience. It was quite open and spacious with lots of greenery. It backed onto a large city park with lots of hills covered in trees and plants. The sales rep took me to the teacher’s office first. There, we ran into a bit of a wrinkle. I was asked to sign an official form beside my name. Unfortunately, my name wasn’t there. They had the name of one of my coworkers. It turns out they were expecting someone else. This was a problem because they had prepared a very nice certificate of appreciation and now it had to be redone with a new name on it. They managed it though. They had to present me with the wrong certificate for the ceremony, but then they gave me a new one with my name on it. It was very nice of them.

The drama contest took place in a large gymnasium with a stage at the front. There were 14 classes participating, which meant I had to judge 14 plays. That’s a lot, and I settled in for the long haul. It looked like the contest was going to run over four hours. The judges – there were about ten of us – were ranged along a set of tables at the very front. The students all sat on the floor of the gymnasium behind us. In between was an audio-visual control center with large video cameras on tripods all hooked up to computers. I felt sorry for the students in that they had to sit on the floor for all of that time. I know my back never would have been able to handle that even when I was a teenager. I need a backrest. However, I was told that students are quite used to it here and to sit there for that long wasn’t a problem at all. I hope that’s true.

My scoring forms were fairly well organized and filling them out wasn’t an overwhelming challenge. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to keep up with it and make notes for my speech later. The plays were actually quite imaginative. They’d put a lot of work into them, and if they’d adjusted just one or two things, they might have been very enjoyable. As it was, the students spoke far too fast for me to make out what they were saying. And the plays generally had numerous scenes – as many as eight scenes for a ten-minute play. That meant lots of stage changes. This was done frantically with lots of running back and forth across the now-darkened stage. Perhaps the pace of the stage changes created this hurried atmosphere, because once the lights came up again, the students would launch into their lines instantly and just go at a breakneck pace. There wasn’t much intonation in their voices either, and with the loud music over the speakers and the thumping sounds of their feet on the stage, I found it impossible to understand what they were saying. Luckily, unlike the theater I had been in last time, this gymnasium was never completely dark and I could read the scripts while the plays were going on. This allowed me to follow the stories. I just wanted them to slow down and take their time and give the audience a chance to get settled before they launched into the next scene.

The plays were also very large and complicated and required a narrator to set up the story and then explain the situation for each scene as it unfolded. The narrators, though, seemed to have this idea that they were supposed to fade into the background. They delivered the narration in a fast monotone and I could not follow what they were saying. They used no hand motions or body language and no intonation, so they didn’t create any kind of tension or suspense or interest in the action to come. Most of the students in the audience just chatted amongst themselves through it all and paid no attention at all. Again, without the script in front of me, I would have been completely lost.

The exception to this pattern always seems to be the evil Queen in Snow White. I’ve seen Snow White at least a dozen times now, and the Queen is always a highlight. There’s something about that scene that draws out the Shakespearean side of the students. The Queen goes for broke and goes over the top and it’s always very enjoyable. Often, the queen is played by a boy, but they don’t play it for laughs. They take it seriously and throw themselves into the role. Perhaps it is because the scene is almost a monologue – it’s the Queen talking to the magic mirror. This scene also seems to have a big impact on the judges. I believe Snow White won first prize at this contest and I think it was largely based on the Queen’s performance. I had not scored Snow White very high because it was only the Queen that was impressive. The other characters were not performed as well. And despite the dramatic acting of the Queen, I still couldn’t understand much that the actor said. There were other plays that I thought were much better and the English pronunciation was much better.

My favorite was an adaptation of Aesop’s fable “The Honest Woodman.” The play opened with a woodcutter with his axe, but then the narrator called everything to a halt and sent the woodcutter off stage. No, this was a modern story of an honest businessman and his old cell phone. The fairy in the river offered him things like golden iPhones to replace his old cell phone – a serious temptation for anyone these days. It was even more of a temptation because the play had established that this poor man was ridiculed by all the pretty girls because of his cheap and old cell phone. He remained honest though, and said that the iPhones were not his, and of course the fairy rewarded him with a giant stack of brand new silver and gold iPhones. It was very funny and well done. It even ended with a sly joke as one of the pretty girls tried to trick the river fairy into giving her a brand new Gucci handbag.

Another favorite of mine was, I believe, based on one of the Grimm Brothers fairy tales: the Town Musicians of Bremen. I enjoyed this one largely because the boy who played the main role of a sheep had excellent English and I understood every word. There were far too many goofy and funny moments in all these plays to recount them all. It was just too bad that there wasn’t a more relaxed pace to the performance with a clearer and simpler delivery of the lines. I think part of the problem was that the plays were written with fairly difficult English – difficult vocabulary and long sentences. It might have been easy for them to write, but it was not so easy to speak those lines clearly.

My speech is now a blur in my memory. I think I started well, but I got distracted by the booming sound of my voice in the microphone and then by the sense that the students were all talking amongst themselves while I was speaking. I wanted to talk about the different plays and what I enjoyed about them, but I had no simple way to refer to them. The students tend to recognize their class numbers and that’s all. Four classes, for example, had all performed the same play, so I couldn’t talk about them using the name of the play. But this time, I didn’t have any class numbers associated with the performances. So I was kind of stuck. I ended up just talking about the importance of speaking slowly and clearly. I also mentioned a lot of the standard pronunciation problems. I talked about this at length because I had been asked to select the five best English speakers in the plays, and I talked about what made their delivery better.

There were tons of speeches, actually. Nearly every judge was given the chance to give comments, and some clearly liked hearing themselves speak. It’s probably an occupational hazard amongst teachers. Then came the presentation of the prizes, and by the time things wrapped up, I felt I had been there a very, very long time. Despite the length of the event, when it ended, I had the sense of being hustled out the door. I think this happens out of a sense of hospitality. I generally, once the stress of the event is over, don’t mind hanging out and meeting people and chatting and shaking hands and that sort of thing. However, I rarely get the chance to do that. I’m either forgotten in the mad rush of the students heading for the exits, or I’m escorted out and to a taxi by a teacher within seconds of the event ending. I think they don’t want to take any more of my time and feel the polite thing to do is let me go. They don’t realize that I’d feel more comfortable sticking around and chatting with teachers or students. I’d feel like I’m giving more that way. I could insist on staying, but I’m not sure if that would be imposing on them. Perhaps they are hustling me out the door not because they are being polite but because they are trying to get rid of me. I just don’t know.

The other big event was a singing contest. It was a complete contrast in every way. For one thing, the sales rep was an awesome driver. I couldn’t believe it. He signaled for all his turns and even for his lane changes. It was a good thing, because the school was located in Shihding – a small town quite a ways from Taipei in the mountains. Getting there required navigating some very complex highways and interchanges. I know that area quite well from my scooter trips, but I was still completely lost. Scooters are not allowed on the big highways like National Highway #3 and National Highway #5, so I’m not familiar with them. I always take all the small roads. The sales rep took this long and roundabout route on the big highways because in the end it’s faster because of the higher speeds. It’s a freaky trip though because it involves some very long tunnels. National Highway #5 is a relatively new highway connecting Taipei with Yilan on the coast. It was made possible by tunneling underneath the mountains. I don’t know if we went through it on this trip, but the longest tunnel on this highway is the Hsuehshan Tunnel. At 12.942 kilometers, it’s actually the fifth longest highway tunnel in the world.

The contest was held in an auditorium and involved the whole school. Two students were rehearsing their hosting routine when I arrived and got my pre-contest briefing. The scoring looked reasonable – just 8 songs, and, though the scores were divided up over six categories, I only had to come up with a single mark out of 100 for each song. But then everything suddenly changed and I also had to select the best performer for about 10 other categories. I really didn’t understand it and then just as the contest was about to begin they told me they had changed some other stuff in the judging. By then, I’d lost all track of what I was supposed to do and I just did my best.

Things got crazy fast once the students arrived. The noise level went through the roof, and they didn’t really quiet down for anything. I’m always surprised at that. The Taiwanese are very polite and friendly and I have this idea that education and respect for elders is super important in their society. However, at these contests, the students seem able to do whatever they want and the teachers don’t control them. The teacher in charge of everything was screaming directions into a microphone but the students just kept on talking amongst themselves. The two hosts for the event – Janice and Michelle – had written an excellent series of jokes and introductions for each song, but no one listened to them. They were nearly drowned out by the talking and shouting and yelling of the audience. I kept expecting a teacher to come down hard on them, but no one ever did. Even when the principal – an older man – got up to speak no one paid much attention. This seemed even odder to me when during the prize-giving, the students all had to give a military salute and a bow to the principal. This rigorous discipline seemed at odds with the chaos generally.

The songs weren’t that impressive. They’d all chosen pop and rock songs (mostly love songs and rock standards like Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”) and there really isn’t much melody in songs like that for people to work with. These songs depend on electric guitars and drums and the repetitive chorus to move them along. Take those instruments away, and there isn’t very much left to sing. Two out of the set of eight songs had some performance quality to them with the girls singing one part and then the boys another. One song had two violins and a piano as accompaniment. These were the songs that won all the prizes. The rest were fairly unremarkable – about what you’d expect a high school class to come up with on short notice. Still, there was a lot of energy and excitement (two classes threw candy into the audience, and a piece smacked me hard in the forehead), and I kept reminding myself that these were high school students singing songs in a foreign language. I shouldn’t judge them as if I were at the Grammy’s. Imagine a group of students in Canada trying to sing a song in Chinese!

This time the scoring sheet didn’t have the names of the songs on it, but it did have the class numbers. So I could keep notes about each performance and when the songs were over, I had things I could say about each song and I singled out each class by class number. Then I commented on the things that I had liked about their performance. It went well, I thought. When I went up on stage, I took the microphone and then just stood there and held it at my side for a very long time. The students had been talking very loudly and not paying attention. So I decided to wait them out. Slowly, students started to look at the stage to see what was going on. Then they started to shush their neighbors until there was complete silence. Only then did I begin to speak. When I made a joke or got them to applaud about something I waited again until there was complete silence before I spoke. Once they got the idea that I was just going to stand there until it was quiet, they were quite willing to listen. To my surprise, that mood stayed throughout the rest of the event. The students were suddenly quiet all the time even when the other judges gave their comments and then when the principal and I presented the prizes.

It was a nice event. It felt friendly and relaxed. This might have been because it was a smaller school and one in a small town outside of Taipei. I posed for pictures with the winners and then with different classes. Lots of students shook my hand and wanted to chat for a while. I was told a number of times how handsome I was. That’s never a bad thing.

The drive back was just as uneventful as the drive out – a smooth and professional drive along Taiwan’s best and biggest highways. It felt like a successful event.

My other big event (non-work related) for the week was an evening performance at the National Concert Hall. I’ve been going to see classical music concerts at Zhongshan Hall, but I also had my eye on the National Concert Hall and the National Theater. These are kind of twin buildings at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Park (now called the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Park). The concert hall and the theater look like traditional Chinese palaces and they are world-class performance venues. It’s only lately that I’ve figured out how to go to these places, and I got hold of their programs and managed to get a row 4 seat for a Thursday-night performance called “Ultimate Beethoven.” It featured Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra (referred to by those in the know as simply the NSO) playing Beethoven’s 2nd and 8th symphonies as well as the Triple Concerto. The Triple Concerto for piano, violin, and cello featured three well-known performers: Nai-Yan Hu on violin, Gwhyneth Chen on piano, and Wen-Sinn Yang on cello.

The NSO is a young orchestra having been founded in 1986, and it has a strong following in Taiwan. Their performances are always sold out and the audience is extraordinary in that it consists of all ages. Lots of young children and teenagers as well as adults come to hear classical music. This has surprised me a lot. And I’m not talking about surly teenagers forced to come by their parents. At this event, I saw several groups of ten to twelve teenagers who were there on their own and clearly were very excited about it. Then there were large numbers of children under ten years old sitting quietly for the entire three hours of the performance.

I went on my own, and I struck up a conversation with the young man sitting beside me. He was a Taiwanese graduate student studying English literature. He was there on his own as well and was a self-professed music lover. He knew everything about the NSO and the pieces of music we were about to hear. He said that it was a rare event to hear Beethoven’s Triple Concerto played and it was even more special because of the caliber of the soloists who had been assembled for it. We had a good chat during the intermissions and he kept me informed about what was going on.

 

The best part of the evening for me was the byplay between the violin and the cello during the Triple Concerto. Each instrument would take over the melody from the other and the music would go back and forth between them and then to the piano and the rest of the orchestra. The cello player, Wen-Sinn Yang, had a very expressive face and he threw himself into his playing. He was a joy to watch and to listen to.

Being in the fourth row so close to the stage and right in the middle, I could see everything clearly and get the full impact of the music. It’s astonishing that those instruments can produce such a large sound without any amplification. I did miss, however, the view I got from the balcony in Zhongshan Hall. From the balcony, I could see all the instruments. Being right up front at the National Concert Hall, I could really only see the first two rows of musicians. Those in the back – the wind and percussion instruments – were hidden from view. I think I’d prefer to sit in the balcony just to get that view. However, the balcony at the National Concert Hall is set quite far back from the stage. I’m not sure if the views would be as good from up there. I think I’ll try to get a seat there in the future and see for myself.

This weekend, I’m going to another classical concert at Zhongshan Hall. I’m looking forward to that. And then I’ll be going to see an opera – Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle – at the National Theater. I’m definitely getting my culture on these days.

I should quickly mention one other thing from this week. I’ve continued to go to the Latin American film festival at the Spot. It continues until January 6th, and I have about seven other movies I’d like to see. This past week, I went to see a Bolivian movie called American Visa. It was an odd film in many ways. It had clearly cost real money to make. There were many dramatic and beautiful aerial shots of the Andean mountains and of La Paz. There were also very involved shots on the streets of La Paz and inside clubs involving lots of extras and elaborate sets. I loved the shots of La Paz and seeing them intensified my desire to someday go there and see this city for myself. It looks like a place I could happily hang out in for weeks if not months.

The story was also quite big and ambitious involving crime and corruption and life-threatening situations and love. Yet, there was something amateurish about it. Perhaps it was the acting. Perhaps it was a certain tonal problem. Maybe it was because I never really believed in the love story. The hero was far too flawed to inspire that kind of love in the woman. There was something weird about it and I didn’t really believe the two lead characters or their motivations. The lead actor certainly didn’t inspire any sympathy on my part. He seemed cowardly and weak and self-centered, and I didn’t find myself rooting for him or identifying with him.

Of particular interest, though, was the way the film talked about the presence of western backpackers. Having done a bit of my own backpacking of this kind, I could relate to it. I often wonder how we appear to local people. The main characters in this film were not villagers or farmers. The man was educated. He was an English teacher with aspirations and ambitions. Yet, he felt trapped and felt life was hopeless in Bolivia. His big, big dream was, as the title suggests, to somehow get to the United States. His plan was to go there on a tourist visa and then remain to find work. He felt so trapped, and yet all around him were these young seemingly rich backpackers from North America and Europe – all with the freedom to go where they pleased and do what they want. If he was angry, it was easy to understand why.

I also enjoyed the small scale of the film. It showed, for example, the physical hardships of life there when you aren’t rich. The man was staying in a typical backpacker hotel in a room with a shared bath. Every morning, he would take an ice-cold shower. To do that takes effort. I took that same shower for months when I was staying in a cheap hotel in Quito, Ecuador. I knew exactly how this man felt when he was in that shower and he was scrubbing his body like crazy to just try to get through that ice-cold water. Then he’d step out of the shower and dance around like mad and scrub himself with the towel trying to get the blood flowing.

In the end, I enjoyed the movie. And, as I said, it certainly stoked the fire of my interest in finally one day going to Bolivia myself.

 

Tags: American Visa, music, National Concert Hall, Taipei, Taiwan