*With Chinese Characteristics
(This is Part Two of my attempt to communicate the wonder of a “Christmas Show” in a Chinese college. Part ONE is here. There were pictures.)
When we last electronically met, I recounted my first-row scribbled impressions of an event the likes of which few Ontario basketball coaches get to experience. We made it to Act the Sixth, but there was much more to come. This is a late report, but the show had few connections to any particular season, let alone Christmas. Speaking of which, Happy New Year. (Again.)
It wasn’t all sweetness and light (and singing), but a lot of it was.
ACT 7: Gold-lamé pants, white flowing blouses and pink ribbons. A rather gentle, oriental opening to the dance. BUT. Here come the heaving breasts, the hip thrusts and, my gosh, the friggin’ bass. Well, that was fairly sexual. Unfairly? [And hey: maybe the overwhelming percentage of female students in our college, in our entire university – it’s a Finance & Economics uni, which means female, while the technology school up the road skews massively male – makes this kind of dancing a biological imperative. It pays to advertise, and all that. Come to think of it, maybe it’s not just that it’s a rich-kid college that makes the hallways so often look like a dance-club anteroom. Minis and heels and spangles. I’m beginning to detect a theme. The young men in our school are a pampered lot, in more ways than two, and yet Chinese reserve is such that most guys barely talk to their female classmates. Missed opportunities.]
ACT 8: This looks Japanese to me, which all will instantly deny. White-draped, angelic young women demurely wave feathery fans. They’re wearing what I’d call harem pants if they weren’t so clearly, well, East Asian. Expensive costumes, kids! [And from the Should’ve Known Better File: these, too, are all rentals. There must be some junior staffer whose entire job was costumes. Amazing. Money has been spent.] That was quite lovely, a sweet tonic.
ACT 9: Here they come! the sort-of-English-speaking MC warns. The tonic didn’t last – it’s back to black leather hotpants!