conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
October 22, 2006 at 6:14 am
· Filed under random
Last night, my aunt was watching some kind of TV show where it was recapping this singing/talent contest and showing the highlights of the winners and top finishers. She was especially enthralled with this one guy who has a falsetto that makes him sound like a woman and made sure I stuck around until they showed the clip of his performance.
When he first came onstage, he wore a suit-like outfit, so you knew he was a “he”. He would also go back and forth between singing in the falsetto, and his normal tenor-esque voice, so you could tell he was a normal guy with a normal voice. I joked that he can sing songs with two voice parts by himself (think Picture with Sheryl Crow and Kidrock), which to me seemed kinda cool, but also kinda disturbing.
The second part of his act involved singing an excerpt of the female part from a famous Chinese opera piece. To fool us even more into thinking he’s a “she”, he dressed up, too. My aunt kept going on and on about how pretty he looked, how so very convincing he was as a woman. I timidly glanced around the room (my uncle and mom were also in the room), and realized that nobody else found this strange.
The words on the tip of my tongue that I never said were, “Um, what would possess any guy to do this and make himself look gay?” but the culture of being gay doesn’t exist here. Nobody else found it strange that a perfectly normal straight guy would impersonate a woman in all seriousness in a national singing competition. Go figure.
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Wait, how do you know he IS a “normal straight guy”?
I think you are talking about 李玉刚 from the show 星光大道 on CCTV. Frankly there are too many of these silly singing competition shows these days, but you bring up an interesting point about gender roles in these Chinese ‘art’ and entertainment shows. Here’s a discussion.
http://ent.gansudaily.com.cn/system/2006/09/01/010120796.shtml
You may know two other singing competition shows. One is called Super Woman Voice (超级女声), which has been going on for about three years, and the other new one is Good Boy (好男儿). The article talks about these, basically saying the female contestants on 超女 have an asexual look about them and the male contestants on 好男儿 are kind of ’soft,’ concluding that this can be either a reflection of traditional ‘ideals’ or a reflection of gender culture complexity in modern China. I don’t think I buy this argument completely, but it’s an interesting argument.
Maybe there is no ‘gay culture’ in the open, but then maybe also the performing arts become a place for people seeking that? The movie “Farewell My Concubine” comes to mind.
Shan wrote @ October 24th, 2006 at 8:54 am
Farewell My Concubine definitely comes to mind, but if I remember correctly, the movie’s officially banned in China, is it not? Also, wangyugang’s operatic excerpt was from Farewell My Concubine … telling? interesting at the very least.
The traditional ideal of a man is indeed that of the 奶油小生. It’s interesting that this ideal would develop. Even 红楼梦 lead male character is described ideally as “almost like a woman”. I think perhaps it comes from the idea of “文武”. The 文人 are delicate because they do no labor, and thus is more ideally womanlike?
That’s right, I think Farewell My Concubine was banned (albeit it was for the political content), and then unbanned but never publically shown. I’m not in China, though, if that was what you were wondering about.
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