brother chun is all man

I can’t really sleep (I think I drank too much tea) so here’s one post for you.

Teaching a foreign language has been an interesting challenge for me, since I’m the kind of arsehole who has trouble keeping my syllables down. A friend once affectionately (euphemistically, I thought) said “you talk just like you write!” But usually the reaction is more like “why do you have to talk so weird?” which is what a classmate once asked me in second grade. At that age I probably had swapped the word “complicated” for “weird” to merit the question. Fifteen years and a comparative literature degree later, I can still drive my friends crazy by just uttering the word “postmodernism.”

But of course I can’t speak like this while I’m teaching – it wouldn’t just be uncool, it would be totally incomprehensible. Attempts to teach the word “characteristic” the other day, for instance, were attacked first with “It is something…that makes something else…special,” then with “It is what makes one thing different from all other things,” and finally “Screw it, let’s look in a dictionary.” In a way, I think this might be a good thing for me. A way to learn to speak in a more approachable fashion. I mean, a way to jive with people better. Hurr.

So after I cleared the way for my celebrity lesson (no, kids, they have nothing to do with celebrations), it was time for me to do even more learning. At one point in the lesson I asked students to brainstorm a list of all the celebrities they could think of in groups, then report back to me after five minutes.

The usual suspects appeared: Michael Jackson, Obama, Jackie Chan and Jay Chou. Some not-so-usual ones did too – Hammurabi and Darius I got to briefly confuse the class after a student pulled out a history textbook. Some ones that I didn’t expect at all showed up (while we Westerners consider “Poker Face” a guilty pleasure, turns out Lady Gaga is openly admired over here.)

In the next class I tried a new activity out, themed towards celebrities. I picked a letter, and kids from different teams would have to try to make a sentence about a celebrity that also started with that letter for a team point. Most were pretty simple: K, for instance, yielded “Kobe Bryant is a basketball player.” Good job kids.

Attempting to be a little more devious, I threw out the letter B, figuring that it would be hard to imagine a celebrity whose name started with B. Imagine my surprise when one of my normally-truculently-quiet-middle-schoolers bolted upright and shouted “Brother Chun is very handsome!” The class erupted in giggles and desk slappings.

I was happy to see everybody else so animated, but kind of puzzled too. “Who is Brother Chun?” I asked the class. They just giggled again. “Is he a celebrity?” I asked. They giggled even more. “What, it isn’t a he?” I asked. The two pronouns for “he” and “she” are almost interchangeable in Chinese, so Chinese ESL students often mix them up. I thought this might be why they were laughing. “Yes!” “No!” shouted back my students, who then dissolved into even more hysterical giggles. Puzzled, I moved on to the letter C. The boy shot back up again and yelled out “Brother Chun’s English name is Chris!” After we went over the rules again he amended, “Chris is Brother Chun’s English name!” Pandemonium again.

After class finished, some students ran up to my teacher’s podium and threw up some pictures of “Brother Chun,” stopping on a picture of a brute of a muscle man with the head of a prettyboy. The class went bonkers again. I stared at the projector screen, still a little bewildered, and asked a boy near me “What, is it because he looks like a girl?” He tittered. “It is because she IS a girl!”

Later in the office I looked up “Brother Chun” and found this entry. The girl’s real name is Li Yuchun, famous for winning the TV show “Super Girl,” a contest that is basically the same thing as “American Idol.” When I realized who she was, I faintly recalled my mother once watching Chinese television late at night back home in America, absorbed by what I thought was a silly dance variety show. “Mom, what are you doing?” I had asked her. She explained that all these people were voting on who they thought should win this contest, but nobody had expected that this androgenous tomboy (or, in Mom’s words, this “not very feminine” girl) would prove to be so popular with the Chinese audience. I could see that, given how every starlet I see on Chinese television is either a waif of a model or sporting military epaulets. (However, I was still a little bemused that my mom was watching it.)

As to whether or not my middle schoolers’ reaction constituted a revealing glimpse into modern China’s attitude towards gender roles and feminist theory, I don’t know. They’re 14-year-olds whose boys shout out “Sexy!” every time I show a picture with a girl in it. (Well, except for this girl.) But what they did do quite adeptly was somehow bypass in a second all of China’s censorship software to find Brother Chun’s head photoshopped onto Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body, over the caption “Brother Chun is all man.” Take another look at the Wikipedia page that I found Chun Ge under and see for yourself: a list of 10 Internet memes designed to either get around or poke fun at “The Great Firewall of China.” Like our lolcats, except adapted for more scrutinized circumstances (another shameless plug for that essay, hee hee).