Jackie Chan, Giant Hands, and the Dosey Doe

I am going to attempt to describe what I witnessed at the Guangdong International Tourism and Cultural festival that the Shenzhen Education Bureau carted us off to last weekend, but it won’t be easy. Let’s just say that floats, dancers, singers, fireworks, cars, opera, drums, giant foam hands, girls dressed as cakes, butterflies on roller blades, and Jackie Chan, among other things, were all involved.

Like everything else in China, this show was done on a colossal scale and involved massive amounts of people. There seemed to be almost as many performers as guests. Only in China, where there are 1.3 billion people, could this sort of man power be utilized just to promote tourism in one province of the country. If you watched the opening ceremony of the Olympics, you may be able to envision this show better than others. It was on a smaller scale, but it used similar techniques—huge dance ensembles set to music, lights, and fireworks with a pop singer or two added to the mix.

It was over the top, glittery, random, and so Chinese—I loved it. The cherry on top was definitely when Jackie Chan stepped out of an actual airplane that rolled onto the stage, and people dressed as giant hands with smiley faces (envision the Hamburger Helper hand) came running out and proceeded to dance around while Jackie Chan sang. To me it was utterly bizarre and hilarious, but to the Chinese people around me it was a typical show in China. Through my American lens, it was a comedic actor who really can’t sing running around with a bunch of people ridiculously dressed as giant hands, but to the Chinese people, it was a national icon singing about their country’s pride and the hands were a symbol of people working together. The song was entitled “We are Ready.” While, I had no idea what Jackie Chan was saying since it was in Chinese, from the title’s translation, I assumed it was a song about China being ready to take its place in the world. I may be completely wrong, but I think it’s as good a guess as any. Everything here is about the group, the people, the country.

The other day I realized just how much this group mentality is engrained into the people here. My school had its own opening ceremony for its sports day. The students all lined up by class and marched in unison around the track. They then proceeded to do their morning exercises in front of a panel of judges who decided which class was the best. Every morning I am awoken by kids shouting “yi (one), er (two), san (three), su (four), and the sound of the music that accompanies these “exercises.” I have never really watched these exercises until today during the opening ceremony. Each class lines up in two vertical rows (boys in one row and girls in the other row) with one head student a few feet out front. Then the music starts, and in as perfect unison as possible they perform a sort of dance involving head turning, arm waving, toe touching, clapping, and leg kicking—and that is just the first song. They then proceed to a second song that involves the girls partnering with the boys to dance Dosey Doe style. Each class performed with the other classes in their grade in front of the judges all the way down to the first graders.

My fellow foreign teacher friends and I have discussed how this marching, dancing, and chanting in unison is somewhat disturbing to us. There is something unsettling to our individualist minds to see a bunch of children marching to the beat of numbers being shouted at them over a microphone like they are in the army instead of primary school. But then I think about my elementary school experience—standing in lines to walk between classes, flag raising ceremonies, saying the pledge of allegiance, performing in school plays—and I realize that it isn’t that much different. I was once told by a college professor that schools are the most powerful political institutions because they teach children what they believe is the right way to be a good citizen. So, my students are being trained to be good Chinese citizens just as I was trained to be a good American citizen.

What a good citizen entails may be different here than in America, but the concept is similar. Teach them discipline so that later they will obey authority figures and the law. If I compare the sixth graders to the first graders I can see how six years of morning exercises has changed them. The sixth graders take the exercises seriously. They stand straight and even Dosey Doe without a smile. They depend on their student leader for guidance, and they follow instructions well. The first graders on the other hand have no idea what this exercise thing is all about, so they smile, giggle, and stare off into space. Their leader isn’t much different, maybe just calmer. Most of this behavior of course is the difference between a 6 year old and a 12 year old, but it makes me a little sad that in a few years these 6 year olds won’t smile anymore when they Dosey Doe. One thing is for sure though; I and my fellow Chinese teachers could not stop smiling as we watched the first graders do their exercises. I mean how scary can a smiling six year old with pink-bowed pigtails be? The best was the little boy in the middle who just stood there bewildered. I wanted to say to him, “Me too, buddy, me too, I have no idea what these kids are doing.” And to the little girl in the front who was completely off beat with the rest of the kids, but smiling and rocking out to the music in her own way, I wanted to throw out every American individualistic cliché I could think of—“You go girl! Keep marching to your own drum! Be yourself! Don’t become another giant foam hand! At least become a Jackie Chan!”