Phone Calls and Gong Fu

Beijing Yue Yan Dauxue (my school) likes to send foreign students on free trips around Beijing. Tonight, it's a Gong-fu (Kung fu) show at the Red Theater. We fill 3 tour buses for the 45 minute drive across the city. With our tickets in-hand and an hour to kill after arrival, some of us decide to go eat dinner at a restaurant near the theater. It's a very strange meal, as the crotchety restaurant owner continually shoves a cell phone in our hands and makes us talk to potential customers who keep calling her but don't seem to know any Chinese. Some places here have a very different perspective on customer service.

After dinner, we walk back to the theater, pushing through vendors with fake watches and cheap, terribly-made traditional musical instruments. One woman seems to think following us while playing Yankee Doodle on one will make us want to buy them. We throw what is left of our drink bottles into the trash before we go inside, and almost immediately people clammer through the bins to retrieve them. It's so strange that what would be litter in the United States can be left virtually anywhere and someone will quickly come along to use it.

When the show starts and the artists emmerge, flashbulbs start going off all over the dark theater. It takes almost an entire act for the ushers to make everyone stop. But the show is very cool. It's like a ballet, but with weapons and gong fu. A screen at the top of the stage narrarates the story, which is about a boy who becomes a gong fu monk, and overcomes numerous problems before becoming an ultimate gong fu monk master. Numerous little kids do crazy flips that involve bouncing on their own heads. At one point, the gong fu monk balances his stomach on a giant spike, while his friends spin him around. Another, he lies on a bed of nails with another sheet of nails lying facedown on his stomach, as another man lies on top on them and yet another breaks a giant rock on the second man's chest. Later, the gong fu monk falls in love (oh noes!!) and does a delicate dance with a woman, suspended on wires over the stage. The show ends with fake snow and lots of candles as the man becomes the new abbot of the monastery. It is amazingly cool, and the synchronized gong fu moves are mind-blowingly complex at times.

It's a little bit late when we get back to campus, but the show has been a nice break from immersion class monotany.