Ass Wide Shut

My daughter Lulu and I appear semi-regularly on Chinese tv. This is no great cause for celebration, because if you’re a foreigner and you hang out here long enough, you pretty much always end up being offered a show of your own. (I actually have filmed more than one pilot and never at my own expense.) I used to appear regularly on a children’s show as Miss Sunshine. The awfulness of my part was compounded by the fact I wrote the segment I appeared on. Fifteen minutes a day I bored small children with my toothy grin while spouting great lines such as, “Yes, the monkey is playing with a cock!” Lulu was a child star, which meant a lot of variety shows, sometimes as the Precocious Child Star, sometimes merely as Foreign Kid. In our defense, we never watched ourselves on TV, and seldom knew the name of the shows we were on. We didn’t ask anyone to watch us, partly out of modesty, and partly out of apathy: We knew how bad we were and couldn’t think of any reason why we’d want to share that joy. We were often requested to appear together, but were seldom invited back as a team. We are, you see, incorrigible.

I don’t mean we’re rude. We don’t complain about the box lunches, or the working conditions, or the 22-hour shoots. (Well, I did complain once about my hair do in Heilongjiang, but there’s a long story behind that.) The problem is that when we’re together faced with the tedium of a hard day’s shoot under the lights, we get a little punch drunk and start giggling.

I also don’t mean to suggest that we screw around on the set. I am the best of stage moms: My kid shows up on time, well-rested, and with her lines memorized, and I turn her over to the director and sit down and read until she’s finished. As foreigners, we are invariably forced to sit with the studio audience when we’re not performing, with at least two cameras trained on us at all times, in order to catch our facial reactions. These are edited into the show in a manner we refer to as “foreigners on parade.” Sometimes these reaction shots are broadcast cut into shows on networks we never even heard of. We are stock footage, the punch line on tap, and as China’s only fat working foreign actress, my expressions of merriment, puzzlement, and awe are in high demand.

However, as I mentioned, we are seldom invited back as a team. Our mirth goes too far. We have sat as sober and solemn as judges while Peking Opera performers broke rank to come forth shyly and sing “Memories” from Cats, Peking Opera style, and never let on that we were dying inside. We have sat through “The Sound of Music” as sung by a choir of deaf children (there’s an oxymoron) and had tears of sentiment spill forth at the politically correct moment. I have been filmed leaping to my feet and shouting “Jia You!” (Way to go!) as paralyzed ballroom dancers did the tango in their manually operated wheel chairs. In short, I try hard to do what’s required of me—to be a good guest—but sometimes, with Lulu at my side, I just fail.

Case in point: the most dramatic instance of our demonry got us banned from a certain TV station for life. Lulu was appearing as some damn thing or another a few years back on a kid’s show. Prior to filming the show, we were sent to be part of the audience while the warm-up act got the audience in a merry mood. The audience was all keyed up and excited and would have applauded just about anything, which is exactly want you want in a TV audience (a shame we can’t rent them to Jimmy Kimmel) and as we took our seats we realized that three—not one—but three cameras were on us to capture our reaction shots. Lulu was already a bit tense from her upcoming performance and I was knackered, having gotten up out of bed around three to make the six a.m. makeup call. (It should be noted that we got there as directed at six for make-up—and the rest of the cast and crew arrived somewhere around eleven.) So we sat, tired, tense, with cameras trained on us, and tried to smile gamely.

A whisper of music filled the stage. A stage door creaked, stopped, then was roughly jerked open by an invisible hand so that a performer could lurch out. A young girl, perhaps eighteen, sullenly crossed the stage, microphone in hand. As the music swelled, she began to tap one foot, clad in a hideous Minnie Mouse pink platform clog, slightly off beat with the music. She was dressed in hip hugger jeans, with a sequined bra, and had two Mickey Puffs for a hairdo. (You know, the type little black girls wear—adorable on them, not so good on a Chinese girl.) She was heavily made up, but what was most apparent was her bored, I’m-just-here-to-bop-the-boss expression. Lulu and I took one look at each other, then glanced at the huge Minnie Mouse clogs—one tapping offbeat—then burst into soft chuckles.

The director whirled around and screamed, “STOP THE TAKE!” (only it sounded more like “Stoppur der tekur”) and gave us an evil look. As soon as he looked back at the girl we knew the score—she was his babe—and we tried to compose ourselves. She stomped off stage, Minnie Mouse clogs thumping all the way, and went back behind the door to await her cue. The music began—the stage door rocked the set as a stage hand gave it an invisible but overenthusiastic push—and the girl lurched out again, mic in hand, sullen expression fixed in place. She hit her mark (always an iffy procedure for the amateur) and her foot began its tap-tap-tap. Lulu and I let out a yelp of laughter while the director screamed and the audience gazed at us. What the hell were we laughing about anyway? The director raged—the girl blinked vapidly at us—we tried to stop laughing and eventually the third take was ready to roll.

Cue the music. Cue the rickety stage door. Cue the girl. The foot began to tap. Lulu and I bit our cheeks and did not look at each other. The cameramen sighed in relief and pulled in for a tight shot, not of the girl, but of us. We were behaving.

And then—and then—Languid Beauty the Performer lifted her arms above her head and invited the audience to clap along. She had neglected to perform a certain act of personal grooming (like, ever) and two hairy pits completed her look. Her hands didn’t even have time to clap together once before Lulu and I gave a shout of laughter and collapsed onto one another, shrieking with mad joy, eyes shut tight as we cried with the glorious pain of it all.

This time the director really lost it. He jumped off his platform and ran towards us, megaphone in hand, shrieking insults. “You—you FUCKS!” he screamed in English. “You OPEN your ASS and SMELL!” Well, that did it—we FOLKS being screamed at to open our EYES and SMILE was the last bit of instruction we needed. We fell off the chairs, kicking and screaming, hooting and whooping, while the audience looked around as if to gauge whether this grand mal seizure required the judicious use of a spoon. When we finally stopped laughing, and a stage hand kicked us off set, we were handed a note that said, “Lulu is welcome to coming but his mother no.”

This was, I think, supposed to hurt my feelings, but it did not. First of all, Lulu forgot to hand me the note, and I didn’t find it until I was washing her costume a week later, and second of all, I could hardly feel angry about being chastised for my less-than-perfect behavior. If only the girl hadn’t had that expression on her face—or tapped that huge pink shoe off beat—or had shaved her pits! But regret gets us nowhere, and we pulled two good things off the experience: first, my daughter’s performance earned us enough to pay that month’s phone bill, and second, our family motto was finally and firmly established: Open your ass and smell, you fucks.