Sorry I couldn't chat for longer last night - the time difference caught up with me. After a long week of teaching, make-up classes, meetings about pay and trying (not very successfully) to learn my lines for this play, I'll be glad when term finishes and we fly to Kunming on 7th January!
Sitting over lunch, two random office workers tasked with planning this year's Christmas celebration got to chatting.
"We should get someone to put on The Butterfly Lovers. Everyone loves The Butterfly Lovers." says one.
"Yeah, but it's old, the student's have already seen it a thousand times." replies his mate. Obviously this is all in Mandarin.
"Hmm.... It needs a new slant. What can we do?" asks the first guy again.
"I know. Let's get two foreigners to do it. Oh! And let's pick ones who don't speak Chinese. They'll really struggle with traditional language. Wouldn't it be great if if they'd never seen the play and have no idea what's going on as they try to read it?"
"Um, but don't you..."
"A pity we don't know any and don't speak English. Still, that'll make it harder for them as we won't be able to help them."
"Hang..."
"I'll print off the script for 30 minutes worth of total humiliation. You get some one else to choose the victi... actors."
"Wait...."
"Oh and don't forget to tell them that the show is on the twenty-third of December."
"It's on the twentieth."
"Cunning, eh? I'll give them the script seven days before, but only in characters. It'll take them ages to get it into pinyin. And I'll leave out the stage directions!" He may or may not have cackled at this point. Continuing, he said "And whatever you do, don't order the costumes until the day before."
"Ok."
If anything, I'm getting worse at delivering my lines - having five different ways of pronouncing a two-letter word is not the way, in my opinion, to go about constructing a language. I'm not going to say that I've lost sleep over it, because I made it up with a good nap the next afternoon. But I will say that I'm going on stage (in theory there'll be a stage, I haven't thought to check) tomorrow banking on my students finding it too funny or being too polite to say how crap it was.
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