Musical Hilarity

This week is English Week at Yang Ming, which means that every morning there is a different English language competition, like storytelling, singing, reading aloud, drama, etc. As an English teacher, I have to help judge this thing, so I spent my entire morning today and yesterday judging the singing and drama competitions.

I was so psyched when I heard that I was going to judge the singing. It practically negated the fact that they made me come in on my day off to judge. The competition is from grades 1-6, but the vast majority of competitors in the singing competition were from grades 1 and 2 (older kids are too self-conscious I suppose). SO CUTE. A lot of them sang children's songs, but there were some really quality musical selections, like the girl who sang "I Will Follow Him" in angel wings and a halo, with accompanying dance moves. Partway through the song she switched to "we will follow him," and I realized that she wasn't singing the original, but rather the version from Sister Act, where the "him" is God and the "we" is "me and this chorus of nuns." Even better!

The musical selections also included a strange profusion of songs that referenced the American South. When you are a small Taiwanese child with sort of hazy English pronunciation, it's pretty hard to sell lines about how you were born in Louisiana, or how you come from Alabama with a banjo on your knee, or best of all, about how you wish the country roads would take you back to "West Madimba." (a number of kids picked this song, but nobody came remotely close to being able to say "Virginia" properly)

Fun Fact: As far as I can tell, everybody in Asia knows "Take Me Home, Country Roads." Any KTV (read: karaoke joint) worth its salt has this song available for selection, and I have a vivid memory of singing it with Japanese friends in a Beijing taxi at 3 in the morning.

Other highlights of the singing contest: the 6th grade boy who sang Shakira, the minuscule 2nd grade girl who belted all of our ears off, the 3rd grade girl who sang a medley of songs that she made herself, and the 14-person-strong group of 6th graders who performed "Doe, a Deer" with an elaborate Sound of Music-style dance routine and an instrumental ensemble backing them up. Wowser.

Only 4 groups entered the drama competition, but they were all pretty awesome. By far the most unusual was the group of 6th grade boys who performed Little Red Riding Hood: Little Red was a boy in a hooded red T-shirt and a grass skirt, Grandma was another boy in a shower cap, and the hunter who saved them from the wolf had a drawn-on beard and a machine gun. In a slightly nontraditional ending, the hunter left the wolf with a bomb in his hand and ran away. Shades of Wile E. Coyote!

Besides the extraordinary range of musical and dramatic performances that I witnessed this week at school, I also got to spend Tuesday night with some other Fulbrighters at a performance of Hairspray given by the English department of Tajen University. It's quite ambitious for a group of Taiwanese college students to put on a play in English that is so long and slang-filled, not to mention all of the singing and dancing, so I was pretty impressed by the fact that they managed to pull it off at all. The language was sometimes a little unintelligible, and they sang and danced about as well as you'd expect a bunch of English majors to, but it was a lot of fun. The part that I was most interested in, however, was that an all-Taiwanese cast was putting on a play that is all about racial inequality between whites and blacks, considering the negative attitude towards dark skin in Taiwan. In the end, however, the moral of the story was less "down with discrimination!" and more "yay, we put on a whole play in English!"