As a foreigner in China, what is it like to perform xiangsheng (相声, crosstalk comedy repartee) at the Spring Festival Gala, a televised event with over a billion Chinese people watching you? That’s exactly what the American sinologist David Moser did in 1999, as seen on China Central Television (CCTV). In a skit titled “Joyful Together” (同喜同乐) with three other foreigners — a Canadian, a Beninese and a Yugoslav — he told jokes in Chinese in front of a live audience of just about every Chinese family who had a TV.

David Moser holds a Ph.D. in Chinese Studies from the University of Michigan, with a major in Chinese Linguistics and Philosophy. By the time he stepped onto that stage, he had been living in China for a decade, learning xiangsheng under Ding Guangquan, translating books and playing jazz in underground bands. Moser hosted a number of popular shows on Chinese TV, including the annual English-speech contest Hope Star Talent Competition (希望之星). He is author of A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language (Penguin Australia, 2016) and co-host of the podcast Barbarians at the Gate.

The Peking Hotel podcast talked to David Moser about that first appearance on the Spring Festival Gala, how he first came to China in the 1980s, and everything that followed:

We had to perform it for the censorship department in a little auditorium with ten or so people, all Party members.

Guest

Transcript

Let’s start at the Spring Festival Gala in 1999, the biggest annual event in the Chinese-speaking world. The military band just finished performing. Four of you, all foreigners, were waiting to get on stage for the third act of the night. A billion viewers were watching. How were you feeling at that moment?

How could you feel but nervous? We had rehearsed the script so many times that we could probably do it in our sleep, because the chunwan is a really serious event. We didn’t realize what we were getting into when we agreed to do it. But we thought, “This is a good opportunity.” One of the people in the group was [locally famous Canadian personality Mark Rowswell, who goes by] Dashan, and just being on a stage with him would boost our visibility quite a lot.

I thought we would just rehearse a few times, maybe at somebody’s house, and then do some dress rehearsals. But they want you there every week, many times for a month. You spend all day long just waiting for your turn, sitting there. It’s very boring. Everyone’s smoking and waiting and eating, and you can’t leave.

They want a full performance timed down to the second so that if something happens on the night of the live broadcast — somebody breaks their leg or pulls out a banner that says “Free Tibet” — they could plug in the recording from the previous night.

We rehearsed it several times every week. So I wasn’t nervous that I might miss my lines or something like that. What I was more nervous about is that there’d be a technical problem, like a microphone quitting.

Have you ever been in any of those CCTV buildings?

I’ve been there as a kid. There was a show that needed an audience and who else to fill the audience other than little primary school kids in Beijing.

It’s guarded by soldiers like an army base. It’s not easy to go in and out. You’ve got to have a pass. That process was pretty tiring, this was all new to me. I’d been on TV shows before but not on such a big one.

You rehearse and rehearse, and then they do a backup recording. They want a full performance timed down to the second so that if something happens on the night of the live broadcast — somebody breaks their leg or pulls out a banner that says “Free Tibet” — they could plug in the recording from the previous night. You therefore have to do it twice and do it for real, because that might be the actual one that they use.

Then we would have to perform it for the shenchabu (censorship department) in a little auditorium with 10 or so people, all Party members.

Also — and I didn’t know this either — it’s not as simple as writing the script and then it’s approved and then you rehearse. Each time we rehearsed the script and would memorize it and work it out pretty well. My crosstalk — xiangsheng — teacher, Ding Guangquan, was the director, because all four of us were his students.

Then we would have to perform it for the shenchabu (censorship department) in a little auditorium with 10 or so people, all party members. Then they contribute their comments or objections — “You shouldn’t say that.” “Don’t stress this.” “This is not funny.” These are not television experts. They’re just party ideologues.

At least five times we had to do this, and each time we had to revise the script. We came to realize that each time, it became less funny. I wish I’d kept the original script because it was actually funny, creative, and interesting. But every time we revised, it became more and more four foreigners competing with each other to say how much they loved China. It was literally, “No, I love China more than you do — No, I love China,” by the time we got to the fifth iteration.

By this point, the director and the scriptwriter were frustrated. We put so much work into it and they just kept changing it, and it was no longer very funny. The ending is very important for xiangsheng, so we came up with something. There has to be a resolution. What they thought was, let’s have these four foreigners, because they love Chinese culture and everything, perform a dance. The old ladies in the hutongs (old neighborhoods) would do this niuyangge that usually had drums.

Like a guangchangwu (square dance).

Yes. It’s the original guangchangwu. Usually it’s women that do it, right? So we did this, and of course, we did it badly. But everyone said, “That is funny. The audience will love that because it’s so incongruous. It’s weird, but silly. Why would four foreigners, four men, do this dance? That’s a great ending.”

Then we went through the final shencha (censorship session). We overheard an old woman saying, “Sige laowai, niuyangge, zhege bu hao, bu haokan, bu didao” — “four foreigners doing niuyangge, this is not good, doesn’t look good and not authentic.”

But that’s the whole point!

Right. The joke is that it’s not authentic. This woman knew nothing about entertainment. Maybe she thought the yangge is a sacred dance and you shouldn’t let people make fun of it.

That was my first experience. The next year, they wanted to invite us on again. We all said, “No. Absolutely not. We went through it once, it was fun, but we don’t want to do that again.”

So now, what are we going to do? We no longer had that funny ending. I think they just gave up. I don’t even remember how it ended, but we had to all recite some kind of poem. Because they just, “Couhe ba” — “whatever”, just get an ending.

When it aired live and we finished and I went out, waiting for the taxi, my friends started to call me. They said, “Ei, Dawei, wo kan ni yan chunwan” (Hey David, I saw you on the New Year Gala show). Then, they would say, “Ni zhidao ma, ni zhege jiemu, bu tai hao, bu haowan’r” (you know, your act wasn’t funny).

That’s harsh.

They were brutally honest with me. These are good friends, they wouldn’t lie to me. They said, “nide nage jiemu shi zuichade” (Your act was the worst.) I would say, “Yeah, I know, I know.”

That was my first experience. The next year, they wanted to invite us on again. We all said, “No. Absolutely not. We went through it once, it was fun, but we don’t want to do that again.”

The audience was pretty positive. Everyone was clapping and laughing.

But they would clap at anything, I don’t know whether they really liked it or not.

I guess the idea behind this xiangsheng, in some sense, is that the ideologues, the censors, the propagandists have a conception of “the good foreigner,” who learns Chinese properly, who loves Chinese culture, who has a Chinese wife, who dresses up in a Chinese gown. In some sense that is the role they assigned you guys.

That’s exactly right. We knew that of course. It’s obvious. Almost everything you do has something of that flavor in it. Even when they invite you on a show to talk about something, you’ll always get some question like, “How do you like China? What do you think?” It’s a propaganda thing, but it’s understandable. They want to present foreigners who are well disposed to China. And it’s easy for us, because we in fact did like China and we did enjoy Chinese culture.

And you have a long history of studying Chinese. But you actually started as a music major. You spent a few years in Boston playing the trumpet and recording music, and doing many different things. Until you hit on this thing called the Chinese language. And somehow it overtook you.

That’s right. Have you been talking to my mother? How do you know all this?

I spoke to the propaganda department and they shared your file with me.

My time’s about up now. I think I have to leave. (Jokes)

I was a music major and I was so sure my future was going to be in music. Since high school, I played guitar, I was in a rock band, and I wanted to be a composer. But it’s a funny thing. You never know what it is you are really passionate about. Sometimes you discover something, but you may not think, “I could make a career out of this. This could be my life occupation.” I was always interested in language. I spent a lot of time on my own just studying it.

The first Chinese I ever learned was, “Chi putao bu tu putaopi…” (“east grapes without spitting out the skin”) They thought it’d be so funny to have a novice foreigner who’d never spoken any Chinese learn this tongue twister.

I was also curious about China. There were not many foreigners in our small town. But my mother was just the sweetest person in the world. At the church she went to, a dean of the local college said, “Every year, all the American students go home for Christmas. And the foreign students that can’t go home are stuck in their dorm rooms and they’re lonely.” And so they said, “If you could, invite some of these students into your home for Christmas dinner, just so they’re not so lonely.”

So my mother did that. She was wonderful. I’m not objective, but she really was an unusually generous person. She invited them into her home, and this included two women from Taiwan, who were studying there. And she liked them so much that she said, “We have an empty room. Why don’t you just live in our house?” So there were two Taiwanese graduate students living in our home when I was in high school — in 1970, something like that.

I thought, “I’ll learn a little bit of Chinese.” They thought this was funny. And so I said, “Teach me some Chinese.” The first Chinese I ever learned was not nihao or chile ma? (have you eaten?), or anything like that. The first Chinese I ever learned was, “Chi putao bu tu putaopi…” (“east grapes without spitting out the skin”) They thought it’d be so funny to have a novice foreigner who’d never spoken any Chinese learn this tongue twister.

He said, “I want you to go to Beida and work on the translation project.” I said, “What a weird opportunity. Why not?”

I must have said it really badly. They recorded it on a cassette tape. And it was so funny to them, they actually sent this cassette tape to Taibei to someone they knew who had a radio show. I never heard this, but they played this tape of me doing chi putao bu tu putaopi on Taiwan radio.

Wow. It was like TikTok before TikTok. A short clip going viral.

That was the first time I learned it. I was always interested in this, but, for me it was a hobby. I was still going to be a musician.

I was at Indiana University in the music department, and there was a professor there named Doug Hofstadter, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on AI — the first one, a very important book. He found out from his colleagues that a Beida (Peking University) team was working on translating his book into Chinese, and he said, “I don’t trust them. The book is too complicated. I’m sure they’re missing some things, and it’s gonna be a lousy translation.”

There was a mania for famous books from outside China, like this book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, that my friend Douglas Hofstadter wrote. Intellectuals were intensely curious about the newest things, and AI was one of them.

He knew I was studying Chinese on my own. I was meeting up with Chinese people, speaking Chinese in my spare time. He said, “I want you to go to Beida and work on the translation project.” I said, “What a weird opportunity. Why not?” I thought it would be like a semester, a year, and I’d have an interesting life and then come back home. That was where my real involvement in China and Chinese began.

It turned into a 40-year journey.

I got there in 1986, the gaige kaifang (reform and opening-up) period, the most exciting time. By then, I had known a bit more about China. But even if you didn’t know anything about China, you just could just feel it. Everyone was so optimistic.

I had time to prepare and I read Orville Schell’s books In the People’s Republic and To Get Rich is Glorious. That was a great preparation because he introduced you to a lot of very important cultural aspects such as [communist hero] Lei Feng. And he also was very linguistically oriented, so he was my role model. “Maybe I could be something like that.”

I would get naive questions, like, “In America when children finish high school and then they leave home to go to college and they create a life for themselves, when they go back home, do the parents charge them rent?”

Going to China in 1986, did you sense there was a general curiosity about the world outside China from the Chinese folks on campus and in society?

Absolutely. They were totally obsessed. They had such curiosity. And they also did actually know quite a bit. There was a mania for famous books from outside China, like this book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, that my friend Douglas Hofstadter wrote. Intellectuals were intensely curious about the newest things, and AI was one of them.

I would get naive questions, like, “In America when children finish high school and then they leave home to go to college and they create a life for themselves, when they go back home, do the parents charge them rent?” And they really believed this, that in American culture, parents say, “Okay, you can come home, but you have to give us rent.”

My grandma always said that Americans charge their kids rent.

Really? Somehow, that piece of bullshit was in the air at the time.

One of the things I would tell them is that, “If you don’t understand religion, you don’t really understand the U.S.” That was something they had no idea about. They’d never seen a movie that talked about that, or read an American book.

Religion had been deliberately erased from public life in China.

That’s right.

I was translating this book that had very American references. And, it was funny what they would know and wouldn’t know. One of the translators said he was reading Kafka. And then I said something, “You might as well be Santa Claus.” He asked, “Who?” How could you know Kafka, and you don’t know Santa Claus?

In another book he was translating, a father gives his daughter his Visa to take to the mall. And of course, it’s a Visa credit card. But my friend was asking me, “Why in the United States does a daughter have to take a visa to the mall to buy things?” Some of them were very funny, like a fortune cookie that you get in a Chinese restaurant. They had no idea what that was. It doesn’t exist in mainland China.

You can imagine how I became hooked on this.

They would have these wenhua shalong (cultural salons) at Beida. It’s hard to imagine this now, but they were talking about democracy and they were talking about making changes.

Two dislocated universes, even though you’re speaking Chinese, they speak English. And 1986 was quite a year, not least because of the student movement for democracy. And Fang Lizhi was making speeches in Anhui. Did you see any of that?

I never met Fang Lizhi. I did meet with these graduate students at Beida and Renmin and Tsinghua universities who attended his lectures. I met Perry Link but that was later. I didn’t meet him until ‘88 or ‘89. We met up many times in Beijing.

It was really exciting — very open. Everyone was optimistic. But they were Western-oriented, especially the young people. And they were also negative toward China. There was a sense of cultural inferiority, to the point where, if I said anything good about China, they would say, “No, we suck. We want to learn from you.”

They would have these wenhua shalong (cultural salons) at Beida. It’s hard to imagine this now, but they were talking about democracy and they were talking about making changes. A big topic was, “What happened to us? How did China fall so far?” The same kind of May Fourth debates were still going on at Beida — the same place, and the same question. “What did we do wrong? And how can we get out of this?” This was just amazing to me.

I thought that’s what I was born to do, to explain the U.S. to these enthusiastic Chinese people, and then also to explain China to my friends and people back home. To this day, that’s probably the thing I’m proudest of and the thing that I really passionately care about.

People were so open with you. They would talk to you about anything you wanted to talk about. Everything was passionate, but also optimistic. Although they were down on China, in some ways, it was only going to get better. It was really, really exciting.

The translation took much longer than we thought it was going to take. For me, at that point, I said, “Maybe I’ll just quit my music career, and just get a PhD and do this.” So I did. I suddenly realized, “Wow, this is something that can really grab my attention, my full devotion. I can put my life into it.”

Also, I felt back then very strongly that I liked the feeling of being a bridge. I thought that’s what I was born to do, to explain the U.S. to these enthusiastic Chinese people, and then also to explain China to my friends and people back home. To this day, that’s probably the thing I’m proudest of and the thing that I really passionately care about.

I’m a very American person, but on the other hand, I’m also typical for my age group in that I have a kind of distaste and disappointment and hatred of America from this rebellious, sixties hippie generation. So I felt these are two cultures that needed each other, and I could be in the middle there, intensify it or augment it.

You had five different translators all with totally different styles. There was no unity to the book, and some of the translations were very literal.

You spent some time in China and then came back to the U.S. for a Master’s and PhD.

Yeah. At that time, the woman I was living with got a promotion. She was Douglas Hofstadter’s graduate student. Hofstadter was going to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan. So then I did too. I ended up getting my Master’s and PhD at Ann Arbor.

The Chinese studies department was very liberal. They said I could go back and forth, whatever I wanted. I ended up getting my Master’s there, ‘87, ‘88, but going back and forth the whole time.

While doing the translation?

Yeah. Because the translation was more complicated than any of us had thought. And they actually had to ditch the original and start all over again.

They had all kinds of different translators in charge of different parts. And you’re supposed to piece them together.

That’s right. You had five different translators all with totally different styles. There was no unity to the book, and some of the translations were very literal. The reason that Doug Hofstadter had wanted me to go there was that he didn’t want that kind of a translation. He wanted a translation that would be accessible to the average Chinese reader and feel natural. So he told us to revise the whole thing, and instead of using only American cultural examples, use Chinese cultural examples.

So you needed to help him rewrite parts of it.

It was like translating Alice in Wonderland or something. You can’t just do a literal translation. You have to reconstruct the jokes or reconstruct the wordplay in the native language. We spent a lot of time doing that.

We were working with Commercial Press, one of the most prestigious publishers in China. As far as I know the book was the first book to be typeset on a computer, Which is appropriate since it was a book about AI.

A lot of people had read the Zouxiang Weilai booklet [that summarized parts of Gödel, Escher, Bach], so they were very interested in the translation.

No pressure there.

This is before digital technology. We now have [translation app] Pleco and different digital Chinese dictionaries. There was nothing like that. Everything was books. You had to look up characters by doing the radical lookup. I had only been studying myself for several years and not full-time, but I picked it up pretty fast. And my tones were pretty good, because I was a musician; I could always hear the tones fairly well.

But when the work started they would plop this stack of pages in front of me with squared lines and characters in each little square, handwritten. Even now, it’s hard for me to read handwritten Chinese script. I guess it was a good opportunity because I got better than most people in being able to read Chinese people’s handwriting.

It helped that I had the original text. So it said, “Computers will take the role of…” Okay, so computers, there must be the word jisuanji in here. And so I searched, “Ah, this looks like it.”

That’s a great way to learn a language.

It was the best possible way to learn the language. First of all, I’m getting shumianyu [written Chinese], plus the handwriting, and then plus translated back into oral speech, because I would be talking about it. I was getting all three of these things, and that’s a kind of a crash course in Chinese that most people don’t get.

If you can get it, that’s marvelous. And back in Michigan, that was the time of the so-called Michigan Mafia, right? What’s the magic of Michigan? Why Michigan?

I don’t know. I’m not sure why. It might be their library. I’m sure that [Kenneth] Lieberthal and [Mike] Oksenberg had a lot to do with it.

Of course.

They were very tolerant, loose, experimental. They were willing to let you do a project that was unorthodox. I was taking courses in psycholinguistics and psychology and in ancient classical Chinese, and other kinds of things that would help me with this book. And my thesis was multidisciplinary, it had to do with linguistics and psycholinguistics and Ancient Greek.

What’s your thesis about?

It was a philosophy thesis, really. But it was about how the Greek philosophical focus had a lot to do with the Greek language, and that their emphasis on abstractions and logic and stuff like that just fell out of the language. Whereas there were no marked forms in the Chinese language to call attention to things like abstractions.

That’s interesting.

Here’s just a simple example. The Greeks have suffixes to indicate abstract nouns. So you say, “This is good” — “This goodness.” Good is an adjective, and “goodness” is an abstract noun, because it’s “-ness.” So then I can do, “This movie has a lot of Americanness about it.” You can use that “-ness” to create abstract nouns and you see it as a different word. But if you don’t have that suffix, then you might not even notice that you had a word class difference.

So if you say, “He is good, his goodness knows no bounds,” that’s a different word. But if you say, “He is evil, his evil knows no bounds.” There’s no morphology. It doesn’t change. So if you just are focusing on a folk kind of understanding of language, there’s no reason why you would say, “Hey, I wonder what this other word really means.”

So for the Greeks, they were trying to figure out the ontology of the universe and logic and all this stuff, and where do you go when you don’t have a slightest idea? You go to your language. So the Greeks said, “Aha, we know that this is white, but what is this thing called whiteness?” So then go to the Chinese world. They would also ask these questions and talk about it, but there was nothing in their language that could clue them in that there was a difference there. This is the kind of thing my thesis was about.

What I’m hearing is that by the late eighties and the early nineties, a certain image of the great learned American was emerging in your life. You are good at music, reading Chinese classics and doing multidisciplinary linguistic studies on Chinese and Greek classics, and you’re talking to Chinese.

And starting to learn xiangsheng.

How did xiangsheng land on your desk?

All this time I was trying to improve my Chinese, because my Chinese was terrible. I was looking for something that could be a teaching aid. Back then all the Chinese textbooks for foreigners were unbelievably stupid and boring. I never bought a single one.

I wanted something that was real and interesting. One of the translators said, “You should listen to xiangsheng because it’s very challenging, but it’s also interesting and it’s filled with Chinese cultural aspects and languages and dialects and history and all this kind of stuff. I think you’d enjoy it.”

They would come in their limousine and would go up to my dorm room. And the fuwuyuan (service worker) in the hallway would go, “Aaah, Ma Ji!” And I was, “Who, what?”

So I did. I bought some cassette tapes, and I would ask one of the students, “Could you transcribe this xiangsheng dialogue for me?” I absolutely had to have the text to look at, because otherwise I’d only understand maybe 50% of it.

So I taught myself using this while I was at Beida. And at that time, Dashan was already famous. And the person who had discovered him or recommended him to the TV station was a professor in the Chinese department at Beida named Wang Jingshou. He was an expert in quyi (oral performing arts) and had written books about it. He knew all the xiangsheng people. He was so funny.

I met him and he was so excited that a foreign scholar wanted to learn about xiangsheng. I said, “I’d like to interview some xiangsheng performers.” “No problem.” So the next week, I had people like Jiang Kun, Tang Jiezhong, Li Jindou, and Ma Ji in my dorm room.

These are household names in China.

But I had no idea. In fact, I was surprised. They would come in their limousine and would go up to my dorm room. And the fuwuyuan (service worker) in the hallway would go, “Aaah, Ma Ji!” And I was, “Who, what?”

I still have lots of cassette tapes with recordings. Some of them were telling me about performing xiangsheng for Chairman Mao at Zhongnanhai.

That’s really cool.

Anyway, you can see I was pretty busy. I was doing 10 things at once, writing a thesis and doing all this, and the translation.

Learning Chinese from xiangsheng is not too different from Chinese trying to learn English by watching Big Bang Theory and Friends. When did it occur to you that you could actually perform xiangsheng?

It was the same professor, Wang Jingshou. I had already met Dashan. Wang Jingshou said, “Dawei, ni ye keyi” (David, you can do it too.) I said “No” many times. He said, “No, you can do it.” So he started recommending me to TV stations.

The first skit I ever did was with [xiangsheng performer] Hou Yaohua, and somehow I did it. I didn’t understand the script, but I worked really hard on it.

It is really funny. I watched it just now.

That was the first time I performed, and then after that, I got more into this xiangsheng world. I only later on met Ding Guangquan.

How did you meet him?

Ding Guangquan needed another foreigner for a skit. So he called me up. We did the skit. And then after that he knew who I was. I formally took him as my teacher in 1997, maybe 1996.

This was after your PhD?

Yes. I think I’d just gotten it. Up until 1994, we were still working on the book, believe it or not.

Oh really? Eight years on.

Yeah, because we started from scratch in ‘86. And there was all kinds of trouble. The book was so complicated that Commercial Press didn’t really want to do it. There was some editor there who just thought this was crazy, it was too complicated. So we had to bribe people to get the book published, finally. And it’s a good thing we did, because, to this day, it sells. It’s a classic book in China. ∎

This post was also published at Peking Hotel. Listen to the follow-up episode here.