Friday night in Beijing’s chic new Tofu House. On a TV screen suspended from
the ceiling of the otherwise elegant restaurant, four beautiful, baby-faced
heart-throbs are being lowered onto a stage, dressed in red vinyl bodysuits
with silver breastplates. Flames shoot from the floor as the boys burst into
song. Before them sits a panel of three judges, two expressionless men, and
a woman in a foot-high, pink, feathered hat and earrings so enormous they
hang almost to her shoulders. She is laughing and dancing in her seat, along
with thousands of live studio audience members, who scream and leap up and
down to a medley of Chinese pop hits. Then the first of the night’s solos
happens, a Taiwanese number accompanied by a martial-arts dance. The second
song, a screaming rock track, features Peking Opera moves; the third is a
ballad, during which a screen flashes schizophrenic images ranging from
ancient Chinese calligraphy to an American dollar bill. Finally, there is a
surreal rendition of All I Care About from the musical Chicago, complete
with a Chinese Richard Gere and high-kicking Roxy Hart.
This is China’s primetime reality-TV favourite: Happy Boys Voice, known in
casual English to everyone in China as Super Boy. I have been watching it
nightly at the Tofu House; mine is a front-row view of China’s most recent
modern offering, this unlikely love child of socialist propaganda and X
Factor cheesiness.
The singer of All I Care About turns, lips quivering, to face the judges, a
recording-industry executive, a pinched dour older man, and Yang Erche Namu,
the pink-plumed, giant-earringed judge who has upstaged everyone on the show
and captured either the heart or wrath of hundreds of millions of Chinese
viewers. During tonight’s show, she mysteriously shouts: “Could I wear such
earrings with a fake ear? I think not!”
I turn to Coco, the dazzling 33-year-old owner of the Tofu House. “What does
she mean ‘fake ear’?” I ask. Coco shrugs: “She’s insane. I can’t stand her.
I mean, look at her clothes!”
Coco is waiting for the judges to decide the fate of her favourite contestant.
They describe his routine as “lacking real emotion” and him as “tonight’s
loser”. His cheekbones glisten with tears. In a matter of moments, he will
be voted off and everyone will sob, including Yang Erche Namu, the studio
audience, and the Tofu House crew. “I loved the cute xiao bai lian,” says
Coco of the just-eliminated “little white face” or baby-faced contestant.
Coco is quite baby-faced herself, wearing a patchwork boho skirt and black
slippers trimmed with green lace. Less vocal, but equally tuned in, are
Taylor, a Tofu House manager so good-looking he’s worthy of Super Boy status
himself, and Jake, a basketball fan who dresses in Levi’s and Adidas. Little
Cun, the maid, is tidying, her eyes on the screen, and Cecilia, Coco’s
assistant, rushes about answering the phone, serving tofu rolls, and trying
to make it back to the TV without missing anything.
The last time I was intimately acquainted with Chinese TV was a decade ago. I
had moved to Beijing to do an ill-fitting corporate job when I accidentally
became a beneficiary of China’s equal-opportunity celebrity-making. At a
party, a Chinese furniture salesman said: “You’re white; do you want to be
in my friend’s soap opera?” Just like that, I was cast in Foreign Babes in
Beijing.
Foreign Babes was standard for its day; a stylised TV drama with no real
pretence of “reality”. It featured two American girls who “dared to love and
dared to hate” Chinese studs. One girl was “good” and the other “bad”; I
played the bad one. Ten years ago, western babes seducing local guys on TV
seemed modern and racy, especially compared to other dreary state-run TV.
Beijingers loved the bad girl, not only for her commitment to Chinese men,
but also for her bravado, libido and American style. The show carried the
delicate pretence of a socialist message – foreign imports are corrupting –
but was actually an ad for liberated lifestyles.
In this respect, it was identical to all other moneymaking gimmicks that walk
the razor’s edge between compliance and entertainment, including Super Boy.
A sequel to Hunan TV’s unparalleled hit of 2005 and 2006, Mongolian Cow Sour
Yoghurt Super Girl Voice contest (known widely as Super Girl), the all-male
singing competition has attracted hundreds of millions of fans. Super Girl
was filled with screaming, dancing, high stakes and humiliation of the X
Factor and American Idol variety; the show’s finale was watched by 400m
viewers, and its most recent winner, Li Yuchun, is a national celebrity and
recording artist. Her adorable, androgynous face is almost as well known in
China as Chairman Mao’s. She is China’s Idol, a “democratically” TV-made
celebrity. And while she may seem to be living the western celebrity dream,
the struggle of contestants here embodies a particularly Chinese paradox:
escaping anonymity in a country of more than 1.3 billion people by becoming
part of a new global public.
Super Boy looks, on the surface, surprisingly like the latest western youth
culture obsession. Yet, lest it comes too close to “westernness”, its
behind-the-scenes footage is as culturally specific as the producers can
make it: super boys eating fish cheeks at banquets, dancing with finalists
from Super Girl, and stir-frying. One memorable sequence involves a boy in a
fruit-print apron in his parents’ kitchen, peeling skin off raw chicken legs
and serving a home-cooked dish to weeping fans. That’s not a scene you’d see
on X Factor.
China’s first reality TV hit, Extremely 6+1, which premiered in 2004, was a
more watery imitation of X Factor and American Idol. Even then, reality TV
in China was partially imitative of western reality TV and partially a
Chinese reflection of the reforming youth struggle to achieve individual
distinction (and wealth). A more Maoist proletariat vision than Super Girl
or Super Boy, Extremely 6+1 featured contestants from four to 70 who
underwent six days of vocal and dance training before performing on the
seventh day. Then the audience voted for people it especially liked, but
there were no winners or losers, just communally adored participants.
Later that year, Super Girl popularised actual audience “voting”. When its
first winner sold over a million albums, the power of the show to create a
star was clear. Equally obvious was its ability to fill the coffers of a
struggling provincial TV broadcaster. Whether Super Girl would help produce
a sound society or filter out unsavoury western cultural pollutants was less
apparent.
That uncertainty triggered an official backlash, even as Super Girl’s
popularity inspired hundreds of millions of fans, several blockbusting
stars, and spin-offs. Severe official criticism of Super Girl accused the
show of “promoting vulgarity” and, by providing examples of instant and easy
celebrity, discouraging youngsters from living life practically, with
realistic expectations. Liu Zhongde, the former culture minister, demanded a
ban on all reality TV. But it didn’t happen. Super Girl fans multiplied, and
in TV stations, producers argued for more reality TV, in exchange for closer
collaborations with regulators.
China’s State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) conjured
up a hefty list of guidelines for Super Boy. Officials demanded the sequel
to Super Girl not include the word “Super” in its title. Chaoji, which means
“in a class exceeding all others”, is the same “super” in Superman, perhaps
too closely connected to the American hero, perhaps suggestive of too great
a reach above the masses. Of course, the guidelines don’t mention English,
so while the show is called Happy Boys Voice in Chinese, it’s conveniently
translated and discussed in English as Super Boy.
SARFT also forbade “gossip about the contestants”, or “scenes of fans
screaming and wailing”, or “losing contestants in tears”. It was to
“maintain a happy atmosphere”, and include only “healthy and ethically
inspiring songs”. There would be no “scandal-dogged” judges, and no mockery
of contestants. In fact, SARFT insisted on overseeing everything from
“language and manners,” to outfits and accessories, to maintain “mainstream
values” and avoid “weirdness, vulgarity or low taste”.
The show is an example of the increasing impracticality of SARFT’s censorious
process in today’s China, a place where reality includes the economic
imperatives of provincial TV producers. Super Boy resolutely carries the
temptation of its predecessor Super Girl: the very heart of the appeal to
the audience, and the revenue for the producers, is the magical bridge
between the ordinary and the super, between everyday Chinese guys and newly
minted celebrity idols.
There are, of course, gestures of concession to the censors, including the
chicken-leg peeling scene, and even more uplifting moments, including
wet-eyed interviews about patriotic events such as Hong Kong’s return to
Chinese rule. Though most contestants noted they had been under 10, all were
“changed for ever” by the end of British rule over China’s cherished Hong
Kong. Overall, such imperfectly blended moments of correctness and
entertainment present a mixed message about the intersection between what’s
modern and what’s moral.
Every week a “super boy” is eliminated; judged, “juried” and voted off. Voting
is done by text; the pay-to-vote system is more about revenue than voting.
And, in much the same way as the voting on American Idol and X Factor is
meant to be an imitation of the “free” voting westerners enjoy during
elections, so the voting on Super Boy reflects a system in which votes are
not definitive, because the actual selection process is complex. On Super
Boy, judges’ votes, those cast by “randomly selected commoners”, and choices
made by previously eliminated contestants, really determine the outcome. And
yet people send in millions of messages. Each vote posts a one-yuan (6p)
charge to the voter’s mobile-phone bill, so the ability to vote is tied to
economic privilege. Sixty per cent of the cost (6 mao) goes to Hunan TV and
40% (4 mao) to the state-owned phone company. Multiply that by 400m, and
it’s an irresistible recipe for making money.
There are, of course, more earnest interpretations of its success. According
to the director Long Dan Ni, it’s their love of “truth” that keeps the
audience voting. “Truth is my strategy,” she says. “I want the audience to
know everything about each boy, even if he’s from a rural, poor family, and
everything about his personality, even his worst qualities. The singing is
just a show. The audience loves reality.”
Or perhaps the audience just wants to take part in creating a celebrity. The
joy of watching commoners rise from poverty is not specific to the West. In
the Tang dynasty Story of Miss Li, the protagonist Scholar Zhang transforms
from an impoverished social parasite to a rich, famous singer. After losing
his fortune to a prostitute, he reclaims it by singing at a contest held by
funeral directors. “Before he had finished the first verse, all who heard
were sobbing…” What’s poignant is not only that Zhang, an ordinary loser,
becomes a “super boy”, but also that fortune itself is volatile and easily
reversible, a truth perhaps never felt as keenly in China as in the past 20
years, during which vast fortunes have been made and lost.
Super Boy promises to make and break the fortunes of ordinary boys, and flaunt
an endless supply of what audiences love and censors claim to hate:
gossiping, dirty dancing, and wailing. Perhaps because Super Boy is live,
it’s impossible for censors to control the shots, scandals, or tears. Or
maybe they just don’t actually want to. In either case, the show’s quotient
of weirdness, controversy and hot drama is obscenely high.
Yang Erche Namu is somehow both a predictable and unimaginable candidate for
playing the part of China’s Paula Abdul (the American Idol judge who is a
constant source of gossip). She is a model of the conflict between what
audiences want to watch and what Chinese censors claim to want to conceal.
And her reputation is for being more “scandal-dogged” than Paula and meaner
than Simon Cowell. Already famous for her kiss-and-tell books and an
English-language memoir, Leaving Mother Lake, she grew up on the border of
China and Tibet, at Lugu Lake, among Mosuo women, a matrilineal society that
practises female polygamy. Her mother’s advice to Namu was that good sex
means good skin, and if she didn’t want zits she’d have to take a lover. It
worked. The once-barefoot goat herder spent the better part of her twenties
as a model, singer and celebrity. She attracted international media
attention in the 1990s after the publication of Leaving Mother Lake. Now in
her early forties, she runs a guest house and museum in Lugu Lake, and is
the most famous and reviled judge on Super Boy.
I track Namu down in Beijing, and she tells me to meet her at a hair salon
called Eric’s of Paris, that she is leaving the following day for
Shanghai for “some romantic dating”, and must have her hair done.
An hour after I arrive, Namu climbs the stairs. She is Amazon tall, with her
signature straight-black hair parted in the middle and hanging like drapes
on either side, covering a huge percentage of her wide, lovely face. She
carries a huge gold bag that matches strappy gold stilettos on her
French-manicured feet. Everyone stares.
She shakes my hand and tells me she now has no time to do her hair, so we go
to a cafe next door, where Chinese guys smoke and type, and fashionably
dressed women sip lattes. Namu orders black coffee and shakes her incredible
hair. “Look at this,” she says, and pulls out a purple silk pouch, in which
is a carefully folded hot-pink Chinese jacket. “This was 4,000 RMB,” she
offer (over £250). “But I had to get it. I have to wear something new and
exciting every week, even though I have to spoon-feed them my colours. They
hate colour.” By they, she means SARFT, whom she compares at every
opportunity with Hunan TV’s producers, who celebrate her costumes and
controversies.
Namu launches into the story of the huge feather hat that Hunan TV now
features in a promo. After she wore it, “they” called her to say it looked
like a “chicken nest”, and that she had to “rest” for a week and not appear
on the show (Super Boy has an arsenal of five judges it rotates). Namu shows
me her mobile phone inbox, messages from the Beijing officials directing her
not to appear for a week, and then dozens from Hunan TV about how fabulous
the hat looked. Her female fans have sent messages, too: “Won’t you be there
next week? The show is only beautiful when you’re on.”
“See! My fans love that hat. A chicken nest! I wore that hat to Gay Pride in
Switzerland, and I was on TV six times. In 1999 I won the best-dressed woman
in China. Before Super Boy I was the most talented, the best dressed, a Mosuo
princess, cultural ambassador and the best writer in China. Now everyone
hates me.”
Namu, perhaps oversimplifying, attributes the animosity to her visibility, and
to Chinese men.
“Chinese men have always hated me,” she says. “I make them feel like nothing.
They’re closed and I’m open. I say the truth.”
In fact, her bad rap comes in part from her performance on the show, and in
part from her reputation for liberated sex, lurid books and criticisms of
Chinese men. She won’t consider marrying a Chinese man; westerners, she
tells me conspiratorially, are “more romantic”. The subject of Chinese women
dating anyone other than Chinese men is a fraught one in China. The reasons
for this range from historical resentment over barbarian invasions to the
gender imbalance in China’s population and concern over the dwindling number
of marriageable Chinese women. Namu, by publicly taking herself out of the
running, is a PR agent for western men and potentially a terrifying role
model.
“Chinese women love me,” she says. “Women here are independent, strong and
stylish. The men can’t compete; they’re repressed and think everything is
dirty. When I told one ‘super boy’ he should come to Lugu Lake, everyone
misinterpreted it. His singing was beautiful, and singing in my minority
culture is a natural practice, so he should come to my home town.”
She does not mention that singing in Mosuo culture is famously used for
courtship and seduction. Her comment was seen as an invitation to spend time
with her at home. One of the male judges famously said to a contestant who
had just sung about dreaming of his love by a river: “If the river is Lugu
Lake, your dream is a nightmare.”
Namu developed her reputation for being what she refers to as “the biggest
bitch in China” early in the show. Three judges, who then included a
celebrity-guest rock star called Zheng Jun, set about turning 100,000
potential “super boys” into 50, and Namu kicked contestants off the audition
stage with stunning speed.
“Everyone criticised me for only letting stupid contestants sing three words.
But I was giving them face by listening at all. We had to audition
thousands! So I kicked off 61 bad ones per hour.”
When Namu and Zheng argued over who should be awarded golden tickets in his
home city Xi’an, she made her first 8m enemies by kicking off his favourite.
Zheng stormed off.
To the delight of Hunan TV, SARFT’s horror, and the fury of Xi’an, the spat
was televised.
“On my flight back to Beijing, everyone was glaring,” Namu says. “I thought I
had on too much make-up, or my dress was too low-cut. Then a flight
attendant gave me a newspaper. It said three terrible things about me: I
only care about people’s looks; never let anyone sing more than three words;
and speak English all the time.” She denies all three. “I care what is in
people’s hearts! But the guy who Zheng Jun picked the first day had a huge
pimple on his lip and his eyes were red. And I don’t speak English. I just
correct people’s stupid English when they sing their English songs.”
Namu partially blames Lugu Lake for the flak. Having spent the past four years
there, she was unprepared to face the publicity and meanness that awaited
her in the capital. She returned because her “body needed some papaya juice
and dating”. When Hunan TV called to ask if she would help judge Super Boy,
she said “of course”, and within weeks her reputation had soured.
As to why she said “of course” to doing the show, Namu puts it simply, batting
her lashes.
“I needed pocket money for coffee on my next trip to the south of France.”
Why Hunan TV asked her to star is also easy to guess. They knew she would
elicit every kind of reaction possible: outrage, delight, controversy, and
tabloid attention. The latest rumour is that a jealous western man hacked
off Namu’s right ear and now she wears a fake one. She shows me her ear,
intact, and says this is why she wears 5lb earrings: they are proof that she
has real ears.
The director Long Dan Ni loves working with her. “Namu is adorable. She has
her own unique personality; Namu is a very real Namu. My directorial vision
is about truth; I want everyone to show his or her own personality and hide
nothing. That’s just what Namu does.”
In spite of this loving defence, and Namu’s apparent delight at celebrity, she
claims to be exhausted by all the scorn. “I’m a second Jiang Qing,” she
concludes, comparing herself to Chairman Mao’s famously villainised second
wife, sentenced to death for her participation in the Cultural Revolution.
“Now the media has covered me in this unfair way, I can understand how the
Cultural Revolution started. But I am lucky to have been born in the right
time, because I have western friends. I can escape the Chinese community – I
have two worlds.”
Perhaps because I belong to the western one, Namu ends our interview in a
joyful mood, suggesting I help get her a job on American Idol next season,
after she finishes judging a Chinese reality-TV beauty contest slated to air
in autumn.
In China, the power of the media to convey messages is well understood. But
with the country’s staggering pace of change, TV’s moral messages have been
shrunk to fit the political exigencies of each new moment. Chinese TV is the
site where the slogan-speak of the country’s past meets the advertising
language of its present. Censors still require the presence of some moral
messages, but they are increasingly permissive of injections of those
messages into commercial content. According to The Wall Street Journal,
China is launching a new reality-TV show, Soccer Prince, backed by Chinese
and western companies, including the producers of American Idol.
Sheldon Lu, a professor of comparative literature at the University of
California, Davis, and the author of Chinese Modernity and Global
Biopolitics, says the appetite for reality TV is driven by an increasingly
diversified audience. Historical reenactments of Qing dynasty dramas cater
to Lu’s generation, while reality TV is “the story of the younger
generation”.
“My mother wouldn’t like reality TV; she likes Years of Burning Passion,” he
says, referring to a hit drama of 2002 about a revolutionary Chinese general
and his family. “Super Boy is a good example of the American influence on
the younger generation, and maybe it is the future of China. There are a lot
of good things to say about American public culture, but this kind of show
is not the only direction for the future of China. It’s a one-sided
representation of what life should be.”
On Friday night’s show, the finalists are lovelier than ever, each with a
glitter-caked celebrity on his arm. The Tofu House audience is mesmerised.
After three hours, everyone grabs mobile phones and begins frantically
texting. The boy with too few votes stands above his losing number, collects
himself, and makes an Academy Award-worthy speech. He apologises to his
parents, promising the loss will motivate him to work harder so he can help
his impoverished village. Then he slinks away, leaving the winner to ascend
to superhero heights.
“At least he’s not too short,” Coco says of China’s first crowned Super Boy. I
ask what qualities, other than baby-faces and height, matter. The
conversation is heated; some consider “uniqueness” a requirement, but Coco
argues it should never trump good looks or talent.
“Who was that crazy guy on American Idol – the Chinese one, the terrible
singer?” she asks, meaning William Hung, the notorious contestant who sang
so badly he made a name for himself. “William Hung really lost face for
Chinese people. And he was ‘unique’. Nobody should sink to such lows for
celebrity.”
