Judging an English Competition 看西南大学的英文比赛

(little did this contestant know she would win second place)

(James, Frances, me, and Ben sitting in the first row of the auditorium ready to judge the contestants)

At 6:00pm six people (including those pictured just above the text) gathered at the front gate of Chongqing No. 3 middleschool only to be squeezed into a five passenger car. The driver complained about so many foreigners cramming into the car. In total there were 7 people in the car. Normally people would find this uncomfortable, on the contrary we found it quite amusing. After a while there was no use keeping the car heater on as all of our bodies began to generate enough heat to surpass that of the heater. All of us soon fell asleep wondering how long it would take until our arrival at South Western Sichuan University's Beibei Campus.

Forty-five minutes came and went. Everyone had already been awake for a bit and had vaguley worried looks on their faces. I looked outside our tinted black windows. Even though the windows were hard to see through I could tell that we were somewhere far from the city...and it was fairly dark. The road was bumpy, and the car was surrounded by forest. "This is a bit dodge, wouldn't you say?" one of my British friends said.

Now I was worried. They had crammed all of us 老外(lao-wai: foreigners) into a small black car with tinted windows, and were proceeding to drive us deep into the countryside of China. I tried to recall from biology class, where the kidneys are located in the human body. Can I keep mine? I wondered.

In a meeger voice I asked the Chinese man who had arranged this whole thing when we would arrive. "Soon, soon. Don't worry." I worried.

Thankfully, we did arrive fairly shortly afterwards. The university sort of sprang up in the middle of nowhere! It looked like many other schools in China with its plain white tiled walls.

We were late, and staff members waisted no time in getting us to the auditorium where we were to judge the English speech competition.

The audience applauded as soon as we entered. I blushed. I didn't know we were that important. I actually did not know what to really expect of this competition. There were easily 200 people in the audience. I thought it would have been smaller, but I suppose people-wise nothing in China is ever small.

They seated us in the front row. The long desk that was seated in front of us was covered in red velvet! Fancy! And each judge had their respective water bottle, scoring sheets, topic lists, and pens. The MC asked if our names were spelt correctly on our name plates, surprisingly they were...but they were not capitalized. Oh well.

The MC then asked us if we "would like to light up a light for a Chinese girl." I was confused, someone wanted us to light a cigarette for a Chinese girl? Apparently this is a direct translation of a Chinese expression meaning: to pray for, or say a few words for...etc. The girl had recently found out that she had contracted a "treminal disease, and there is not hope for her health." Everyone looked a bit embarrased, what are we supposed to say? We don't know her? We all looked at one another. Finally James spoke up and politely refused. It was an awkward question...but in the end the head of the student union did it for us.

Before the first speech the MC introduced the rules to the audience in choppy English, and her counterpart relayed them in Chinese. Her English was quite good a part from she kept saying "millets" instead of "minutes" which was rather distracting...I had to try extremely hard not to burst out laughing. I coughed instead.

All of the contestants were girls, except one. Two of the 15 contestants were of the Uighur minority that belongs to north western China (they are more Turkish than Chinese, but the Chinese prefer to call them Arabs).

"Each contestant will be give 3 millets during their first planned speech, and 2 and a half millets for their improvisation speech. The topic of their improvisation speech is chosen at random and the contestants are given one and a half millets to prepare."

(The reason why she was saying "l" instead of "n" for miNutes. Is because the accent from the south west of China confuses L's and N's. They also confuse their F's and H's. Mind you this happens when they are speaking Chinese and English. Oftentimes our calligraphy teacher will say "Lo Lo Lo!" when we are making an incorrect stroke while writing a character.)

The first speech was not much of a speech but more of a mispronounced list. (I was the hardest to please judging-wise). It was titled Where We Are Heading and began like so:

"Where are we heading?

We are buying more, but enjoying less

We have more conviences, but less time

More experts, but more problems

We talk too much, but love too seldom!

We have added years to life! But not life to years!"

(I wrote it down while she said it)

It continued on like that until her time was up. After a few contestants we discovered that many of them were excellent at memorizing their planned topics, but when it came to answering our questions or improvising they failed miserably. I am harsh, see?

One girl decided to do her speech topic on the Recession. Her speech was very disorganized. like many words jumbled toegtehr and you felt like you were listening through a wall. To prove her points she held her fist in the air and shouted, as if she were leading an army to a battle.

Ben leaned over and whispered in my ear "Was this what the cultural revolution was like?"

In the end the contestant who won was a Uighur mionority girl whose speech was on mass media. Although none of us agreed with her speech we still could not ignore the fact that she delivered it very fluently, and her improvisation was almost flawless. She answered our questions with ease. I gave her quite a good score. I later wondered if the people throwing the competition were sore that a minority had won. I was happy.

And I am sure the winner was too because she got a mobile phone for winning!