Watch video clip for The other side of GHOST
2013 May, I just graduated, and had to get a job to support
myself. As a foreigner, who doesn’t have any “practical profession degree”,
there are probably two kinds of jobs that I could get: Working in exotic/oriental
Asian-type restaurants or teaching Chinese, and I had done both of them in the
past year.
Anyway, this video is about my first teaching-Chinese-related-job
interview for a famous kid’s language chain
tutoring center “Langu*** S**r”, they sent me a
sample-lesson video and asked me to do it in Chinese. Basically what I had to
do was introducing myself a little bit, and teaching an invisible boy, whose
name was Charlie, how to speak puppy, kitten, and duckling in Mandarin, then to
play a game about “finding the puppy” with him.
It’s actually really
difficult to force myself to watch this video, for some unexplained reason I
felt pretty shameful and embarrassed about it, it’s like running into a scene
that I shouldn’t see. Some of my friends strongly suggest that I should show it
as one of my performance piece, including those who could barely watch the
video because their native language is also Mandarin. But that’s not the main
reason that I put this video at the end of all my documentations.
For me, this video is
more like an annotation of my other project “GHOST”, both of them reflect my
reality as a foreigner, but in very different perspectives, and I would like my
audience to juxtapose them when they see this show. Chronologically, this
footage also works well as a representative final chapter about my life in
Chicago for the past three years. Most important of all, unlike showing other
documentations that I have power to control how I present myself, showing
self-images that really bother and frustrate me in public is a whole new
experience, like a new experience of living in reality.
