2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

Chapter 56

An actress I'd met in Beijing, a young lady with a lovely girl-next-door innocence, once told me about her first-hand experience with auditions. She studied at Zhong Xi, The Central Academy of Drama, which is one of the three most prestigious drama schools in China, together with Beijing Film Academy and Shanghai Theatre Academy. Zhang Ziyi from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Tang Wei from Lust, Caution, Gong Li from Memoirs of a Geisha, they all studied there. Naturally, entry into the school is cutthroat.

This girl told me that when she was auditioning for Zhong Xi, the first round was a group interview. A large group of 20-30 aspiring actors were ushered onto the stage all at once, and the judges would then dictate a topic on the spot, to which they must improvise a performance. For her year, the topic was "Find".

To get noticed in a sea of distractions, she decided she had lost her keys. Which I thought was an odd thing to lose. The first thing that came to my mind was losing my wallet – in Shanghai. But as I would soon find out, she lost her keys for good reason. "To find the key," she continued, "I acted a violent scene of kicking and banging against the door."

Here she paused, seeing my face cringe. "For the first round of auditions," she explained, "you have to act like a freak, otherwise you won't get noticed."

The thought of: "ME, acting like a freak, to an audience of 400" only makes me cringe again. Even though I'm not in the throes of auditions for film school, it is still an audition, I still have to perform. The common advice of "just be yourself" seems so feeble and so pale against the cold wash of floodlights. What if "being myself" isn't good enough?

To make matters worse, the format of the show doesn't lend itself well to showcasing the women.

It opens with the 24 ladies (in our case 26) standing in a line, facing a single man. Through a series of personal videos, we learn about his lifestyle, dating history, and friends' opinions. Each one of us has a light that we initially turn on, which indicates our interest in him. The man, as soon as he comes on stage, picks a girl as his favourite – his "Heartbeat Girl" as they call it – whose identity is kept secret. Usually, by the end of his video introductions, most girls have turned off their lights. If at least two girls have left their lights on for him, then the host would proceed to revealing the identity of the "Heartbeat Girl". The three girls are then invited center stage.

At this point, the man can whisk off either of the girls who left the light on for him, and win a trip for two to the Aegean Sea (in our case a fancy dinner at a local restaurant). But if he stubbornly insists on winning the heart of his "Heartbeat Girl", then he risks leaving empty-handed. Because the "Heartbeat Girl" will then have the final say.

Now if you've been following the show, you know how easy it is for the girls to end up as wallflowers. To stand out, the girls have to either 1) say outrageous things, such as "I like to sip red wine while munching on a pound of duck necks", or "I'd rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of a bicycle"; 2) become one of the final three.

Naturally, becoming one of the final three is by far the most graceful way to leave an impression. It's just that I either would have to be willing to leave the stage with the guy (thereby forfeiting my chance to advance to Nanjing), or be his "Heartbeat Girl", which is totally NOT up to me. This leaves me with option 1 – saying outrageous things.

Generally speaking, being the spontaneous, free-spirit that I am, for any speech longer than three sentences I like to be prepared with an entire script memorized to the punctuation marks. But on a dating show when all the banter occurs on the spot, and the identity of the single men are a mystery, I had no clue how to prepare for it. After much hammering of the heart, and wriggling of the toes, I gave up. The pressure is too much. I'm not a comedian!

So in the end, I decided to just stay alert for the men's self-introductions, and force myself to ask at least one question of each guy. Similar to how I doggedly earned participation marks in business school. So at the end of the day, if I can't be funny or smart, I have at least made a respectable effort to speak.

By seven o'clock, I peeked through the curtains to find the banquet room's seats filled up completely – a sold-out event. With the first bars of pop song, and the announcement of the host, we spilled onto the stage like a string of beads.

I don't remember much of the event itself, but I do remember having the distinct feeling of being admired from the upturned faces in the audience. I carried out my plan of one question per guy with militant discipline. And I maintained a positive attitude, as they advised, in the self-help books.

It was my positivity, or perhaps it was my penetrating stare coupled with a toothy grin – misinterpreted as attraction – that landed me center stage as the "Heartbeat Girl" for two out of the five single men. Thereby making me the only girl to have been the "Heartbeat Girl" twice on the show. Even though I'd love to report that it was my winning personality or stimulating conversation or incredible depth that set me apart from the rest. But no. "Heartbeat Girls" are picked before any conversation is exchanged, based on appearances alone.

The Fei Cheng Wu Rao producers scouted around the nation for two dozen women to go on the show. By the time they arrived in Vancouver, (after Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton) I don't know how many slots were left. But this much I was sure, even if they were to pick only one or two out of all of us tonight, I did well enough to be remembered.

After the show, journalists from the Chinese newspapers with their big cameras and blinding flashlights swarmed backstage to photograph us. They said all sorts of kind things. I posed and smiled, feeling sparkly like a superstar.

If anyone's going to Nanjing, it's gonna be me.

A few days later, the notification text finally came through.

It said:

"You're invited to the Fei Cheng Wu Rao interview at the Piano School in Richmond on Friday. Please arrive between the hours of 8am-5pm."

Huh?

Hadn't I just aced the audition? What's with the interview?

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