A month or two ago, I heard about a Chinese speech competition. Sure, why not, I can join that! I thought to myself. I signed up by adding someone’s WeChat and learned that I had a month or two to prepare and write the speech which I would then film and submit online.
My next course of action was to put off the speech writing and get busy with life. When I realized that I only had about two weeks left and no speech and no real ideas for speeches, I was about to give up on the whole thing. But then I was climbing Baiyun mountain one day and had an idea for the speech that I liked.
After heading home, I spent a couple of hours that night writing out the speech. I read through it the next day and tried to edit it before sending it to my Chinese teacher, a student who tutors me on Thursdays. She gave me some corrections, and when I got it back, I fixed everything and timed the speech. My three-minute speech was over seven minutes. Oops. I cut it down, but it was still about a minute too long. Cutting things down has never been my strong suit, and I couldn’t decide which of those other words that I had written would need to be sacrificed, so I decided to wait and take it to my Chinese class. Xiao Yue, my tutor, helped me to finish cutting out some things and then helped me with a few other grammar mistakes and pronunciation tips.
I’ve been reading through the speech as often as possible and also made a recording so I could listen to it. Yesterday and today I spent some time memorizing it because this afternoon, I really needed to film it so that I could be on time for the deadline.
This afternoon, my roommate, Kendra, agreed to help me with the filming, and we set off to Baiyun mountain. I figured that since my speech was about comparing my life in Guangzhou with climbing Baiyun mountain, climbing the mountain would be a great place to film the video. Fortunately, the weather was beautiful with glorious blue skies. Unfortunately, that meant that EVERYONE decided to climb Baiyun mountain today.
My original plan was to take a side path that basically goes straight up one part of the mountain. There aren’t usually many people on this road, and I thought we would be able to find a little spot and film the speech and be done and maybe climb the mountain a bit more just to relax. But let’s be honest—things rarely go according to plan, do they?
We started heading up the path that was supposed to have no other people, when Kendra and I both noticed a generator that was making a loud buzzing noise. It seemed to be pumping water from the little creek up the mountain via giant fire hoses. Several guys in fire uniforms seemed to be carrying a bunch of equipment up the path also. My first thought was that there was a fire, but no one seemed to be concerned enough for that.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Maybe we should go back?” Kendra suggested.
“I guess so. We don’t know how far they’re going to be doing things up that path.”
So we started walking down one of the more common paths. There were lots of trails off to the sides of this path into the bamboo forest. I wanted to find one of these side trails away from people where we could set up and film. The first one that we took headed back to the loud machine, so we gave up on that one.
The next side trail seemed perfect. We set up next to a little creek and a cluster of bamboo, making sure to get a place that didn’t splash splotches of sun over my face during filming. We started filming, and there was no one around. It was great. For a moment.
Just a little way into my speech, a man came along behind Kendra and started talking to us, while we were filming and I was looking at the camera and talking!
“Wow! You can speak Chinese!” He said.
I tried to ignore him and kept going.
Kendra looked at him and smiled but tried to motion for him to be quiet. He kept talking to himself or us, I wasn’t quite sure which. I tried to keep going, but I was very distracted and kept having to look at my speech paper that Kendra was holding next to the camera.
The guy came over next to me and peaked into the camera. I’m not sure what he was looking for. Maybe he was hoping to make it into my video? Well, he did. We didn’t keep that video for many reasons, but I did save a screenshot of this random guy photo-bombing my video.
Lots of other people also came by during that speech, and we gave up on that location and decided to keep going.
At the next road that went through a little park and up the mountain, a bunch more guys with fire hoses were spraying trees with water. I think everything is just too dry and they were using water from the reservoir to try to soak the trees that thought this was a tropical environment. We decided to go past them and hope they didn’t follow us.
Once we got up to another road closer to the top of the mountain, we tried to find another place, but we ran into a snake, people walking by during filming with loud music, and other people who just stared at us or tried to talk to us.
Finally, we set up the camera in a wooded area where several people had stopped to rest. These older people didn’t bother us, and filming was going well until we ran out of space on my phone. Then my microphone died.
I didn’t realize that filming this speech would be so incredibly difficult. Plus, I kept forgetting parts of the speech.
In the end, we finished filming the speech without a microphone, and I have now uploaded it to the app for the competition. I have a lot more respect for my students now, and that’s the biggest thing that helped me to keep going with this when I almost gave up many times. I wanted to understand what I’m asking my students to do, and I wanted to encourage them since they work so hard in my speech classes.
Even aside from all the trouble I had filming, giving a speech in Chinese was so difficult. I was afraid that if I deviated from my script, my grammar would have problems or I would leave out something that would fail to connect the things that I needed to connect. I had tried to memorize the speech, but it felt more like playing a piece on the piano from memory than giving a speech. When I give speeches in English, it’s easy to have the main points and then just speak extemporaneously, but speaking like that in Chinese is much harder, and every time I forgot the next line, I realized that it’s hard to just keep going.
My final take was not perfect. I had to correct a word or two, and I had to look at my notes a couple of times. But, I was glad that I finished it. Whatever happens with this competition, I can’t wait to show this speech to my students and sympathize with them and talk about what I learned and see what they have learned from giving speeches in English. IT’S REALLY HARD!
Also, I’d like to give a special thanks to Kendra for spending the entire afternoon climbing all over Baiyun mountain and helping me to film this video. I’m not sure I would have persevered without her encouragement!
