I Survived a Chinese Game Show!

Two Sundays ago, two of our classmates announced that they were selected to be participants in a popular Nanjing game show. They said the game show was being filmed the following day and that we were all invited as their “special guests.” I figured that Monday’s FHE would be an activity night. :)

My two roommates, one of our native friends, and I took a taxi across Nanjing and arrived at the filming studio around 6:30 p.m.. The show was supposed to start filming at 7:00 (it didn’t start until 7:45), and we wanted to make sure that we got good seats.

*One of the benefits of being a foreigner in China is that people don’t really question what you do because 1) they just assume that you are confused and 2) they don’t expect that you can speak Chinese.

We didn’t have tickets for the show, but we just walked in the studio and looked for our classmates. We didn’t see them anywhere, but in front of us were about a hundred native college students sitting in the seats for the studio audience. When we walked over to the bleachers, all one hundred pairs of eyes turned and stared at us. There were a couple of seats left, and I ended up sitting front row center. One of the producers came up to me and asked me what I was doing. I told him that our classmates were participants and that they had invited us to watch. We ended up talking for about 15 minutes, exchanged phone numbers, and made plans to do something after we get back from Beijing. See “The Man Date.” :) All the students sitting around me were so fun! They asked me a lot about the NBA and they were particularly interested if I had ever seen a live game. My thoughts flashed back to Uncle Reggie’s last playoff game. Luckily, I was able to wipe away the tears before the cameras came on.


They taught us what we were supposed to chant when one of the contestants lost (“Man Zou Bu Song, Xia Ci Zai Lai!”), passed out whistles and pompoms, and then the filming began.

The host of the show was hilarious! He was short, his hair was spiked straight up, his glasses can only be described as extremely Asian, he was wearing black pants with a white belt, a pink shirt, and a white sports jacket that was glittering with jewels. I concluded that he must be pretty popular when everyone screamed and yelled his name when he came on the stage.


After the host said his opening comments, the curtains opened and a group of girls came out doing something that I assume they considered a dance. I am not really sure because for two reasons my head was down when they were on stage.

1. They were not dressed as modestly as I had expected. I guess Chinese television is more similar to American television than the Chinese government claims.

2. They were completely NOT synchronized in their dance routine. I was embarrassed for them. Dad’s “good thought” came to my mind. :)

After the six contestants introduced themselves, the games began. There were three different games.


For the first game, the two contestants put on fat suits, jumped into a pool of water, and then had to get to the end of an obstacle course and rinse out their suits. Whoever was able to rinse out the most water won.

The second game had both contestants run on a huge treadmill that gradually got faster. They both had buckets, and the goal of the game was to catch the most fruit and vegetables falling from the buckets above the treadmill. An onion flew all the way over to my seat. For some reason, I felt cool.

The last game consisted of the two contestants carrying huge heads of lettuce through a slippery obstacle course and then throwing them into a basket. The games reminded me of “American Gladiators,” just without the cool guns and without women with massive triceps and traps.

One of our classmates made it to the final round, but he lost in a wrestling match where the goal was take off the other person’s sock. It was weird, but the Chinese crowd loved it!

Filming the whole show took about five hours, and everyone in the crowd was getting pretty restless as the time was nearing midnight. The show was even stopped at one point, and the producer walked over to my roommate and me and told us to stop talking. I felt like I should go sit in the corner. Luckily for me, the students sitting around me were so fun that it was essentially five hours of language practice.


We got back to our apartment around 1 a.m., completely exhausted but happy. After all, we had just been part of the live studio audience of one of Jiangsu province’s most popular television shows! Also, a couple of days ago I received an email from the show’s producer that included an invitation for me to be a participant on the show in two weeks. This blog just might have a part two. :)