My career as a foreign performer in China started with an ad at the local western restaurant. “Foreign Performers Wanted: Call Wang.” I thought to myself, “I'm a pretty decent performer, I'll have a go at this.” I gave Wang (not her real name) a call. She asked me to come back to that same restaurant the next day in the afternoon. There I met Wang, another foreigner, and a TV crew. Apparently she was being given an award by the TV station, and they wanted to film her with her foreign friends, of which I was now one. In retrospect, I should have clued into the fact that she had to lure people under false pretenses to get them to appear on TV with her. Either way, she agreed to let me work with her. The first thing she wanted to do was enter a contest. We were not going to get paid for the contest, but it was going to open the door to a world of fame and riches.

She managed to put together a group of five people for this contest. A Mexican guitarist, a Singaporean trumpet player, a Canadian guitarist (me) and a Chinese keyboard player comprised the band. Wang sang. She decided we really needed to wow the judges, so we put together a whole martial arts dance to the music of Shanghai Tan. We were twirling and spin-kicking like the love child of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jacky Chan.

The ridiculous part is that the contest was for young people who wanted to be singers. All these college aged kids were going up on stage one at a time and singing a cappella, and we brought in a five piece band and did a full-blown kung fu show. The judges didn't know what to do with us. They told us that this was the wrong contest for us, but if someone wanted to try to sing a cappella, they could be chosen as an individual to go on to the next round. Wang got up to the microphone and the look of pain on the judges’ faces was excruciatingly delicious. Did I mention she really, really can't sing?

After our humiliating exit from the Teenage Singing Dream contest, our next stepping stone to unimaginable fame was a comedy duo.

This entailed memorizing a script in the local Sichuan dialect.

The script, however, was a problem. Wang had paid 10,000 RMB for this script and she assured me it was funny. It's not that I didn't believe her, there were some funny lines, but the script required me to play the dumb foreigner. The part that bothered me the most was this:

Wife: When we get to my parents' house, make sure you tell them your Chinese name. (To audience) Would you like to hear his Chinese name? (Audience responds in the affirmative.) Tell them the Chinese name that I gave you.

Stupid Foreign Husband (Me): My lovely wife gave me a beautiful Chinese name. My Chinese name is, Gua Wa Zi! (Guawazi is Sichuan dialect for moron or idiot, but more of a curse word.)

To me, that was the equivalent of having a Chinese person saying, “My friend gave me a great English name. My English name is, Dumbass!”

Needless to say, that line got the biggest laugh of the whole show. I did it once, and vowed never to do it again. I told her we could come up with a better script on our own, she refused. I quit, and she screamed, “You'll never work in this town again!”

I  did work in this town again – as a Rollerblading Santa Claus at Christmas-time. I had a reputation for rollerblading around Chengdu, and my friend at a local 5-star hotel thought it would be a good idea to have a foreign Santa Claus on wheels. I donned the gay apparel and fake beard, grabbed a sack of presents and glided gracefully across the lobby handing presents to the kids.

In the West, we always see Santa on his chair, with the young ones lined up patiently to sit on his knee. In Chengdu that day, those kids just saw a white dude on skates with a bag of presents and they attacked. I was swarmed by throngs of kids, ripping at my bag of goodies, and parents screaming at me to make sure their kid got something good. I managed to barricade myself behind some decorations and throw the presents into the teeming throng, but when I ran out of presents they didn't stop attacking. I had to bodycheck my way out of there like I was trying out for the NHL. I made it to the elevator and the manager was beaming. (I guess he didn't care that I had just flattened a few kids.) Part one was a success.

Part two entailed me doing the same thing in the main ballroom. Instead of unruly kids, this room was filled with inebriated men. I was supposed to enter from the back and skate up to the stage, a good 50 meters away, and hand out the presents from there. However, drunk fathers behave the same as their kids and when they saw red, they charged. I barely made it five meters before I had a pile of 20 bai jiu breathing bodies stacked on top of me. I managed to stay upright, which on wheels was no easy task, and I had the presence of mind to protect my presents, but I was rendered immobile. I had to stand there helplessly wrestling my red bag of presents from these naughty-listers until security came and rescued me. These security guards showed up and started grabbing bodies and throwing them off of me. They then formed a box and escorted me step by step to the stage, where they created a human wall from behind which I launched presents into the crowd until my bag was empty and I could make my escape backstage.

Again, the manager was beaming. Apparently watching Santa get ravaged by raging zombies was his idea of yuletide fun. Even that hasn't put me off from performing in China, and I still pick up singing gigs on a regular basis; but you'll never again see me as Santa on wheels, and I'll never again utter the line, “My Chinese name is Dumbass.”

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