Superbowl

Watching the superbowl in China was quite the experience. The time difference was just right so that the game started at 7 am on Monday here. There are a lot of American expats here, so we saw a lot of sings around the city advertising superbowl morning specials and happy hours. Unfortunately that same morning we had our language placement exams. So instead of getting up to go watch the superbowl in the main student lounge, I woke slowly, my roommate turned on the TV in our room, and we watched the game as we tried to refresh our memories with Chinese. The Chinese broadcast of the superbowl was at times hilarious, but other times lacking and made me miss the insight of great American commentators like John Madden. Whenever a player does something well they announcers say 很漂亮 (hen piaoliang) or very pretty, but the way they say it is in the most feminine way possible. It was just a very bizarre occurrence to see Peyton Manning get sacked and have them announce how beautiful it was.
They don’t cut away for commercials like in the United States, whenever there is a TV break usually they just show the field, or they simply show one commercial. Most of the time it is the commercials put on by the NFL of athletes doing incredible feats. If anybody has seen them they know what I am referring to. There is one kicker who kicks six balls and is able to precisely hit the posts of the field goal each time. Then there is also a commercial of a player buried to the neck in sand and then able to jump out of it. The only other one I remember is a wide receiver who is blindfolded and then proceeds to catch balls flying at him from every direction. Why these are cool to see, it also furthers the stereotype of blacks in China. Without much contact with black people, Chinese form have formed their impressions of black people from the television. Through these types of commercials have let their imaginations wander into thinking about black people as magical beings who are physically extremely powerful. I haven’t really run into these kinds of thoughts yet but my roommate assures me it is very prevalent.
The halftime show was an instructional program on how to play football. The NFL has an ambassador to China, a former LB who once did his missionary work in China, putting on a camp for Chinese kids to run football drills. In addition to this they tried to explain the rules of the game to the view by a combination of old highlights and the video game Madden NFL. The unique thing about this was that the version of Madden must have been five or six years old, it had the same graphics that I remember playing with back in the day. Unfortunately I had to go take the placement exam after halftime and missed out on the exciting part of the game. I was very pleased to find out after my exam that the Saints had won. But I think the most devastating part about missing the superbowl was that I have not seen most of the good commercials. Youtube is blocked here in China, so I was only able to watch things posted on Yukou (Chinese youtube). The only ones I was able to watch was the Google commercial (which was very very cute) and the Megan Fox commercial (pretty funny). I was able to get both ends of the spectrum and I think it made up for missing the rest of the commercials.