The night
I got a lot of new information in the activity on Friday. (Do not take tube when tube strike…)
The schedule of this activity in V&A museum on Friday is: random play dance, a dance workshop and performances, then another random play dance. I arrived at the first random play dance and stopped four Chinese girls that I didn’t know before randomly for interview after that. They did not want to show their faces so I put my camera down to the ground.
Me:”I want to ask, how do you know about this activity?”
Girl A:”I saw the post of Red.” Red is where I posted the event.
Me:”Ah, that should be from me!”
A:”Maybe so.”
Girl B:”I’m from UCL, and I joined the Kpop society, they shared this.”
Me: “If you don’t use the Red, you don’t know about it, do you?”
Girl C:”It seems that there is really no way to know.”
Me:”Do you guys use Instagram?”
They all:”Very less.”
Me:”Did you dance with foreigners before? Or have you ever….”
They:”No.” “Sometimes I do! I’ll go to dance studio. Does that ok? There were many foreigners in The Hub, you know that studio?”
Me:”Then you have never danced with foreigners like in a small crew, or like do K-Pop cover?”
They:”Not yet.”
Me:”So why don’t you join their workshop and feel the atmosphere of dancing with most foreigners? Form my experience, maybe when I go to the class in Krew Dance Studio, there were more Chinese people. When I took a break, I saw Chinese people gather together to speak Chinese. Then the only foreigner of that class was quite embarrassed and no one spoke to her. So either you can join their workshop and feel it, and then I will wait. Can I come back and interview your feelings? “
These girls readily agreed to my proposal and joined the workshop.
At the same time, I also asked my friend Aijing to participate in the workshop. She is a ballet dancer. Since last year, she has also started to learn some dance styles such as hiphop. She never danced to K-Pop. This is her first K-Pop workshop.
After they participated in the workshop, I interviewed them again.
Girl B said: “When I went to UrbanKpopDance to have a class, I had a class with many, many foreigners. That day, the teacher asked us to sit around in a circle at the end of the class, and then we danced together. The atmosphere was super good. Just now after the workshop ended, they also let us dance together. However, if foreign people are playing some music at will, and then they gather there like now (she pointed the people behind us), I don’t dare to go there to join them, I think they will not pay attention to me, which will embarrass me. “
I said, “So you mean you need someone to lead you, right?”
B said, “Yes. I also went to class in Krew dance studio and there was a white girl. During the break, I saw that she seemed confused about some bits. I wanted to talk to her, but she just gave me few words.”
I said, “What do you think causes them to ignore you? Is it because you look like an Asian, or do we really have language barriers?”
She said, “I think both they are.”
I said, “Do you think if your English is at the level of native speaker, they will accept you more?”
She said, “I think it might be. There will be no linguistic misunderstanding.”
While we were talking, a group of people with non-Asian-looking were dancing to music not far behind us. I tried to take this girl to join them, but at that moment I lacked a bit of courage. When this girl saw that I was not too brave to go forward, she also worried that we would get some bad reaction or that we would not be accepted by those people. In the end, we didn’t go forward.
And at the 2nd random play dance, I also met a white girl who seems a little bit aggressive, which made me feel a little bit annoyed.
However, for the 2nd random play dance, the girls (the blue hoodie) I interviewed joined it at the back of the people.
Findings
According to today’s interaction, I got some findings that:
- Someone really saw my content published on Chinese social media and knew that I would attend, so they went to this event. It shows that this is effective. If a Chinese person publishes these contents on Chinese social media, they will be seen and have the courage to go to a safe environment that is completely unfamiliar to them. Based on the research and my experience on marketing, I think this is a branding method for local dance studios to do marketing in Chinese social platform, in order to lead the Chinese to engage.
- If you want to achieve the goal of “encouraging Chinese people to dance with foreigners”, you really need a person to do this example and lead them. Sometimes this person can not be me, can not be a Chinese, can be their teacher in class.
- Language is a big barrier. In my experience, most Chinese people want to be close to foreigners who can speak Chinese, because Chinese is their comfort zone. It is not easy to encourage people to jump out of the comfort zone and communicate with others, because everyone wants to live in the comfort zone, especially Chinese students who have been suppressed for a long time and pushed. Based on my experience of making friends with people from different countries, it seems like non-Chinese male are more confident with their English, though it sounds bad (especially from some of my Indian friends and Malaysian friends).
For the last finding, this is a quite common thing I felt for most Chinese people especially newly coming here, also for new coming me in Feb. When I sent email to some of the local crews, I sent with “forgive my poor English”, and I even said no any single word with them for our first meet. I was only listening to them just because I got good grade for listing of my IELTS test. I mean, I can only listen, I can understand what they are saying, but I cannot say any single word because I am afraid to make myself misunderstood. Although I changed a lot during this year, as I said, I feel it is quite common for Chinese.
Additional stuff
【Full video of the Friday night live: https://youtu.be/aMHsR3qwmDE】
(I don’t know how to put the video directly into the blog…..I don’t know how Jiang did that)