"The Chinese Olympics Committee is shitting on the sweat and blood of energetic youth."

Theme Magazine has a great interview
on their recently revamped blog with a member of the Beijing Organizing
Committee (he calls it BOCOG - the Beijing Organizing Committee for the
Games of the XXIX Olympiad). Sounds fancy, but he's just a regular Joe (or should I say Zhao)
Student who, like his classmates, wanted to get involved in the Games
and got a nice gig doing some translating and commentating.

Most of my classmates were selected as announcers, which means they do
the intro before every event like “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the
XXIX Olympiad… etc. etc.” or “Today the weather is fine, a nice 29
degrees.”

Think about that next time you're watching the Games.

The guy seems to be your typical, nice, earnest, Olympics-loving Chinese dude - until this:

Do you realize you speak with an English accent? How did your English get so good?

Trainspotting is my favorite movie. A very memorable, very
impressive movie. I guess I watch a lot of English movies. I like Jude
Law’s accent a lot also and try to emulate it.

He learned English from Trainspotting and Jude Law! Eat it, American cultural hegemony!

I can further see how he was inspired by Trainspotting here:

...So, are you a volunteer?

No, not at all. I’m a step above those guys. Paid employee here. I get
paid about 80 RMB (about 10 dollars) a day. Enough to get me a pair of
new shoes okay? I also enjoy free transportation. Basically, what I’m
trying to say is, the Chinese Olympics Committee is shitting on the
sweat and blood of energetic youth. It’s great.

File under: The Chinese: Just Like Us!

Categories:

Sports

Lisa Wong Macabasco

Former Editor in chief

Lisa Wong Macabasco joined Hyphen in 2006; she has worked as the magazine's features editor, managing editor, and editor in chief. She has written for Mother Jones, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, AsianWeek, Audrey, Filipinas and ColorLines’ RaceWire. She graduated from U.C. Berkeley and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and co-founded the National Asian American Student Conference. She was formerly an editor at AsianWeek newspaper and an editor in the marketing department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.