Censoring Ralphie

Once a week I reserved the multipurpose room (the one with the large TV and stereo), lined up three classes’ worth of chairs, and treated my students to such cultural icons as Star Wars and Ghostbusters, Goonies and Tootsie. And Sixteen Candles, where they found the slow dancing hilarious. Jaws – part thrillcoaster, part snapshot of small-town American beachgoing – was an instant hit.

Their all-time favorite was A Christmas Story. “We want more movies like this one,” they demanded. “We want the real life American movies.”

“You don’t understand,” I apologized. “There aren’t any more movies like that. A Christmas Story is the best one ever made. Besides, America isn’t like that anymore. That was the 1950’s.”

“But this is the movie we like. Not ghosts or UFOs.”

Leading up to Christmas and afterwards they asked for A Christmas Story each week. I continued showing new features on Fridays, and reserved the room different days for reruns of Ralphie’s Red Ryder quest. They packed the seats each time.

Before showing any film I previewed it and took notes so I could preteach helpful vocabulary and cultural elements. In my preview of A Christmas Story, before I first showed it to my classes, two scenes made me nervous.

One was the infamous Chinese restaurant near the end. With their turkey dinner devoured by the Bumpus hounds, Ralphie’s family eats out at a Chinese restaurant (the only place open on Christmas) where the waiters fa-ra-ra their way through “Deck the Halls” and guillotine a cooked duck at the table. How would my students handle such a stereotype?

I winced as it played on the screen, but they found it exquisitely honoring to find their own culture playing a role in such a classic American film. It suggested they might have a place in America. Besides, fa-ra-ra invited them to laugh at their own English struggles.

The other worrisome scene came in the first five minutes, and actually it was just one line. Younger brother Randy won’t eat, so his mother goads him with the oh-so-familiar guilt trip: “There are starving people in China!” As a whole the scene was priceless, a faithful reenactment of dining table antics across the American continent every night of the year. And Randy’s mother coaxing him to eat like the piggies do, face shoved deep in his meatloaf and mashed potatoes, cackling maniacally, was too funny.

But that line!

China was a living contradiction – a proud country with an inferiority complex. The birthplace of paper, gunpowder and silk, somehow China had let the world pass it by. As they began opening to the rest of the world, then, just how far behind the Chinese had slipped slowly became apparent. It was a matter of national face. They were unsettled.

So how would my students react, hearing their country bandied about as poverty’s poster child?

No way would the line go unnoticed. They would ask, and then I would need to explain. What would I say? How would I inform real, live people I knew and loved, people who had been such gracious hosts to me, that their country, which they viewed as a global superpower, was (in 1993) still considered by many a Third World nation?

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t think of a single explanation that would work. Maybe the cold hard truth would be best, shocking them with just how far back Maoism had set them. But I didn’t want to play that role in their lives – at least, not so rudely. There’d by plenty more opportunities to disabuse their notions of Communist superiority.

Besides, I wanted them to enjoy A Christmas Story, which would be nearly impossible after a first impression like that.

So I punted.

I showed the scene. By the end of the semester I must have showed that scene, and the entire movie, five times. And every single time, right as the Starving China line neared, I chose that moment to step up to the TV, thumb the volume down to zero and ask, “Can everyone see okay? Is it loud enough? It’s okay? Good.”

Five times I did that.

Maybe they caught on; maybe they didn’t. At the very least they must have found it strange for their teacher to check the sound only for this particular movie, and always during the same few seconds.

The gesture was futile, of course. They would see the film again at some point in the lives. But by then I’d be half a globe away.

Besides, no doubt Chinese censors would have done their work, and had the line removed.

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