文档介绍：The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the final of “China’s Got Talent” show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium. Guess who was the performing guest? Susan Boyle. And I told her, “I’m going to Scotland the next day.” She sang beautifully, and she even managed to say a few words in Chinese. [Chinese] So it’s not like “hello” or “thank you,” that ordinary stuff. It means“green onion for free.” Why did she say that? Because it was a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle— a 50-some year-old woman, a vegetable vendor in Shanghai, who loves singing Western opera, but she didn’t understand any English or French or Italian, so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese. (Laughter) And the last sentence of Nessun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was “green onion for free.” So [as] Susan Boyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang together. That was hilarious.
来苏格兰(做TED讲演)的前夜,我被邀请去上海做”中国达人秀“决赛的评委。在装有八万现场观众的演播厅里,在台上的表演嘉宾居然是(来自苏格兰的,因参加英国达人秀走红的)苏珊大妈(Susan Boyle)。我告诉她,“我明天就要启程去苏格兰。”她唱得很动听,还对观众说了几句中文,她并没有说简单的”你好“或者”谢谢“,她说的是——“送你葱”(Song Ni Cong)。为什么?这句话其实来源于中国版的“苏珊大妈”——一位五十岁的以卖菜为生,却对西方歌剧有出奇爱好的上海中年妇女(蔡洪平)。这位中国的苏珊大妈并不懂英文,法语或意大利文,所以她将歌剧中的词汇都换做中文中的蔬菜名,并且演唱出来。在她口中,歌剧《图兰朵》的最后一句便是“Song Ni Cong”。当真正的英国苏珊大妈唱出这一句“中文的”《图兰朵》时,全场的八万观众也一起高声歌唱,场面的确有些滑稽(hilarious)。
So I guess both Susan Boyle and this vegetable vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherness. They were the least expected to be essful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent brought them through. And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams. Well, being different is not that difficult. We are all different from different perspectives. But I think being different is good, because you present a different point of view. You may have the chance to mak