Alex Hix-Dunn: UK Chinese Bridge Semi-finalist

Photo credit: A Hix-Dunn

This week Leona catches up with Alex Hix-Dunn, a 4th year Spanish and Chinese student from Lincolnshire. Alex is Vice-President of Sub-Aqua Club, and also reached the semi-finals of the UK Chinese Bridge competition this year. Now, Her Campus were equally as bemused as you probably were on hearing this, so we caught up with Alex to find out exactly what is involved in Chinese Bridge…

So what is Chinese Bridge exactly?

The Chinese Bridge competition is an international competition across the world and in each country it’s set up by the Confucius Institutes which are funded by the Chinese government. They run their own mini competitions which end in a final for each country. The aim of the whole thing is that a couple of finalists from each country go to China where there’s a big televised competition. All contestants are foreign students that are learning Chinese, which is a key point – you have to be a student. Basically the aim is to get on this TV show in China where they have to do loads of different challenges. Sometimes they do Chinese cultural stuff and have to learn about the Tang dynasty, dress up and learn how to do court etiquette and things. Or they have to do tasks like street-selling to tourists.

You were at the semi-final in London. What did you actually have to do on the day?

So on the day, there were three of us [from UoN] that went and we all had to prepare a 3 minute speech which could be on any topic of our choosing, in Mandarin of course. Then we had to prepare a 3 minute performance of a Chinese cultural talent. For mine, a month and a half before, my Chinese teacher at uni started teaching me how to play the Chinese bamboo flute. I learnt how to play a piece on that, which was really good fun but more difficult than I thought it would be. I had good fun trying to get used to the Chinese way of noting music because they have completely different musical notations. And then in the final part you get asked 5 questions from a huge list that they send you beforehand. These relate to Chinese cultural knowledge, Chinese language and Chinese current affairs.

What was your speech on?

My speech was on my impressions of China.

Were they positive or negative impressions?

Positive impressions. It mainly talked about the crazy things that happened on my year abroad when I spent 6 months studying in the city of Qingdao, where Chinese beer comes from. Lots of people will have heard of it before, it’s written Tsingtao but pronounced ching-dow. The first section was about Chinese cities; they’re really crazy, everyone’s running around, it’s always really busy and there’s always lots of mad stuff going on. Then I talked about how Chinese people were really friendly and welcoming, and about how you get treated so well just because you’re foreign. They can talk about you all the time even though they don’t realise that you can understand what they’re saying.

What did you learn from taking part?

I learnt a lot about Chinese culture, current events and language stuff. For the question and answer section, they sent us the 220 questions we could be asked and of all of those they would pick 5 to ask. It was quite difficult, but trying to learn all of those I learnt a huge amount of stuff that I had no idea about before, which is interesting and kind of useful for the future. Otherwise, learning the bamboo flute was pretty fun, I’m gonna try and keep it up. I’ve bought one on Amazon but it’s rubbish in comparison to the real deal Chinese one.

You played the bamboo flute for your performance, out of the other semi-finalists, were there any other acts which blew you away?

There was one guy that was really good – he came in second place and had been quite creative. He’d recorded a video of himself beforehand and he stood on the stage and pretended to call himself whilst he was in China. So he would talk, and the video would respond. He challenged the guy in the video to see who was better at calligraphy and they both raced to draw these characters to see who could do it best and eventually held it up and it spelt out a phrase that said ‘good luck’ in Chinese. That was quite cool, very inventive.

Where can we find you on a Friday night?

At the moment probably in the library somewhere – maybe on Jubilee campus in the Chinese building.

Thanks Alex, well done for getting to the semi-finals of this huge event and good luck for your final exams.

Edited by Sam Carey

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