Every February and March you can see thousands of students and their parents crowding the gates of China's four top movie and drama institutes with dreams of becoming a superstar.
The craze is undiminished this year. At the Shanghai Drama Institute, about 1,500 students fought to make the 28-person quota as performance majors, 900 vied for 20 places in a related major.
The situation was even tougher in Beijing where the ratio of applicants to places available was more than 8,000 to 30 at the Beijing Movie Institute and more than 7,000 to 50 at the Central Drama Institute.
It is obvious that an individual's chance of being enrolled under such circumstances is very slim, but this does not scare away the dedicated students who shuttle back and forth between the well-known institutes, trying again and again. Nor does it worry strong-willed parents who put their work aside and cut back on other family expenditure to support their children who have ambitions to pursue a career in acting.
Perhaps only a very small number of the applicants are sincere drama or movie students who want to devote their lives to the art form. For the rest, entering the entertainment world means having a colourful lifestyle, fat monetary rewards and an enviable social status. However, these are the very stimulants that drive them and their parents and children to chase the exciting gamble.
Is it reasonable? Maybe it is understandable for youngsters to pursue their dreams no matter how bizarre with great passion, but how can parents be as impetuous as their children? They are old enough to see their children have little chance of being selected. They are also conscious of the fact that the fierce competition will leave the vast majority of applicants bitterly disillusioned. However, there are still lots of them willing to risk their children's future happiness as well as their self-confidence.
Apart from the opportunists who would be part of any craze going and the optimists who feel confident about their child's academic skills, most parents are there because of an over-indulgence of their child brought about by the family-size control policy. They cannot bear to frustrate their only child over any issue, no matter how slight. Their inexperience as parents as well as their great expectations for their child also accounts for their inability to give proper guidance.
Instead of explaining to their children the extremely low chance they have of gaining admission to the world of acting and telling them of the various hardships and the dark side behind the apparent splendour of show business, they surrender instead to the child's adulation of pop stars and the elusive mirage of showbiz glitz.
Too much attention given to the only child in a family not only blinds parents' ability to reason and clouds their judgement, it also encourages the child's willfulness. The final victim is surely the child, who fails to make wise, responsible choices about life and who cannot bear to shoulder failure alone. In many cases, indulgence goes before long-time distress.
(Shanghai Star May 8, 2004)
