Debut

I made my live Mandarin newscasting debut yesterday! I never knew I could be so nervous to wake up with almost 20 pimples on my face. It didn't go that well, but I think it was passing.

First I did the 1100 China Airlines news, then the 1400 cable news. CI news went OK. I did it for four days about a year ago, so I was somewhat familiar, though still a little nervous. The associate producer (AP) told me I needed to smile a little more. I was so nervous I forgot to do that. So I kept it in mind for the 1400 news.

The 1400 news was quite different - it was a full hour of news, something like 30-40 stories, where CI was about 15 stories plus a BBC segment. I didn't manage time properly and couldn't get through all the scripts before heading into the studio.

When I did the CI news last year, political stories were hard for me because I didn't know the political scene well. This time, it was the baseball stories that nearly killed me. It was a huge MLB day and about a quarter of the stories were on baseball. Two or three of them were anchor scripts, which mean I read and read and read forever. I wasn't familiar with the terminology or the people, so it was so so so difficult! I paused in the wrong places, even read one of the team names wrong (I don't know half the teams' names in Chinese) and it was just a nightmare!

After 8 stories, I thought I was going to faint. I thought the commercial break would never come. Eventually, it did, and while the program director yelling that my pauses were a HUGE problem, I zoomed through the stories coming up in the next block and prepared for the worst.

Thankfully, blogs two through four were much shorter, which bought me a little more time to go through stories in the next block, but GOSH, was it scary!! Chinese is no joke for me! I almost had a nervous breakdown in there. I still can't believe I survived.

If you saw it, now you know why I looked so grave.

I can't believe they want me to do Taiwanese news next weekend. My Taiwanese is not even up to conversational level. This is not funny. I'm going to DIE.