辩论赛选手心得——Unforgetta
ble Seven Battling Days
2006-03-13 16:25:37
Liu Changchang
“You are really like an American now,” the girl said. “No, I am a Chinese,” I affirmed. “She is not an American, she just learns fast,” another girl added. Of course I did not feel elated at all, but one thing they said is correct. That is, I’m a fast learner. I reckon not only me, but all the Chinese debaters in the 12th All-Asians’ Intervarsity Debating Championship are faster learners. All of us did our best, strengthened the friendship with debaters from other countries, and won over the admiration and respect from the adjudicators and other organizing committee members. We have attained an unprecedented high score in the debate which was reportedly deemed as a great breakthrough in our international debate history. And that is why it is so important and unforgettable to me until now. The 12th All-Asians’, short for the 12th All-Asians’ Intervarsity Debating Championship, was held in Kula Lumpur, Malaysia in May 2005. It has been a renowned event in the debating field for many years, and luckily, I was one of the Chinese debaters who could experience it in person. On May 10th, I set out on the trip with my coach to Beijing, where I would for the first time meet my fellow debaters and take a flight to Malaysia. I felt butterfly in my stomach. I knew I was stepping into a world with great challenges and unknown results. This feeling became overwhelmingly strong when I met the other debaters at the airport. They were all top dogs in either CCTV Cup English Speaking Contest, or FLTRP Cup English Debating Competition. I had watched them on TV screen making wonderful speeches, and when the Best Impromptu, the Best Performance winners came real in front of me, I found my hands were trembling. “Don’t worry, you can do equally well. Trust yourself and go ahead.” my coach encouraged me, as he always does. That was the prelude to my Malaysia trip. The ensuing competitions were like a thunderstorm, intensive and exhausting. I had two brilliant teammates, and together we fought our way through the tough days of debating. At the beginning the challenge was extremely hard for us. We didn’t know the debating rules and had no idea about how to structure our presentations. We had never heard of “Matter, Manner, Method”, which are the principles of effective debating. We couldn’t even understand our competitors because of their heavy accents. For the first three rounds, we were actually learning rather than competing. Even so, I still felt grateful, because I had the opportunity to learn and I even learned a lot from our opponents. During debating sessions, our opponents were fierce in rebutting, but once the debate was over, we became good friends instantly and some of them even taught us some debating techniques. Quickly we were catching up. Almost all our opponents were amazed at the fact that we Chinese debaters just knew each other a couple of days ago at the airport. For them, debating was a long-time cooperation and teamwork. Most of them had been practiced debating in their team for one year, two years, or even five years. They just couldn’t believe that our teams, which were made up of total strangers, could do so well. Indeed, we were learning very fast. Instead of being attacked by our opponents when debating, we began to make pointed rebuttals, and attack the other side on their weak points. In just two days, we learned how to make our presentations logically structured, how to follow the three debating principles, how to manage to beat the opposition teams, and how to make our opponents speechless. Amid the fierce speech attacks and wit-wrestling, not only did we learn quickly, the seven debating days also passed quickly. When we really began to enjoy those 15-minute preparations and 40-minute warlike speeches, the “battle” was coming to an end. Too fast, I told myself, feeling a bit lost. I began to love debating. Though honestly, Chinese debating teams seldom achieved satisfactory results in this competition due to the lack of practice and other factors, I still felt so proud of being a Chinese. Especially when some of the topics were related to China, we could act as if we were the Chinese government spokesmen to answer the questions, to voice our opinions and to illustrate our policies. You can imagine how proud I was to be a Chinese. Another instance that struck me the most was that the organizing committee formally apologized to our Chinese debating team for their misjudgment in one round of the debates. That round occurred in one afternoon between our team and a Malaysian team. With careful preparation and fluent English, we presented our views, rebutted the opponent’s points and we were so sure about our success. Yet, the outcome turned out to be the opposite. The Thai adjudicator announced that we lost. We were quite surprised and even our opponents were surprised at the result. We felt so disappointed and indignant. The unfairness and prejudice in judging our debate were apparent. After the negotiation with the adjudicator failed, we talked to the deputy committee adjudicator about the whole debate and our standpoint, in a gentleman-like manner. As instructed by the committee, we wrote a long letter of formal protest overnight and submitted it the next morning, expressing our indignation about the obvious bias toward our Chinese team. A day later, the chairman of the organizing committee formally delivered his apology to us on behalf of the whole committee. It was a pity that the result could not be changed, he added. Well, of course, our initial purpose was not to change the result, but the significance of our formal protest was that although we Chinese debaters lost one round of the debates, we did not lose our dignity and we had made our voice heard. How time flies. It has been over seven months since I came back from Malaysia. We fifteen debaters are still keeping in touch. Once in a while we would flash back to the unforgettable days in the 12th All-Asians’. The strange and substandard accent, the curry-covered chicken, the freezing air-conditioning in every venue, the stubborn hotel morning call (It never receded if you didn’t pick the receiver up. And if you put down the receiver the night before, there would surely be a waiter coming up to your room and knock at your door.), and the repetition of “here, here” whenever you wanted to express agreement… I fully experienced and enjoyed the whole event, and felt glad that our Chinese team, as a whole, was making great progress and historical breakthroughs. And now, as an unknown author put it in the preface of his book, “I need to write things down to feel that I fully comprehend it.”
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