Watching United States President Barack Obama's town-hall meeting with Chinese youth on xinhuanet.com was a unique experience. It was like reading a foreign play: I had to visualize how the US president interacted with his Shanghai audience, how he calibrated his mega-watt charm and whether many of the questioners were indeed as tongue-tied as the transcript seemed to suggest.

The live text broadcast left a lot for imagination. It also offered a fascinating study into linguistic subtleties, not that simultaneous translation contains any subtleties. Many colloquialisms in speech, when rendered into Chinese text, took on a special tone, unusually formal and slightly condescending. But surely it was not a problem for those present as their English proficiency was lavishly praised by Obama.

I could certainly imagine Obama's eloquence and humor. He probably made the audience laugh when he said there's no course one can take to get a Nobel prize.

Although the live audience was mostly youths, their questions did not strike me as young, except for the one about Twitter, which was loaded. They were such a representative amalgam of all the regular Sino-US issues that any social demographic in this country could have come up with a similar list. While their maturity should certainly be lauded, it however deprived us of the joy of the wildcard. There must be some young man in there who was desperate to know what pickup line Obama used when he first met Michelle.

On the other hand, there were thousands of questions online that embody the passion of today's young. For example, instead of conveying the concern of a Taiwan businessman, one netizen wrote his question wanting the US president to envision Hawaii being lured to break away.

Obama's answers hit all the right notes. They were so comprehensive and balanced he could have recited them in his dream. If only his political rivals in the US had floated him such balloons.

raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/17/2009 page3)