The secret life of a shadow in the spotlight

An accountant who twice a week sheds her own persona and becomes someone else

Quiet, introverted and timid in front of strangers, twice a week she decides to hop out of her cozy cocoon, and the person who emerges, commanding center stage, is a performer named Xiao Wu, a rare woman in the tough world of Beijing stand-up comedy.

"I don't force people to understand this part-time job," Xiao says. "I just want to do what I like and keep it low key."

Xiao, 27, who holds down a nine-to-five job as an accountant for a university, is a graduate of China's leading university of finance and economics, Central University of Finance and Economics. Several years ago she took up the university post, a job offering an urban Beijing hukou (household registration certificate), good salary and ideally loose schedule.

"You may well discover that in your job you are not realizing your true potential," Xiao says, adding that she has long yearned for something more meaningful than a desk job.

"It may end up being a lot different to what you imagined when you graduated from school."

She reckons she is more humorous than her peers, whom she always makes laugh.

So she decided that with her humor she should start getting serious, and her first plan was to be a gag writer.

"When the Chinese sketch comedy series Diors Man went viral, I thought it would be cool to write jokes for a comedy like that," she says.

However, a campus comedy tour changed her mind.

"Like most Chinese people, I confused stand-up comedy with talk shows, and I went to see the show." There were 14 stand-up comedians, including Dashan, China's most Mandarin-fluent foreigner. The show was such a success that she decided to try doing a routine herself, signing up for an open mic event in early 2015.

The one-week preparation and five-minute debut ended up as an utter flop, with deafening silence from the audience, but she decided to press on.

"I gave myself 10 tries, which was a lot."