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Lives in Chinese Music

University of Illinois Press

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Writing Lives in Chinese Music Helen Rees...............................................................................................11. Zhao Yongming: Portrait of a Mountain Song Cicada Frank Kouwenhoven and Antoinet Schimmelpenninck..................................................232. Shao Binsun and Huju Traditional Opera in Shanghai Jonathan P. J. Stock, with Shao Binsun..........................................................453. Tsar Teh-yun at Age 100: A Life of Qin Music, Poetry, and Calligraphy Bell Yung....................................................................654. Gathering a Nation's Music: A Life of Yang Yinliu Peter Micic......................................................................................915. Grace Liu and Cantonese Opera in England: Becoming Chinese Overseas Tong Soon Lee..................................................................1196. Abdulla Mäjnun: Muqam Expert Rachel Harris....................................................................................................1457. Compliance, Autonomy, and Resistance of a "State Artist": The Case of Chinese-Mongolian Musician Teng Ge'er Nimrod Baranovitch.....................173Contributors...........................................................................................................................................213Index..................................................................................................................................................217

Chapter One

The bus trip from Shanghai to the heart of Wujiang county took us two and a half hours. Under a gray winter sky we drove along concrete roads past rice paddies, ponds and lakes, and scattered farmhouses and villages. The area was flat, but at certain points cone-shaped hills arose like solitary lumps on the horizon. We crossed rivers and canals, where Chinese junks and cargo boats made of concrete progressed slowly. Some of the motor boats on the water emitted a thick black smoke.

Up to the 1950s—as one bus passenger told us—many towns in this area could be reached only by water. Even today, one would need a small boat to reach the more outlying places. The entire landscape—a patchwork of ponds, rivers, canalized streams, a realm of fishing and small farming—had been shaped by centuries of floods, erosion, and human intervention.

It was said that Wujiang county was rich in folksingers, and that quite a few of them lived near Luxu. This was a core area of the celebrated "Wu songs," named after the ancient kingdom of Wu. One famous singer, the "mountain song tiger" Jiang Liansheng, sang long narrative texts and was reputed to have the best voice of all. Then there were Li Asan and Yu Baoxiang, who had croaky voices but always kept their audiences spellbound. And there was the prolific but slightly notorious Lu Amei, who—it was whispered—once performed a song about lesbian love.

How many of these people were actually still alive we didn't know. The folk-song tradition in southern Jiangsu was on the wane, and if any of these singers—listed in local booklets and articles—were still around, they had to be old and withered. At least we knew one contact person, and we had a place to start.

* * *

Mr. Yu Wei—a plump and evidently convivial man—waited for us at the bus stop in Luxu. He had received our telegrams and had agreed to receive us in his cultural office, a local government institution.

We crossed the high stone bridge over the canal and entered the old town. Most of the houses in the town center were nineteenth-century wooden structures on top of stone foundations, beautiful in design but in bad repair. If someone cared to restore and repaint these buildings, Luxu might possibly rise to fame as a new tourist target. But the fate of the place looked sealed. There was apparently not enough money or incentive to restore the town, and the new Luxu was taking on a very different appearance. Drab concrete buildings arose on construction sites. It might take a few years for the face of the old town to disappear completely.

We expressed our admiration for the old architecture, but Mr. Yu had nothing much to say about it. He had spent most of his life in this place, sharing a house with his mother. Perhaps it all looked overfamiliar and boring to him. His colleague, Mr. Xu Wenchu from Wujiang's county seat, whom we met at the government office, showed a more keen interest in Luxu: with its population of seven thousand, the old town center served as an industrial and market center for the entire region. "You see," said Mr. Xu, "we live close to Lake Fenhu, an important fishing resort. We are a kind of gateway between Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and the Shanghai district, and we link up many major industrial towns."

That sounded reassuring—a place that was important first and foremost for being close to some other places. In other words, a relative backwater. But no, Mr. Xu was genuinely passionate about Luxu and its environment. Raising his extraordinary long eyebrows, he explained that no fewer than four different dialects were spoken in the Luxu region and that many different traditions of local opera and story singing had flourished in this area until recently.

We sat down and took out our notebooks. Our hosts introduced us to a gnomelike figure seated on a leather chair in a corner of the room. The man was so small that his feet barely touched the ground. He had a hunchback, wore a cap and a faded blue suit, and glinted at us with small eyes.

"Please meet Zhao Yongming, the best of our local singers." We shook hands with him, and Mr. Yu turned to him, saying: "These are the two foreigners I told you about. They have come all the way from Europe to record your songs, and to take them abroad."

Zhao continued to look at us, with the faintest indication of a smile. He didn't look happy.

* * *

It was the winter of 1988. We had started collecting folk songs in China in 1986.3 Much of our time had been spent in contacting the cultural offices and tracing local singers. Sometimes a folk-song specialist from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music accompanied us to act as an interpreter. We were not able to communicate with most singers directly, because they did not understand our Mandarin Chinese, and we could not understand them, the regional Wu dialect—really more a group of dialects, or a language—posing many problems. Consequently, our work progressed very slowly. Eventually, we replayed and worked out nearly all our tapes with the help of friends in Shanghai, but it could take months to find out what any singer had been saying to us in a particular conversation. In the field we often depended entirely on local people who did speak Mandarin Chinese and were willing to translate. The situation was not ideal, but there was no alternative. We were learning the local language, but progress was painfully slow.

Not surprisingly, our first impressions of Zhao Yongming were superficial. Mr. Xu and Mr. Yu did most of the talking. They were openly apologetic about the quality of Zhao's singing. "He doesn't sound good now. He has a weak voice. You...