Mom asked me to post something from my travel writing. Here's a little piece I wrote after coming a trip through Southwestern China in 1994:
In the late 1990’s I spent some time exploring China - mostly the northwest deserts of Xinxiang, which borders Central Asia, and the mountains and tropics of southwestern Yunnan, near Laos and Burma. Like many other travelers, I found China maddening, but at the same time endlessly lovable and captivating.
Talk about music! Musicians and singers were everywhere in China. Everywhere! Troupes and bands played on street corners, grandmothers in costume played ancient instruments, blind buskers sang rambling story songs at the train stations, children walked hand in hand singing together in lovely voices. There were roaming tribal musicians. In a taxi the driver was liable to start singing ballads, and on a bus the passengers might take turns standing and singing a song or two. It was often spontaneous, and always unselfconscious. Sometimes it seemed like China was one big hootenanny. When was the last time you heard someone break into song, simply because they felt like it? In parts of China, you’d experience that every day.
Most of the time it was a welcome treat, except for karaoke, which could really wear you down. The sound of a drunk Chinese salaryman howling Tie A Yellow Ribbon, leaking through the walls of your hotel room at 1 AM, is not a pretty thing.
My strangest Chinese musical experience was in Baoshan, a midsize city along the old Burma Road. The streets of Baoshan had a feature that was common in China; propaganda loudspeakers. Bullhorn style speakers were fastened atop the power poles every 200 feet or so, apparently fed from a little studio somewhere in the town - probably at the main police station.
China awakens early, and the authorities would crank up the propaganda machine up at around 5 AM. It was usually long rambling commentaries, history lessons, and accounts of meetings between government officials. The propaganda was loud, it echoed all over the city, and it went on for about four hours. The locals seemed to respond by talking louder and making more noise of their own.
After the official programs ended, the loudspeakers stayed on all day, playing music. But it wasn’t just any music. They played Kenny G. Loud, all over town, all day long and into the night, over and over again. I think it was the “Duotones” CD. I first heard it coming through my hotel room window, and I figured it was from a music shop on the street. But the same songs just repeated all day long, and after a while I realized that Kenny had the entire city covered. Nearly anywhere you went in Baoshan, day or night, you heard Kenny G, over and over again. I’m not sure what effect this was meant to have on the population, but I was more than ready to move on after two or three days.
I made my way west on the Burma road, crossing into Burma about a week later. But to this day I think of China any time I hear Kenny G, and wonder whether his mind numbing “soft jazz” tracks are still echoing around the streets of Baoshan.
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5 comments:
What you deescribed is something I would never have imagined. I wonder whose pet idea that had been.
It reminds me of an experience I had that was at the other end of the scale and then some. It was while Felix and I were driving along the Moldau River in Czechoslovakia. One of the pieces of music I presented to children in my teaching was a recording of The Moldau". For lthose of you not familiar with it, it depicts musically a little stream beginning at a spring in the mountains. As it moves downriver, there are tone poems of the forests it passes, a village festival, rapids, then the final section where it has broadened out into a mighty river.
As we drove along, I began hearing that music louder and louder in my head, particularly the main theme. I have never "remembered" a tune so loudly as that was. I asked Felix to stop along the road near the river - I just had to get next to the river and actually touch it. It was an odd experience for me, and I have never forgotten the way that felt, to "hear" mentally. Talk about a song running through your mind!
How bizarre! And I thought it was annoying hearing "I'm a Survivor" by Destiny's Child every single place I went in Okinawa. Kenny G certainly tops them all.
As you write about Vltava I cannot stay aside. Because The Vltava composition is also my favorite, I have prepared shortly a simply page about the Vltava river with a few pictures and also with possibility to listen this composition. For those who are interested, here you are: http://web.mac.com/vkulka/iWeb/Kulkovic/Vltava.html
On the one hand, I love the idea of a country where people just break out in song. I realize it's not the same, but it makes me think of those musicals from the '50's and '60's -- The Music Man, West Side Story, Singin' in the Rain -- where people are having a conversation and they suddenly break out in song as if it's the most normal thing ever. I'd love to live in a world like that.
But then the loudspeaker thing is so very "1984".
I could see how a backdrop of history and education soundtracks could be construed as a way to improve the knowledge of the populace. But I don't think there's a community on earth where someone wouldn't edge in and take it over for their own purposes -- like for propoganda, brainwashing, or even torture, as we see being done in Baoshan with the Kenny G track.
That is an interesting story David, thanks for sharing it.
Vi, can you explain why much of the world calls it The Moldau, and Czechs call it Vltava? There seems to be no relationship between the two names.
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