Zhu Xiao-Mei – The Secret Piano

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Bach, Book Review, China, Ellen Hinsey (Translator), Mao Tse Tung, The Cultural Revolution, Zhu Xiao-Mei

Mao, Tao, Bach and a Piano

I’m embarrassed, as a lover of classical music, not to have heard of the classical pianist Zhu Xiao-Mei, until very recently, coming by chance across her wonderful autobiography, The Secret Piano. Perhaps, given her history which is a history of her country in the latter half of the twentieth century, this is not so surprising

Zhu Xiao Mei was born in 1949, to an artistic, bourgeois, intellectual family. From a very early age she showed an extraordinary musical aptitude. However, the possession of a piano in a family home was at this time yet another indication that the family was not ‘a good family’ Bourgeois, revisionist, not revolutionary.

She was however born just in time to have some years of training at China’s premier classical music college, before the launching of The Cultural Revolution in 1966 changed the lives of her generation. Bourgeois thought was to be rooted out. The young, impressionable to exploitation, something totalitarian regimes of left and right have capitalised on, became the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution, condemning any who showed individualist, critical thinking towards Mao Tse-Tung thought, as deified in The Little Red Book.

Intellectuals were sent to work camps for ‘Re-education’ This happened to every member of her family – sent to different camps. She spent 5 years in a workcamp, which seemed to have a remarkable similarity to some accounts of the gulags.

Her destiny, which had seemed, from her early prowess, to indicate a life as an exceptional concert pianist, was far from realisation. After Mao’s death, when a thaw in relationships between East and West began to happen, the flame that music was for her, could only express itself in lowly ways. She finally managed to complete her interrupted musical education, and began working as an accompanist for the training dancers at Beijing’s Dance Academy.

I often wonder whether I should hate Mao Tse-Tung for what he did to me. On a purely theoretical level, his analyses were not incorrect. The Chinese people did need to be liberated. How could I forget the documentary they screened for us at school,, which showed the sign the English erected at the entrance to Waitan Park. On it was clearly written “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted”

She left China for America, determined to try and study her art further, and supported her studies by various jobs – some completely unconnected with her musicality, such as house-cleaning.

Things began to change for her in the eighties. She moved to Paris (where she still lives) and where her ability was recognised so that, as she continued with her studies, she was at least able to get work teaching the piano.

This book (beautifully translated by Ellen Hinsey) shows Zhu Xiao-Mei to be an exceptional human being, as well as musician. She has, of course, been scarred by the experience of the Cultural Revolution, where idealistic and impressionable young people were brainwashed into acts of betrayal because they believed they were acting in the common good. She does not spare herself from culpability. The experience has left her not quite able to trust. However……..she is a deeply reflective, modest, spiritual individual, and indeed, one of great generosity of heart and soul, great authenticity. SHE does not say these things of herself – but this listener found these qualities in her work

 

There is a poignant moment, on a plane, on her way to America where she learns, for the first time, about the philosophical and ethical inheritance of her country, as exemplified by Lao-tzu – of whom she had never heard, as all this was hidden, regarded as deviant and retrograde, when the doctrine of her country was the one religion of Mao Tse-Tung Thought.

Before playing a work…I need to be peaceful, to empty my mind.

The Chinese are well acquainted with this way of seeing things; they often use the image of water to illustrate it. To see down to the bottom of a lake, the water must be calm and still. The calmer the water, the farther down one can see. The exact same thing is true for the mind – the more tranquil and detached one is, the greater the depths one can plumb….it is precisely by following this path of self-effacement and emptiness that one attains the truth of a musical work. Without attempting to impose one’s will, without forcing something on the listener. Without struggling with the self. By disappearing behind the composer

Quotations and reflections from Lao-Tzu,and Confucius – and Jesus, clearly inform her way of being, and the Tao infuses her understanding and interpretation of Bach, in particular, whom she describes as the most Chinese of composers, the composer closest to comprehension and inhabitation by a Chinese person

Only now I am able to understand the extent to which my experience of the Cultural Revolution taught me to never use music’s power to impose anything on my audience. I suffered too much under the yoke of servitude, and I prefer to speak rather than to compel

This is a wonderful, moving, soulful book, very humbling to read.

Strongly recommended.

As are her handful of CDs. She clearly is an exceptionally gifted communicator using the language of words. What she does with the language of music is something else again

The Secret Piano UK
The Secret Piano USA

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Peter Ho Davies – The Fortunes

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America, Anna Mae Wong, Book Review, China, Chinese Americans, Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes, Vincent Chin

American History through Chinese and Chinese-American eyes.

Peter Ho Davies The Fortunes is a mainly American set account of the Chinese American experience, told through 4 different viewpoints, over more than 150 years, starting with the building of the railways, opening up Goldrush routes in California in the 1860s, and ending with the experience of wealthy childless couples in the market for unwanted babies from less wealthy nations – in this case, as a result of China’s ‘One Child’ policy, and the less favoured status of girls.

Ho’s book is extremely well written, but, covering as it does the experience of what it means to be an immigrant – or even to be second generation, but of mixed ethnicity, – it is a remarkably depressing and distressing read, particularly at this time of turmoil and casual, not to mention not-so-casual, evidence of racial hatred and distrust as part of the water table.

The Fortunes (which has a title page subtitle of ‘Tell It Slant’) is beautifully structured in four sections. Each story is set in a different time and place, seemingly disconnected though there are nods to the previous experiences, and 3 of the stores feature real people, though Ho Davies makes it clear this is a fictionalised interpretation. There is a satisfying framing device.

The first section, Gold, is the story of the railroad and the Goldrush. Ah Ling is the son of a ‘saltwater girl’ a prostitute from Hong Kong and a ‘white ghost’, her probably British protector. The reader is battered from the start from everyday racism – both within China itself, as Ah Ling is a Tanka, reviled by the Han Chinese, and then, after he is sold to be a laundry boy to ‘Uncle Ng’ in San Francisco, the blanket racism towards ‘chinks’. We are reminded also, that whatever the experiences suffered by men, the status of Chinese women was even lower. Racially abused, sexually abused. The laundry Ah Ling works at is also a brothel, and Ah Ling, as a young boy, has his eyes opened by ‘Little Sister’ – who of course lacks even her own name, described only by family relationship:

How can you hate your own people”

“How? I tell you how! You know who sold me to Ng?” She paused to catch her breath. “My father! You know why? So he could send a brother to Gold Mountain to make the family fortune.” She nodded heavily. “That’s right. Chinamen love gold more than girls.

Silver follows the story of Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star from the 1920’s onwards, whose career covered both silent film, talkies and stage. This section is structured almost like a silent film, with short chapters with headers in capital letters, as if they were scene titles

THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

Turned down for the role of a lifetime – O-Lan in The Good Earth, a Chinese female lead; how many of those will she ever see? – and turned down for a white actress. It’s a public humiliation, a famous snub. A loss of face, she’s still Chinese enough to think.

She’d been tipped for the role in the press for years; “born to play it,” they said. It was what she’s been waiting for all this time. But she’d known she wouldn’t get it as soon as they cast Paul Muni, Scarface himself, in the lead. The Hays Code forbade the portrayal of interracial relations on-screen, even when white actors were playing in yellowface.

Jade, the third section, is based on the story of Vincent Chin:

if you remember it a all, if you were around in the eighties, say, what you remember is a Chinese guy being beaten to death in Detroit by two white auto workers who mistook him for a Japanese. This at the height of the import scare, when Japanese manufacturers were being blamed for the collapse of the Big Three U.S. auto companies.

Maybe you remember it happened outside a club where the Chinese guy – actually a Chinese American named Vincent Chin – was celebrating his bachelor party. Maybe you remember he was buried on what should have been his wedding day.

But perhaps you thought it was just an urban legend, a bad joke come to life

 Vincent Chin, source: Wiki

The final story, Pearl, concerns a middle class couple, Chinese American John Ling, teaching university students, and his wife Nola, also a teacher, in their mid-thirties, with a history of difficult and failed pregnancies. They are part of a group of other couples with similar difficulties, going to China to adopt a baby.

Ho Davies, one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, is British born, to Welsh and Chinese parents, though he now lives in the States and is also a University lecturer in Creative Writing.

This is, as stated at the beginning, an emotionally difficult read, but a recommended one. He writes very well, his characters are clearly delineated, and complex. It left me with lots to think about, and distressing matters to feel about, particularly within the context of many world events, at this time, and a resurgence of ‘populist’ parties with simplistic foci for ‘blame’

I received this as an ARC from Amazon Vine UK. It will be published on 25th August in Hard Cover and on Kindle in the UK, but curiously, Statesiders will have to wait until September 6th for HardCover or Audible, with, at the moment, no Kindle version listing. Curious, because Ho Davies now lives in the States, and this is set for the most part there.

The Fortunes Amazon UK
The Fortunes Amazon UK

Bo Caldwell – City Of Tranquil Light

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Bo Caldwell, Book Review, China, City Of Tranquil Light

A Delicate and Compassionate Portrait of Faith, A Marriage and China

Bo Caldwell is a slow writer – and a good one. Her first book, set it Shanghai during the second world war, and dealing with that event through the eyes of a small girl, with a focus on her relationship with her father, The Distant Land Of My Father was, in this reader’s opinion, an exceptional first novel. I found it as powerful and noteworthy as J.G. Ballard’s book from a similar perspective, but from a young boy’s viewpoint. Empire of the Sun (The Perennial Collection)

What surprised me enormously with Caldwell’s first book, which seemed authentically autobiographical, was that she was not born in China, and was not in fact even a glimmer in her parents’ eyes till well after the period in question. This was novel, and not autobiography, or even biography at all, but she had drawn on family recollections to create it. She is the grand-daughter of missionaries who were working in China from the early 1900s till the early 60s, and bedded themselves into feeling far more Chinese than American, fed by a great love of China and its people.

In some ways, the small girl in that first book took some of Bo Caldwell’s mother’s childhood memories into her creation

In this second book, she again uses some of her maternal family history, as she focuses on the naive, innocent, yet incredibly idealistic, dedicated and committed young man and woman who arrive as part of the Mennonite missionary community, in the early part of the twentieth century. Although Katherine (partially trained nurse) and Will Kiehn are not her grandparents, as she is at pains to point out, she does use their experiences in the building of a detailed picture of time, place, culture and more.

Part of the delicately explored territory is faith itself, how it is tested, battered, and exists encompassing doubt – not in SPITE of doubt, but with doubt as an important part of the fabric of faith. There is also the very understanding portrayal of what a marriage might mean, between two people with a great sense of duty towards their work, and their relationship as part of that work. Inevitably, relationships will also mean great pain and loss along the way, as separation will always come, whether through the failure of relationship or through death itself.

The book is written in two separate though complementary voices – Will Kiehn’s thought and accounts, told in recollected tranquillity, looking back over 60 years, set against the pages of Katherine’s journal.

What is noteworthy is the compassionate humanity that informs Caldwell’s writing, the sense of human nature not being fixed, of complex individuals who struggle to be as best as they can. There is an observation of the wrongness of brutality and ends-justify-meansism, but an understanding of how these struggles between compassion and harshness arise

If I didn’t quite find this as wondrous as that first book, my slight disappointment therefore reducing it to four star, I shall certainly be happily waiting for Caldwell’s third book to appear

I’m guessing this will probably be around 2018.

And as i have a huge backlog of unread books, as I am unable to resist stockpiling all the interesting bookiness going, that is fine!

City Of Tranquil Light Amazon UK
City Of Tranquil Light Amazon USA