Along the Roaring River
My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met
By Hao Jiang Tian Robert Lipsyte Lois B. Morris
John Wiley & Sons
Copyright © 2008
Hao Jiang Tian
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-05641-7
Chapter One
Music Torture
The mood in the Metropolitan Opera rehearsal room was tense and
frustrated. Tempers were fraying.
"I can't play it another way. I've changed it so many times already,
I just cannot do it again," said the normally accommodating
soprano Elizabeth Futral, in a don't-mess-with-me tone of voice.
The December 2006 world premiere of
The First Emperor was
one week away, and our collective spirit was deteriorating. Every
opening of a new production is fraught; multiply that by a hundred
for a brand-new opera. But this opera had even more at stake. Plácido
Domingo, the biggest star currently on the opera stage, was
heading this first-ever Chinese-written, Chinese-directed, Chinese-designed
opera, which was also the first-ever collaboration between
the Metropolitan Opera and a Chinese creative team. Composer
Tan Dun, whose film scores for
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and
Hero were his works most familiar to American audiences, had
teamed with Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, whose movies
had ranged from the small and tragic, such as
Raise the Red Lantern,
to the spectacular, like
Hero. The libretto was written in English by
the prize-winning Chinese novelist Ha Jin.
For me,
The First Emperor represented the first time in my opera
career that I would sing the role of an actual Chinese character
in a work about real Chinese history. By that time, I had sung
King Timur in Puccini's Italian conception of a Chinese opera,
Turandot, at least two hundred times in opera houses all over the
world. But never had an opera been presented for Western ears
that told an authentic Chinese story, written by a Chinese
composer, with a production designed by a Chinese artist. I could
bring my personal history and that of my country to bear on this
work, in which I was to sing the principal role of the doomed
General Wang, who also happens to have some great singing in
this opera.
Publicity was everywhere in print and on the airwaves and had
been growing for months. Now this opera was being billed as a
breakthrough in the history of the art form and even of East-West
relations. Oh, the pressure.
"Okay, let's take a twenty-minute break," sighed one of the
Met's artistic staff members.
As the cast and production crew began to wander off, I sat
down to let my fingers loose on the piano. I needed to lighten the
mood. The tune that came to my fingers was "The East Is Red," the
omnipresent anthem from the long-gone era of the Cultural Revolution.
And then, all around me, one by one, Chinese voices began
to sing:
Dongfan hong, taiyang sheng,
Zhongguo chu liao ge Mao Zedong,
Ta wei renmin mou xingu,
Hu er hei you, ta shi renmin da jiu xing.
Our peals of laughter must have rolled out like a tidal wave into
the hallway. The people from the Met and the non-Chinese performers,
who had no idea what we were singing about, rushed back
in. They were astonished to find Zhang Yimou, normally so dour,
singing and raising his fist to the sky in a gesture familiar to anyone
who had been alive during the Cultural Revolution. And his codirector,
Wang Chaoge, who had been the most stressed out of his
team, was actually dancing! Now all the singers were back in the
room, and everybody was laughing, something no one had expected
to experience during this rehearsal.
For the full twenty minutes we sang and sang and sang, one
revolutionary song after another, plus set pieces with characteristic
poses from the model operas we'd been required to attend during
the Cultural Revolution. Wang Chaoge danced on, Zhang Yimou
leaped about and gestured, and, as I added my own voice, I felt a
rush of mixed feelings. The Cultural Revolution had been such a
difficult time.
Whenever I sing "The East Is Red" now, so often I think back
to an evening I spent in 1971 with a peasant farmer near my home
in Beijing. The dumpling restaurant where I'd come for a cheap
dinner that cold winter night was fairly crowded. I sat down at a
table that had only one other customer, a very dirty man with a
filthy old winter coat but no shirt on underneath. He probably
wasn't as ancient as he looked, but the lines on his face were deep,
not to mention dirt-caked. He quietly sang some old folk songs
while nursing a cup of cheap Mongolian wine made from white
yams. I'd heard many of his tunes before, since most of our
revolutionary songs, including "The East Is Red," had been set to
old folk melodies, but I'd never heard these lyrics, some of which
were very romantic, some raunchy. Though it was a little hard to
understand the man, because he had no front teeth, I got to talking
with him. He told me he had just delivered a load of cabbages to the
city and was now on the way back to his village. With his horse and
cart, the trip in had taken him all day, and the trip back would take
him all night. Because of traffic congestion, farmers with carts were
allowed to come into the city only at night in those days. I asked
him about his life and his songs, and for four hours I bought us both
more cups of the harsh, burning, definitely intoxicating wine.
The man told me he knew all the old folk songs but wasn't so
good at the new words. Back in 1966, he said, some Red Guards
took offense when they heard him singing "The East Is Red" with
the lyrics to the original love song. They rushed over and began to
beat him. He was a counterrevolutionary, they yelled, because he
had "changed the text" of an important revolutionary song, and
that was a big crime. When they demanded that he sing it with the
"correct" words, he was so scared he couldn't remember them.
They beat him harder and threatened him more. At one point they
had his head pushed down nearly to the ground as they hit him
across the back of his skull. But the more they hurt him, the less he
could recall the required lyrics. So they said that if he couldn't sing
the song correctly, they would make sure he could no longer sing
the words at all, and they smashed him with a stick directly in his
mouth. Laughing as he told me this, he pointed to the empty hole
where his front teeth should be. He laughed and laughed.
And here, more than thirty-five years later, in a rehearsal room
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, were three survivors
of that horrific decade, singing those songs of oppression, yet suffused
with the warmth of bittersweet nostalgia. We were back in
our youth, the youth in our hearts, feeling a camaraderie that lifted
our transient worldly cares. I felt such a loving kinship with my
Chinese colleagues. We had come through that terrible time, yet in
spite of it, or perhaps because of it, we had discovered our artistic
identities. And life goes on.
We wrapped up our little intermezzo in such fine spirits, with a
rendition of "East Wind Blows," a popular revolutionary song
from those days with lyrics from a Chairman Mao quotation: "The
east wind of socialism is prevailing over the west wind of imperialism."
We sang it in Chinese, so who knew? We were young again,
invigorated, ready for anything.
It was good to be born in Beijing.
Ever since the Forbidden City had become home to China's ruling
dynasties in the fifteenth century, the people of Beijing have
believed themselves more cultured, more refined, more knowledgeable,
and better-spoken than everyone else in this vast and ancient
land. By the time I howled my way into the universe, Beijing
was Chairman Mao's seat of power. Nanjing had been Chiang
Kai-shek's center of government during the Kuomintang (KMT),
or Nationalist Party, period. In 1949, after the revolution, the
Communists reestablished the capital of the People's Republic of
China in its historic place in the land.
Because of the
hukou system, which confined the residence of
each Chinese citizen to one particular location that was registered
at birth, a person born elsewhere in China could not remain in Beijing
for more than a brief period. Indeed, no one could move-even
from a rural area to a nearby town-without government approval,
which was hard to obtain. The system remains in effect even
now, and it is especially difficult to change from a rural to a city
hukou-although this is becoming easier to evade with all the free
enterprise that is prevalent throughout China today. Nowadays, at
least half of the people in Beijing were not born there, and perhaps
the superior airs of those in the capital are fading. But in those days,
to have a Beijing
hukou was a huge privilege.
My parents had not been born anywhere near Beijing. Although
they grew up just one mountain apart in rural Shanxi province,
they did not know each other when they left their families in
1939 to fight the Japanese. In the town of Jincheng, my mother's
family, named Du, had once been very influential and had owned
considerable property. Their tile-roofed houses encompassed five
courtyards, all connected to one another and surrounded by thick
gray-brick walls. The Du family was so well-off generations ago
that they had their own
si shu, or traditional Chinese elementary
school, just for their own children. There was even a separate hall
in their home to preserve their ancestors' memorial tablets and the
family
zupu, the book of generations in which all names were
recorded.
By the time my mother was born, however, her family's circumstances
had vastly changed. Her father eventually had to leave
the family in Jincheng to live far away in Beijing, where he worked
as a private chef in an antique store to support his family. The Japanese,
who invaded Shanxi province in 1937, captured my mother's
two oldest brothers; one was never heard from again, and the other
died in captivity after he broke his back doing hard labor. Two
words-"Move out!"-spared her father's life. Lined up alongside
other men in their village, he awaited his turn as, one by one, their
throats were cut. The sword was at my grandpa's neck when the
commander issued the fateful order that inadvertently saved his life.
My mother had received no education until she was ten, when
she pleaded with the local teacher to allow her to study, even
though she had no money to pay for it. The good woman offered to
teach my mother to knit and to help her sell what she made to pay
her tuition. Thus, my mother obtained three years of education-enough,
in her words, "to go do Revolution."
My father was from Yangcheng, a poor farming village in the
mountains. He was one of six children in the Sun family. They were
so poor that his parents gave him up for adoption to a family named
Tian; two of his brothers went to other families. By the time he met
my mother in the entertainment unit of the 93rd Army Battalion,
the Japanese had already massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the siege of the Chinese capital at Nanjing. The two young
teens had no musical training, but they had no end of vitality and
enthusiasm-and outrage. Their mission was to fill the soldiers'
and the citizens' hearts and minds with courage and patriotic fervor
through music, dance, and drama. It was something they would do,
in one way or another, for the rest of their professional lives.
To their chagrin, their battalion soon fell into retreat, so, along
with three of their friends, they simply walked away, to seek the
enemy on their own. Until they saw their names painted huge on
billboards as deserters to be executed when found, they had no concept
of AWOL. Too late, they shed their uniforms. Military police
caught up with them at a railway station. The five cried their eyes
out. The senior officer took pity on them and, moved by their desire
to face the foreign invader, let them escape.
Now the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old comrades made their
way to the Second Anti-Enemy Performing Arts Troupe, one of
ten propaganda ensembles under the aegis of the KMT. Mao
Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek had agreed to abandon their civil war,
to form a united front under KMT military leadership to fight the
Japanese. My parents did not know at first that the Second Troupe
was an underground Communist cell. It was under the leadership of
Zhou Enlai, who would one day serve as premier of Communist
China, but who, like everyone else in wartime, wore the KMT uniform.
Soon their political sympathies leaned earnestly, if secretly,
leftward. As the Japanese approached and bullets flew, they sang
and danced and acted their way from town to town, encouraging
soldiers and townsfolk alike to be just as strong and brave and patriotic
as they were.
Soon after they joined, the Second Anti-Enemy Performing Arts
Troupe was selected to perform the premiere of
The Yellow River
Cantata. Immediately, the stirring work became the symbol of
Chinese defiance against the Japanese. (It remains the most famous
choral work in China and is known in every Chinese community
throughout the world.) As a result, the Second Troupe became
famous throughout China. But the KMT leadership was growing
suspicious of the political allegiance of this troupe. Why, they began
to wonder, had the Second Troupe been chosen over the other
nine ensembles? Was it because the performance was held in
Yan'an, the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party? Misgivings
were so great by the end of the War of Resistance against
Japanese Aggression that the KMT government detained a third of
the troupe's members and grilled them for three months. My
parents were not held, however, and although my father had joined
the Communist Party in 1941, no one disclosed this or any other
secret. Ultimately, the ensemble relocated to Beijing (then called
Beiping), where they performed in the massive public celebration
of the Chinese victory over the Japanese.
Without a common enemy, all pretense of cooperation between
the KMT and the Communists disintegrated. Civil war broke out
again in 1946. My father became involved with clandestine Communist
activities at Beijing University, teaching sympathizers the
music and politics of revolution. Beijing was occupied by the KMT,
and my parents, now married, continued to wear that uniform. But
when it appeared that the troupe's true leanings were finally going
to be exposed and arrests were imminent, all the members made
their escape in small groups and went their separate ways. My parents
decided to head for Communist Party headquarters, then in
central Hebei province, about two hundred miles away. Disguised
in long traditional Chinese gowns and with my mother cradling
their infant firstborn, my parents made the dangerous journey by
train, bus, and horse cart. They had to show their false identification
papers to prove their Communist loyalties at blockade after
blockade.
The Communists placed my parents in the brand-new university
founded by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the new name for
the Red Army, to train officials for the new China-Xin Jongguo-they
were fighting for. Here, they studied music as well as politics
and joined the PLA. Both studied violin; my mother also studied
piano and began to compose. Here, too, they became part of the
first formal philharmonic orchestra of the Communist military
force. As the civil war raged on, they often studied or practiced
while on the march, fleeing Nationalist bombers. In this stressful
life, my mother produced no milk for my brother. The advancing
force had to scout for nursing mothers in each village ahead of
them, and my brother would be put to a stranger's breast until their
group had marched completely through. In the next village, the
process would be repeated. And so it was always said that my
brother grew up drinking milk from a hundred mothers.
After the Communist victory in 1949 and Chiang Kai-shek's
retreat to Taiwan (then called Formosa), the new government
founded the Central Conservatory of Music in the city of Tianjin.
The PLA sent twenty people, including my parents, to be part of
the first class, reserved for officials with military backgrounds.
Nothing in this newly proclaimed land was separate from Communist
beneficence, certainly not the study of music, for on the wings
of song one can control the hearts of the people.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Along the Roaring River
by Hao Jiang Tian Robert Lipsyte Lois B. Morris
Copyright © 2008 by Hao Jiang Tian.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.