“My practice was so unruly that my fingers went numb and I even bruised my fingertips. Anyway, I sang and learned solfège and counterpoint, and the priests told us that music would free us from the discontent of our lives, that we need no longer be reborn as rats or serfs or even rich men, because we are all part of the same design, all children of the same heaven. So when Chairman Mao came with his liberating army, when the land restitution corps arrived, when the landlords were rounded up and dispossessed, when some were buried alive, when the peasants were raised up to Party secretaries, we were already prepared and willing to accept this new state of affairs. As Mencius says, a benevolent man cannot be rich. We had already been told that we were equal, and that the gates were open to us and we need only choose to walk through. The three priests were convinced that Communism was God’s design.” Kai smiled ambiguously. “Still, despite the great Revolution that I witnessed, I felt my destiny was to leave this village.”
“But, after land reform, what happened to the school, the priests and the piano?” Sparrow asked.
Kai shrugged. He seemed irreconcilably separate from the scene he was describing. “The school is still there and the priests continue to teach. In fact, during the land reform campaign, the head priest, Father Ignatius, became Party secretary for the commune. He took the lead in repossessing land on behalf of the town, he condemned every landlord even though the church was a landlord itself. The priests gave up their holdings and proclaimed Chairman Mao the second coming of their liberator. So even after revolution, people’s lives continue in cycles and not straight lines. I go home, every Spring Festival, to play for them, and they ask me, quietly, if I have been true to God. In my heart, I take God to mean the Party, the country and my family, and I say yes.
“When the famine began in 1959, the priests showed they were only men after all and had no idea how to multiply fish or loaves. My mother, father and two sisters all died that winter. Even Father Ignatius starved to death.” He shifted his bag and rested it on his knees, partially blocking his face. “I watched them starve. I was the youngest and the only son, and they did everything to protect me. Our village cadres blocked letters to distant family. Anyone caught trying to leave the village was arrested. The punishment was severe. If you’ve never been hungry, you can’t imagine…When I first came to Shanghai, I saw that it might as well be a different planet. People had not…they knew nothing about the famine or the ruin. When I was young, I was determined to fit into this new world, to save myself, because Shanghai was a paradise.”
They were silent. Finally, Sparrow said, “To come to Shanghai at all, to go from your village to the city, is like crossing the ocean.”
Kai nodded. “After my parents died, one of the music teachers saved me. Because of my ability, he sent me to live with a friend of the family, a learned man, a professor of literature here at Jiaotong University. He was the first from our village to go to university. He has been like a father to me since I was ten years old.
“Imagine!” Kai’s laugh was sharp and sad. “A stuttering, know-nothing child, suddenly clean and tidy in a professor’s salon. Six years later, I still call him ‘Professor’! I like to think that, if he had sons of his own, they would address him in the same way. You’ll understand when you meet him. I sat like a turnip while his students and colleagues debated and shouted. Sometimes I felt like an animal brought in from the forest. I know that I reminded the Professor of himself, long ago. But I could play. I could play Bach and Mozart even while my education, my language, was rudimentary. I was determined to rise to a new position in life, I had to learn to emulate the Professor and his circle — in every way, in their clothing, their habits and their language. Outside, in the streets, the Party might proclaim a new order, an end to feudalism, an uprising against the old class prejudices, but in the Professor’s salon,” Kai’s voice dropped to almost a whisper, “the old order was still preserved.
“I don’t blame him. A child of the countryside, you see, doesn’t easily glorify the countryside. But because of the Professor’s friends, my thinking has changed. Shanghai, I’ve come to realize, is not big enough for me and will never satisfy all the questions of my soul. I have split into too many people. I blame the priests, who instilled in me the idea of a better world, and the faith that I was destined for greater things. I blame the Professor, too, who once opened my mind but is now limited by nostalgia for the past. I want to make my parents and my sisters proud. I want to rise higher still. Do you feel as I do, Teacher? Your music has meant everything to me, it showed me…I ask myself why your symphonies are never performed, and I think it’s because they make us feel so much, they make us question not only who we are, but who we aim to be. Fou Ts’ong has married the daughter of Yehudi Menuhin, he plays the piano from London to Berlin, and yet his parents are criticized as bourgeois elements. We pianists are not to follow his example despite everything he has accomplished. But surely we would better serve the People if we were part of the greater world. Why shouldn’t your music be celebrated in Moscow or Paris or New York?”
The young man spoke with complete confidence, a childlike determination that seemed to Sparrow like a residue from another time. And yet, like some of the other students Kai’s age, he also spoke as if there was no distinction between teacher and student, father and son, no formality. They had been born only ten years apart, Sparrow thought, but it was as if they had grown up in different centuries.
“My music…” Sparrow said finally. “When I was young, all I wanted was to write my music. Nothing more. And that is still what I feel.”
“I hear something else in your compositions. I hear a gap between what you say and what you desire. The music is asking for something more…I’m certain we are the same.” He turned and looked directly into Sparrow’s eyes. “I no longer wish to live with restraints, Teacher. I wish to cast off the ordinary. The Professor has come to fear the Revolution. I do not. I wish the awakening of our times to waken me as well. We can’t simply learn from Western art and music, we also need to examine and criticize our daily experience and our own thought. We shouldn’t be afraid of our own voices. The time has come to speak what’s really in our minds.”
The bus came at that moment and Sparrow was saved from having to respond.
—
They spent the first two days in the villages outside Wuhan collecting music and two days in Wuhan City itself, including an afternoon at the gong and cymbal factory. Each time Sparrow delicately mentioned the name Comrade Glass Eye, his inquiry was met with confusion or curiosity, but mostly indifference. On the fifth day, however, a stranger approached them as they sat in the Red Opera Teahouse.
He was a compact man in his late sixties with a big, shiny head and the cloaked eyes of a gambler. “Comrades,” he said, “we were on the same bus from Nanjing. What a pleasure it is to meet you again! Tell me, how long will you stay in Wuhan?”
“At least another day and night,” Sparrow said.
“I’m glad to hear it, and by the way, Long live Chairman Mao! Long live the incomparable Communist Party!” His throat crackled when he said the words and he had to stop and cough in between. “Last night, my little niece told me she heard Shanghai musicians performing at the Small Peach Garden and I knew it must be you.” He flicked open his fan as if snapping open a knife. “Hot, isn’t it? Wuhan, you know, the furnace of the South.” As he waved the fan in slow, brutal strokes, he recounted how, before the war, he had lived in Shanghai and studied the violin briefly with Tan Hong. “By the way, my name is Old Huang, but please address me as Jian, as my friends do. Not the jiān that means ‘flounder’ but jiān as in the mythical bird with one eye and one wing.” He pulled his chair closer towards them and whispered, full of emotion, “Please tell me about my dear friend Tan Hong. Does he still teach at the Shanghai Conservatory?”