Fulbright wrap-up, two years ahead

For the sake of closure -- two years after the fact -- I've decided to post a short essay I wrote near the end of my Fulbright year summing up my months in the field. While this was never published, it got me into journalism, which now takes up most of my time. Hope you all enjoy.




According to the Chinese government, China has 55 ethnic minorities and they love to sing and dance. Occasionally, Chinese state television runs specials on minority folk music featuring big smiles, bright costumes and MIDI synthesizers. But real folk songs do not appear on television. They’re passed on from generation to generation in the country’s rural backwaters, and to hear them, you need to seek them out.  

I spent last year on a Fulbright grant recording these songs. More specifically, I was recording the songs of the Nuoso, a group of three million from the Liangshan Prefecture of Sichuan Province. I was attracted to the Nuoso by their history. Liangshan is mountainous and remote, allowing the Nuoso to remain a closed, slave-owning society until the 1950s. They were perceived as violent – while other regional groups accommodated Mao’s soldiers during the Long March, the Nuoso captured stray regiments. But isolation breeds idiosyncrasy, and Nuoso music is utterly distinct. The melodies are sad and delicate. They strain upwards like the mountains.

Liangshan Prefecture was registered as a political unit in 1952 after Mao built small administrative cities in the mountains. It has since developed a clear geographic hierarchy. Outside of Mao’s cities, paved roads turn off onto gravel tracks, flanked by market towns. Behind these towns run elaborate networks of footpaths – dotted lines on county maps, flecked with tiny villages.

At the top of the hierarchy is Xichang, the prefecture capital.

Southern and low-lying, the temperature in Xichang perennially floats between 65 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. It has a cineplex, a Yoga studio, and a strip of up-market coffee shops that sell blends from Jamaica and Brazil. The nightlife in Xichang is vibrant, and many streets are packed with outdoor bars. Spiky-haired kids with acoustic guitars wander among tables, singing Nuoso pop classics for change – songs by local heroes like A-Ge.

A-Ge grew up in Liangshan but lives in Beijing. He has dreadlocks, drinks Jack Daniels and wears AX jeans. Before going solo in the late 90s, he scaled heights of national fame as a founding member of the band Mountain Eagle. His first cassette sold 3,000,000 copies. Experience dictates that most Beijing cab drivers are familiar with his music.

But before his ascent to stardom, A-Ge could see the stars at night through the slats in his roof. His father was a “barefoot doctor” during the Cultural Revolution who, during his spare time, whittled Jew's harps out of bamboo. He traded them at market for sacks of rice. Because his village didn't have a radio, folk songs were the only songs that A-Ge ever heard. They were formative in his musical career – half of A-Ge’s lyrics are in Nuoso. They depict Nuoso festivals and pretty Nuoso girls. In his videos, herders in Nuoso costume sit on Liangshan mountaintops and gaze into the sunset.

These videos have become a fixture of inter-county busses in Liangshan. The road from Xichang winds up into the mountains; the temperature drops; apartment complexes turn into mud-brick huts. But A-Ge’s songs are known to all who ride. They trace the footprints of their singer from city to town to country.

In the middle of the hierarchy are Mao’s county seats.

County seats have Chinese fast food chains and Karaoke parlors. Local men squat outside of white tile administrative buildings and drink beer on the ground. Since A-Ge’s success, they have become saturated with aspiring Nuoso boy-bands.

The prevalence of the boy-band model in Liangshan is not surprising – there’s a strong precedent, and it doesn’t require much equipment or musical training. It does, however, require good connections, and by that token, emerging boy-bands are divisible into tiers. Fist-tier bands are typically cultivated by first-generation pop stars. For example, A-Ge provides harmonies and capital to the Sun Clan, his younger brother’s boy-band. Second-tier bands need day-jobs.

I spent a week in Leibo County with a second-tier boy-band called Yi Commune and their friend A-Su. When A-Su was an infant, his parents’ car drove off a cliff, and he was sent to live with his uncle. This uncle was rich – he owned a coal mine in the mountains, and A-Su worked there for most of his childhood. He was a star employee. Two years ago, on A-Su’s wedding night, his uncle gave him a gift of 70,000 Yuan, enough to buy a small house. For two nights he was so excited he couldn’t sleep.

Soon afterwards, Yi Commune presented him with an investment opportunity. A-Su would finance their debut CD and reap 50% of its profits. The CD was recorded in a month and distributed in county seats throughout Liangshan. It didn’t sell. A-Su lost his fortune.

Despite its losses, the album was a valuable experiment. Yi Commune spent most of A-Su’s money on songwriters – Nuoso musicians who, like A-Ge, live and work in Beijing. They wrote traditional concepts into contemporary genres. They recorded socialist gangsta rap and animist reggae. Apparently, one of Yi Commune’s songwriters had been listening to some Paul Simon. One night, after a few drinks, the band sang me Scarborough Fair in Nuoso. It was a remarkable rendition. It laid bare the strange relationship between art and industry; the idea that music can arrive by way of coal. It was a testament to the power of roads.

At the bottom of the hierarchy is the village.

During my field work, I often heard a story about an American pilot who crash-landed in a Liangshan village during World War II. The villagers had never seen a foreigner; he emerged from the wreckage and, by his appearance alone, broadened their understanding of the world. Soon, other things began falling out of the sky. First there was electricity, and then TV, and then soon enough, the idea of a global order – the idea that the village is poor, and that big cities have money. This idea was enough to start an exodus.

On one of my first trips to Liangshan, I met a retired local official on a market day in a crowded roadside town. He said he knew a man who knew some songs, and he would take me to hear them.
The singer’s house was an arduous two-hour hike from the nearest road. It was built from mud and straw. Smoked meat hung from the ceiling. The singer was 70 and lived alone. His wife was dead; his sons sent him money from Guangzhou. He sang about his mother in long falsetto strains. Although Nuoso songs can run on for hours, the singer stopped to lay down. He was unbearably thin. I wondered if he would last the winter.  

After recording, the singer lit a fire in his fire pit. He threw in some potatoes. Once they were cooked, he rolled them onto the floor. We scraped off the carbon with splinters of bamboo and ate them in silence. We could hear nothing but the wind.