On Music

I DON'T REALLY LIKE MUSIC very much. Colors and smells often make me
happy, but music is always sad. Even so-called light music is the same: its light-hearted bounce is only superficial, even artificial. But colors: indoors in summertime with the curtains down, old pajamas neatly folded and piled on bamboo mats. An azure blue summer top, and sea-green silk pants. Next to one another, the blue and the green have a layered, delicate beauty. Not a beauty that necessarily reminds you of anything. But in the dimness of the room, they carve out a space and quietly pervade it with a sort of joy. I sit to one side, catch sight of them without having intended to look, and they make me happy for a long while.
There was another time when I had put a new air-raid cover over the bathroom light. The dim greenish light shone coldly onto the surface of the bathtub, green seeping into the white, black seeping into the green, laminating the tub with a glossy coat of color, simplifying everything. Gazing into the bathroom from outside the door, it looked exactly like a modernist painting, an altogether new and different dimension. It seemed to me that one could never pass into that alien dimension, but somehow I managed to go in anyway. It was as if I had accomplished an impossible feat. I felt happy and a little scared all at the same time, and just a little numb, as if I had been shocked by electricity, and I came out almost as soon as I had gone in.
In short, colors are only desolate when they lose their luster, but when
 they can attract your attention, they are always something to be celebrated, because they make the world seem that much more real.
Smells are the same way. I like a lot of the smells that other people don't like: the slight scent of mildew in the mist, dust moistened by the rain, scallions and garlic, cheap perfume. Take gas, for instance. Some people feel dizzy when they smell gas, but I like to sit next to the driver on purpose or stand behind cars so that when the engine starts with a chug, I can smell the exhaust from the tailpipe. When we used to wash clothes with a little butane once a year, the room would fill with its bright, steely, stainless aroma. My mother never wanted me to help her, because I would work as slowly as I could so that as much butane as possible would evaporate into the air.
When milk burns or matches burn down, the smoky smell makes me hungry. The smell of oil-based paint, precisely because it seems so aggressively brand-new, is like celebrating New Year's in a new house: sterile, fresh, jubilant. When ham or salted meat or peanut oil have sat for a long time and start to turn, there's a kind of greasy smell that I like a lot, too, because it makes the oil smell even oilier, ripe to bursting, almost rotten, like the "rice spoiling in the granaries" of ancient times. During the battle of Hong Kong, all the food we ate was cooked in coconut oil and smelled strongly of soap. At first, it was hard to accustom oneself to the smell, and it made you want to vomit, but later I realized that soap has a certain cold fragrance all its own. During the war, there wasn't any toothpaste, but I didn't mind brushing my teeth with the coarse, fatty soap you usually use to wash clothes.
Smells are always ephemeral, coincidental. Even if it was possible to smell one thing for a long time, you wouldn't be able to stand it. In that sense, smells are only a minor diversion. Colors are right there in front of you, which is why they make one feel at ease. Perhaps the joy of colors and smells has something to do with this quality. Music is different. Music is always on its way somewhere else, and no one can determine exactly where. Once it gets there, it's already gone, and all that is left is to search for it. Music leaves you alone and at a loss.
The violin is the worst. I'm frightened of the way it always flows away like water, taking all the things in life you would like to grasp hold of and cherish along with it. The Chinese two-stringed violin is much better, because as bleak as it sounds, when it reaches some sort of conclusion it always "comes around again to the beginning," as northerners like to say, circling and perambulating its way back to the world as we mortals know it.
When someone plays the violin, there is always a moment of high musical drama and innumerable melodramatic twists and turns, all of which are much too clearly intended to elicit the audience's tears. Violin is the tragedienne of musical instruments. I think a play should have a female lead, a foil, and a female supporting role. There's really no need for a tragic part, a femme fatale or a commentator (in the civilization plays of the early Republican era, there was always an old commentator on hand to supply a political message).
Nor do I like violin and piano duets or even small groups of instrumentalists centered around the piano and the violin. There's nothing there to hold on to; everything's in bits and pieces, and the awkward way in which the separate parts come together makes you feel uneasy. It all turns out a little like those Chinese paintings that several people work on together Someone paints a beautiful woman, someone else adds some flowers, and yet another person paints in the pavilions and scenery behind her, but often the picture as a whole lacks any particular atmosphere, and nothing approaching harmony emerges from the effort.
A full-scale orchestra is another thing altogether. It comes at you with all the grand bombast of a May Fourth Movement, transforming each individual's voice into something altogether different from what it was in the beginning. The whistling and scraping on all sides become your own voice, and you are shocked by the depth, volume, and resonance of the sound you are making. It's a little like the moment after you wake up in the morning: someone calls your name, and, unsure whether the voice is someone else's or your own, you feel a vague kind of terror.
And since writing orchestral music is so very complex and composers have to undergo such arduous training, they often end up drowning in les-sons and are unable to extricate themselves from their influence. That's why orchestral music is so often afflicted by too much formalism. Why do they always have to keep coming back to the same old bag of tricks? The orchestra will suddenly grow tense; with heads bowed and teeth clenched, they enter the penultimate phase of the battle, urged on by the timpani, which pounds out its drumbeat over and over, determining the orchestra's destiny: to overwhelm and annihilate the audience completely. And all the audience can do is put up silent resistance to the orchestra's attack. Most of them are from the upper classes and schooled in the ways of classical music. They've sat through countless concerts before, and they know full well from previous experience that this music, too, shall pass.
I am Chinese, so I know how to appreciate noise and clatter. Chinese drums and gongs descend heedlessly on your head with an ear-splitting clatter, all at once, and I can take as much noise as they can dish out. But an
 orchestral assault is mounted slowly, painstakingly, allowing time for each weapon—tubas and trumpets, pianos and violins—to be set in place for one ambush after another: that kind of premeditated conspiracy frightens me.
I came into contact with music for the first time when I was eight or nine years old. My mother and my aunt had just come back to China. My aunt practiced piano every day, extending her tiny hands toward the keyboard, her wrists tightly encircled by the narrow sleeves of her knitted blouse, its bright red weave shot through with silver threads. Flowers were usually blooming in the glass vase atop the piano. What emerged from the piano was another world, and yet it wasn't another world at all, just the world in the mirror that hung on the wall across from the piano, reflecting the civilized elegance of an apartment equipped with hot running water.
Sometimes, my mother would stand behind my aunt, one hand resting on her shoulder, singing scales: "La, la, la, la." My mother was learning to sing purely because her lungs were so weak and the doctor had told her that singing would be good for her health. No matter what song she sang, it always sounded a little like she was reciting poetry (she was in the habit of chanting lines from Tang dynasty poems in her drawling Hunanese accent). And her intonation was always one half-pitch lower than that of the piano, but she would just smile apologetically and offer charming excuses for being out of tune. Her clothes were the soft crimson color of fallen autumn leaves, and a corsage of crimson flowers would hang from her shoulder, forever threatening to drift down to the floor.
I would always stand to one side and listen, less because I liked the piano music than because I enjoyed the atmosphere. I would exclaim with real feeling: "I'm so envious! I only wish I could play that well!" And thus the adults came to believe that I was a child who was unusually sensitive to music, and since it would not do to bury this rare talent, they immediately started me on piano lessons. Mother told me, "Since you are starting off on a lifelong pursuit, you need to learn first of all how to take loving care of your instrument." Each of the piano keys was as white as snow, and I was not allowed to touch them without first having washed my hands. Every day, I would wipe the dust from the piano with a square of parrot green felt cloth.
When my mother first took me to a concert, she warned me over and over before we even arrived, "Whatever happens, don't make a sound, and don't say a thing. Don't let them say Chinese people don't know how to behave properly." And indeed I sat silently, without so much as moving a muscle, and did not fall asleep. During the ten-minute intermission, my mother and my aunt whispered to each other about a red-haired woman, "Red hair is so awkward! It really limits the kinds of things you can wear Reds and yellows
 clash. That just leaves green. When someone with red hair wears green, now that's something. . . ." In the dimly lit auditorium, I combed the crowd in vain for a glimpse of this red-haired woman. And as we rode back in the car after the concert, I wondered the whole way home whether it was really possible for someone to have bright red hair? It was all terribly perplexing.
After that, I never once took it upon myself to go see a concert. In fact, I wouldn't even consider sitting in the park on a summer night and listening for free to the orchestral music coming from the bandstand in the distance.
My piano teacher was a Russian woman whose wide, prominent cheek-bones were covered with golden peach fuzz. She would always lavish me with praise, her excitable blue eyes filling with tears as she held my head in her hands and kissed me. I would smile politely, note exactly where her kisses had landed, and, after a discreet interval, wipe them away with a handkerchief. My family's old maid would accompany me over to my teacher's house. I still didn't really know English, and yet I somehow man-aged to talk with her quite a lot, and even the old servant sometimes joined in our conversations. One weekend, when she had just come back from swimming at Gaoqiao, she proudly and happily opened her collar to show us the pink sunburnt skin on her back. Although it had already been a day since she had returned, I thought I could still smell a powerful aroma of sunshine and sweat coming from her body. The walls of her parlor were hung with lusterless, old brown carpets and fitted with green painted screen doors. Each time we entered or exited, her husband would very politely hold the door open. I was always very reserved and never actually looked at him, so that after several years I still had no idea of what he was like, merely a vague impression of a face that seemed never to have seen the sun. His wife made a living teaching piano, but he didn't do anything at all.
Still later, when I started going to school, I had a piano teacher who would always get angry with me, flinging sheet music onto the floor in exasperation and bringing her hand down on the backs of my hands so hard that they slammed into the keyboard cover and my joints ached. The more she hit me, the lazier I grew. I lost all interest in the piano, and whenever I was supposed to be practicing, I would sit on the floor behind the piano and read novels instead. After the piano teacher got married, her temper improved considerably. Her face powder didn't so much float above her skin; it seemed to protrude an inch beyond it. Wrapped loosely in this voluminous layer of white powder, she would manage to smile in my direction and say, "Good morning!" But I was still afraid of her, and before each class, I would stand by the door to the music room and wait for the bell to ring, trembling and wanting to go to the bathroom instead.
 The several years I had spent learning the piano were like investing money to open a shop. It would have seemed a shame to give it up with-out any return on the investment, so I kept at it for quite a while longer, until I finally had to quit. At the time, I was living at boarding school and often had to pass by the music building, which was made up of lots of little rooms filled with lots of people prodding and plucking at their instruments. The sounds of all the various instruments seemed to sway and scatter forlornly to the ground, like rain at dawn on the sort of day when it seems that sun will never rise, slapping hollowly against the sides of the western-style aluminum siding of the building with an almost unbearable emptiness. When some student happened to step on the piano pedal, the scattered instruments would merge together for an instant, but that was merely like the wind whipping the rain into a fine mist. Once the wind had passed, the pitter-patter of scattered notes would start to drip down once more.
Playing an instrument is like being in a skyscraper. You run up the back-stairs reserved for servants and coolies and salespeople. The gray cement steps and black iron handrails are enclosed by gray cement walls, and the landings are piled with western-style red metal buckets and garbage that is cold and gray and doesn't smell because it's winter. You don't see a single other person on your whole way up; all you can do is keep moving into the teeth of the dark, cruel winds of the tower.
Later, when I had left the misery of learning piano well behind me, I did listen to some orchestral music (but mostly on a gramophone, because records are mercifully short), but I always disliked the rousing declamatory style and overly self-important manner of that sort of music. I much prefer the courtly music of the eighteenth century. Those exquisite little minuets dance gingerly on cloven hoofs, as if they're afraid to break something underfoot. In fact, the Europeans of that era were fascinated by Chinese porcelain. Even the furniture in their houses was made of porcelain; dainty little porcelain chairs were embossed with gold on a white background. My favorite classical composer isn't a romantic like Beethoven or Chopin but Bach, who came a little earlier. Bach's compositions are not as finely woven as courtly music. They have neither churchly airs nor heroic gestures. The world inside the music is heavy, even cumbersome, but it fits comfortably in one's hand and pleases the heart: a clock hangs from the wall inside a wooden house, ticking as its pendulum sways back and forth; people drink sheep's milk from wooden bowls; women curtsy as they take their leave; thoughtful cows and sheep move across green fields under unthinking white clouds; ponderous joy sets the gilded bell of matrimony to ringing.
 Just like the line Browning's poem: "God is in his heaven— / All's right with the world."
Operatic sorts of things can be precious, but that's the extent of their appeal. The stories in opera are usually quite puerile. Jealousy, for instance, is the most primitive of emotions, and, in opera, even the simplest kind of jealousy is blown a thousand times out of proportion by its luxuriant expression in music of the utmost sophistication and complexity. And precisely because of this discrepancy, the whole thing becomes overwrought. Big is not necessarily great. Chest-pounding, wildly gesticulating heroes are annoying. But we must grant them the occasional moment of grandeur: when the singer's golden voice reaches calmly for the heights under the overbearing pressure of the music and each of the instruments has anxiously submitted to the tide, man suddenly stands above the stormy waters of life, and you suddenly realize that he's very tall indeed and that his face and his voice give off enough light to rival the stars. If you hadn't seen him stand up, you wouldn't have realized that he's usually crawling on the ground.
As far as foreign popular music goes, I dislike those half-old, half-new sorts of songs the most. Collections like One Hundred and One Classic Songs carry with them the air of a nineteenth-century parlor, a feeling of dull contentment, gently refined and suffocating. Perhaps this stuffy feeling has to do with the vogue in those times for tight corsets, when everyone ate far too well. Their sadness seems less like sadness than gloomy discomfort. There's a love song called "At Dusk": "At dusk, When you remember me 7 Don't hold a grudge, my dear." From the sound of it, this is the voice of a proper lady who rejected a suitor many years before, for his own good, and for her own good as well. Without giving the affair much thought, she lives alone and grows old alone. Although her pride and her self-respect remain intact, she begins to feel apologetic as the end nears. That might be a gentle and lovely sentiment, if only we could ignore the years of slow death and decay in between. As it is, we can feel only annoyed by her belated emotional logic.
There's none of this sort of logic in Scottish folk songs. The ancient folk tune "Loch Lomond" was recently jazzed up by a popular American band and became a big hit for a time:
You take the high road, and I'll take the low road And I'll be in Scotland afore you
But me and my true love will never meet again On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
 You can imagine the mountainous, foggy wastes of Scotland, its slopes covered in heather that grows as tall as wild grass, with soft lavender flowers that seem to float above the heather like a layer of muted purple mist. The air is fresh, vibrant, and cold. We only have that sort of cleanliness in Shijing (The classic of Poetry).
Listening too much to most jazz music makes you feel groggy, like when you wake up much too late, the sunlight is bright and yellow, but you don't know what time it is, and you have no energy, no appetite, and nothing in your head. Those exaggerated, loping rhythms seem to pursue you, and yet they're quite comfortable at the same time. My favorite song is "The Girl at the City Newspaper." It wasn't really very popular in China, perhaps because it was a little too innovative and avoided the usual "June," "moon," "blue," and "you" sorts of lyrics:
Because I miss her, I miss that
Girl at the city newspaper
I miss that pretty young brunette
On the pink pages of the local newspaper.
This is the very image of little people in the big city.
South American music is like a raging fire or the call of an overripe spring. Hawaiian music is very monotonous, always the metallic sound of plucked guitar. It's like late summer or early autumn when you have to put the wicker bed mats out on a bamboo pole to air in the sun. The flower-patterned Taiwanese mats and straw-colored wicker mats curl in the wind, their edges faded a golden sunny hue. You sit on the ground to nap with the brim of a straw hat pulled over your eyes. Not just you-your lover leans against your shoulder, the breath from his or her nostrils soughing like a blow-dryer in a hair salon. Wallowing in this extreme languor, you might grow quite annoyed if you didn't love each other very, very much, because the sense that all you're doing is killing time is all too clear. Tireless deep blue skies above, an ageless breeze, a sun that has shone and will go on shining for all eternity. But life itself is short, and so you are terribly agitated by everything that is eternal.
Of the various kinds of Chinese popular music, I dislike drum songs for their childish temper. The most famous singers sing unnaturally drawn-out phrases in one incredibly long breath, without their faces ever getting red or the veins in their necks popping out with the effort. And the audience has come expressly to see whether their faces will get red or their veins will pop out from the strain. A narrative song such as "The Great Western
 Chamber" will expend enormous effort to portray the love longings of the main character Yingying but always seems like little more than the tire-some ramblings of a loquacious Beijing storyteller who loves to listen to himself talk.
I've only heard tanci story songs once.' A young man with a long, thin face was singing "Golden Phoenix." Every other phrase was punctuated by an extremely affirmative sort of grunt, and with every grunt, he would shake his head back and forth, as if he had got hold of a chunk of human flesh in his jaws and was unwilling to let it go. I suppose some of the audience derives a soft-core thrill from this sort of thing.
Relatively speaking, shenqu are fairly honest and down to earth.2 These Shanghainese songs express a kind of "hurry up and get along" mentality that is matched by a special sort of music that sounds really rushed, like walking so fast your feet don't touch the ground and the wind whistles in your ears. The strangest thing is that when they sing about death, they use a similar sort of music, but the atmosphere seems completely different. When they sing, "Souls by threes and sevens wandering under heaven, souls by threes and sevens wandering under heaven, when the king of hell calls for them at the third watch, this job he won't botch, when the king of hell calls for them at the third watch, none of them will wake up in the morning," the notes fall like a hard, steady rain, repeating over and over again, in a noisy flurry of sound. It's as if some great event is about to hap-pen, and the audience feels nervous, even a little panicky, but the musicians don't really have any feelings at all. For these common folks, even death has a distinctly human feel.
As for Chinese pop songs, it used to be that everyone was crazy for little-girlish singers, and so all the stars forced their voices unnaturally high and flat. A song like "Peach Blossom River" came out sounding like unintelligible nonsense syllables—"jia ah jia, ji jia jia ji jia ah jia"-through the little speaker of a wireless radio. Bemused foreigners would often ask how it could be that all Chinese girls' voices sounded like that? Things are much better now. But Chinese popular songs still lack a real musical foundation: it's as if someone decided that a new era needs new songs, and so they pound out new songs, come what may. That's why when I do happen to hear a pleasing tune like "Roses Blooming Everywhere," I can't help suspecting that it must have been copied from an American or Japanese song.
1 Tanci is a musical genre, usually associated with the city of Suzhu, in which st0rytelling is set to musical accompaniment.
2 Shenqu is a popular genre of operatic songs in the Shanghainese dialect.
 Late one night, the sound of music from a dancehall came floating through the air from afar. A sharp, thin female voice was singing: "Roses, roses, blooming everywhere!" In all of Shanghai, there were hardly any lights on, and the night seemed all the more empty and vast because of it. I still hadn't put out the lights. A row of windows with dark blue velvet drapes pulled shut, like the "heavy curtains of night" of literary cliché. The velvet curtains fluttered in the wind, their edges splattered pale and dusty gold by the light of the lamp. A strange sort of car tore hurriedly down the street, perhaps in pursuit of thieves, wailing as it went, like the steam whistle of a passenger ship. With its sad, attenuated whistle-wa! wa . . . wa! . . . wa - the ocean seemed to appear just outside my window. Departure aboard an ocean liner, a tale of fateful separation to chill one's very soul. The "wa ... wa" sound gradually moved into the distance. On such a cruel night, a night so big and so broken, it was impossible to imagine that any roses would be blooming. And yet this woman, in a tiny and determinedly optimistic voice, was insisting that they were. Even if all that was really blooming were imitation silk flowers-ornamenting a mosquito net, a lamp shade, the brim of a hat, a sleeve, a pair of shoes, or a parasol - the fragile satisfaction they offered had a certain intimate, lovable charm.