《敕勒歌》北朝民歌
"A Song of Chi Le" - Anonymous (Northern Dynasty Folk Song)
敕勒川，陰山下，
The Chi Le plains flow beneath the Yin Shan Mountains,
天似穹廬，籠蓋四野。
The sky hangs like the dome of a yurt, covering all directions.
天蒼蒼，野茫茫，
The sky is boundless and blue; The wilderness is vast and endless
風吹草低見牛羊。
The wind blows and bends the grasslands low, revealing flocks of cows and sheep.
Sitting on a plane from Chicago to Lexington recently, I read a collection of classical Chinese poetry on my iPad in hopes of waking up my Chinese language skills that have gotten rusty from lack of use in recent months. As I read, I came across the poem above, "Chi Le Ge" or "A Song of Chi Le." The poem is an anonymous folk song, and it dates from the "Northern Dynasty" period (roughly 439-589), a time of great social and cultural exchange between northern Chinese and Mongolian speaking tribes, like the Xianbei, who established the dynasties of the Northern Wei. The song's images are evocative, and instantly recognizable to anyone who's done traveling in western China. Azure blue skies. Endless, open, windswept prairies on the steppe. Towering mountains in the distance. Livestock grazing in the fields. Like this:
These images are also recognizable to anyone with a passing familiarity with Chinese literature, music and pop-culture. As I read over the poem, I was struck by what seemed to me to be a fascinating similarity between Chinese and American art and culture that I really felt like exploring with a blog entry, especially given the fact that much of my research for this project will be conducted in western China: much like in the United States, Chinese culture abounds with romantic descriptions of the west. Americans know these stories well. Tall tale stories about the likes of Paul Bunyan, or John Henry, classic American novels like Steinbeck's East of Eden, or any of the many books written by Louis L'Amour, or the films of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood leave their mark on America's literature and popular imagination. Over the years we've cultivated a specific, recognizable image of the "Wild West" that is nearly universally intelligible in American culture.
A similar persual of Chinese prose, poetry, film and music reveals a similar fascination with the country's west. It's a longstanding enchantment. In recent years, a handful of scholars of Chinese literature (most notably, Sanping Chen, whose Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages deals with this subject at length) published work that explores the influence of Inner Asia and steppe culture on classical Chinese works. "A Song of Chi Le" is one example. Other classical poets (especially those writing during the Tang Dynasty, considered by many to be the height of Chinese literature) like the master Du Fu also described life on the plains. In his poem, "野望" or "Viewing the plains," the master describes his feelings while looking out at the step from a place that he calls, "the end of the sky," a place where he stands alone, removed from family and home. Such imagery of boundless, open prairie and endless sky remains pervasive in contemporary Chinese literature. Jiang Rong's hugely popular (and highly controversial) novel Wolf Totem (狼图腾) presents an idealized (and some might charge, essentialist) picture of life with pastoral, nomadic shepherds on the steppe. The modernist poet, HaiZi also often wrote evocative descriptions of the plains. For example, his "九月" (or "September" in English, performed here as a folk song by the blind guitarist Zhou Yunpeng) speaks of grasslands covered with wildflowers, and distant winds:
目击众神死亡的草原上野花一片
With my own eyes I witnessed the death of the Gods on a patch of wildflower covered prairie
远在远方的风比远方更远
The wind blew farther and farther in the distance
我的琴声呜咽 泪水全无
My zither sobbed and cried wordlessly
我把这远方的远归还草原
I took hold of this far distant place and returned to the grasslands.
一个叫木头 一个叫马尾
One I called wood, One I called horsetail
我的琴声呜咽 泪水全无
My zither sobbed and cried wordlessly
远方只有在死亡中凝聚野花一片
In the distance, only in death, can I gather wildflowers
明月如镜高悬草原映照千年岁月
A bright moon hangs high over the grasslands, shining for a millennium.
我的琴声呜咽 泪水全无
My zither sobbed and cried wordlessly
只身打马过草原
Alone, I spurred my horse across the prairie.
Visions on the west also appear in music, and numerous Chinese folk tunes take on western landscapes as their subjects. Songs like "Springtime in the Pamirs" and "Kangding Love Song" (also known as the Chinese song from Marvel's "Daredevil" series) both describe the high mountain ranges that traverse China's western regions. More recently, Chinese-language pop songs sung by ethnic minority singers from western regions, and laden with Tibetan or Mongolian imagery, have become huge hits on the Chinese chart. Songs like DaiQing Tana's "QInghai Lake" and Suolang Zhaxi's "姑娘我爱你" (the English title of which is basically, "Girl, I love you" making it perhaps the most bubble-gum pop-song of all time) use western motifs throughout their videos, emphasizing the exotic mystique of faraway border regions.
Chinese cinema has also looked west in recent years. Ang Lee's martial arts masterpiece "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" filmed many of its scenes in the deserts of Xinjiang province. Lee's Xinjiang offers his characters an escape from the constraints and rules of life in courtly Beijing. His female lead, Xiao Long (played by Zhang Ziyi), finds freedom in the desert to love who she pleases, and to be who she pleases. In the desert, she is able to break free of rules and arrangements and confinements associated with her status as the daughter of a court official, and become who she desires to be. Similarly, Jiang Wen's "The Sun Also Rises," an amazing film rooted in magical realism, reaches its climax in the deserts in Xinjiang. In Jiang's film, the desert is a place of escape for lovers. Again, it is presented almost as a place of wish fulfilment, a place beyond rules or obligations.
This steady stream of romanticism flows throughout much of the Chinese literature written about the west. These are but a few examples out of many. I'm not trained to critique or analyze literature, so my ability to comment on the subject is somewhat limited, but a definite pattern seems easily observed when writings about western China are involved. Time and again, authors, musicians, flimmakers, etc. have extolled the beauty of western China's terrain: the height of its mountains, the openness of its grasslands, the largeness of its sky, the richness of its color, the strength of its winds. They have also extolled its spiritual and emotional virtues: beauty, solitude, serenity, simplicity, freedom. Western China, in the words and images of these authors and artists is a place of desire. It is a place of self-realization. It is a place of wilds, and deserts, and nomadic peoples.
The real Western China that exists outside of literature and film is understandably more complicated. It can be a place of isolation, and poverty. Afterall, Xinjiang's Lop Nur desert was so sparsely populated the state felt it an appropriate place to conduct nuclear tests. Even during the days of imperial China, Qinghai and other parts of the western fronteir were used as a place to exile dissident ministers. In contrast to the heroes and heroines of literature who find western escapes, residents of western China may find themselves limited by economics, lack of resources, lack of infrastructure, disconnectedness from the rest of the country, etc. China's modernization boom seeks to remove some of that isolation, and improve the living standards of those living in far western regions. As I ponder this development, I'm curious as to how these changes will play out. What happens when development and modernization reach this land of literary fantasy and romanticized desire? Will development alter notions of the west in Chinese popular imagination? Will development transform art as well as life? A question to ponder, indeed.