Abigail Washburn tour diary - The Armpit of Capitalism, Hot Cross Buns, Fear-thee-not Meat, The Chinese Reaction, Self-Perception & The Nation State, Fun Olympics: The Review

Hot Cross Buns

Despite a previous, very positive, U.S. state department tour to Guangzhou, I was nervous about this trip. I’ve done a lot of reading as of late and I feel like I’ve had almost too-intimate a view into parts of business-man culture in these "special economic zones" (zones created in the early '80s when Deng Xiaoping opened China. The purpose of the zones was to protect the rest of China from the first experiments in opening the Chinese economy to the west, it’s first experiments in modern capitalism).

Integrity takes on a different meaning in these towns. A thriving businessman is almost expected to practice a sort of circus of pleasures in the "entrepreneurial" spirit. One of the most amazing things I heard about was a businessman that, as a result of signing a lease for a certain plot of land, received a gift from the leaser, called "hot cross buns." The leasee was escorted up to a suite hotel room where 30 naked women awaited him standing in a line. Of the 30 women, he could choose 15. When the 15 that he slighted left the room he would lay down on the bed and the chosen 15 would proceed to roll back and forth over him naked, hence the term "hot cross buns." For some reason I can actually appreciate the hilarity of the terminology applied to this specific procedure of the sex trade. There is plenty not to laugh about a la the resurgence of concubines. This in my mind is only a step short of the tradition of "bound feet" of the previous dynastic empires: a literal method of crippling a woman’s ability to make her place in the world by snapping her feet in half at a young age and binding them to stunt their growth and fit them into tiny shoes known to be highly sexually appealing. Please God, let there not be a resurgence in the popularity of bound feet.

Fear-thee-not Meat

At least equally as shocking as the sex trade bi-product of special-Chinese-economic-zone-capitalism, is the Guangdong cuisine. I know it's a very refined and sophisticated cuisine, but this Midwest girl raised on tater tots, mac n’cheese and cream peas on toast cannot get her head around eating the lesser known parts of strange animals and domestic pets. Just walk down an open-air meat market and you’ll see the equivalent of your fifth grade pet bunny (big, floppy-eared, fuzzy and white) being sold for a bunny-paw dish featuring specially cooked entrails. And then there’s the dove, in my mind a symbol of peace, being sold for dove meat, cooked and served with charred head in tact. How about scorpions in a white washtub crawling on top of one another to escape certain doom (oh, if only they could jump over the immense white wall to freedom! ...and sometimes they do; flip flops not advised in open air markets)? Then there are the underwater creatures such as eels, water snakes, fish, sea horses, sharks, jelly fish. And, oh yeah, cobras for sale! All of this meat product is available on or off the menu at local restaurants. Matching my immense squeamishness is an awe, a kind of profound respect for the matter-of-factness and creativity of it all. Guangdong takes pride in where their meat comes from; they even glorify the animal form in the final presentation. Unlike the expectations of most meat consumers in the U.S., in China, meat is not some hunk of animal shrink wrapped and covered in a pretty plastic sticker implying that the contents were created by corporate branding and not actually the product of killing an animal. I am not proud of the fact that I can’t imagine killing my own meat or that Guangdong food instills fear in me. I’m, in fact, proud to report that a portion of our contingency, Casey and Bela and Ed (our kick ass, totally Chinese-fluent state dept. pal), were not afraid to try things.

The Chinese Reaction, Self-Perception & The Nation State

So it seems thus far that I’ve preferred sensationalist social commentary to writing about the actual experience of playing music in these parts of Guangdong province. I suppose I wanted you to understand the things that went through my mind when we were re-routed to Southeast China. In actuality, we were given amazing first-time opportunities to play in front of a wide array of local folks. (Deep breath before this next sentence.) Our third-party promoter hired by the Chinese Performing Arts Association, partnering with the American Center for Educational Exchange in Beijing, our U.S. state department and consulate in Guangzhou, took good care of us and really tried to maximize the use or our time without running us into the ground. Our first day in Guangzhou was a masters’ class for students from the conservatory in the basement of our U.S. Consul General’s home and then a full-house show at a local performing arts center. A quick testimony here to the coolness of the fact that a Consul General runs cultural programming out of his home and that our U.S. government gives extensive training in language and culture to all the Americans coming to Guangzhou to serve in the name of diplomacy as opposed to the current trend toward militaristic reactionism.

It’s always hard to know how to get people out to your shows anywhere in the world, but I would imagine it would be a special feat in the factory towns of Southeast China that are consumed with business affairs and not really in need of an experimental roots chamber quartet performance. Over the three nights in Dongguan, Foshan and Guangzhou, we played in front of about 1,500 people, all of which were contacted by a personal call from our third-party promoter who specially created a list of people in each town that might be interested in this kind of performance including intermediate school band teachers, conservatory deans, local entertainment media, retired musicians’ associations, owners of local music clubs, misc business partners and friends, etc. We had everyone in the audience from academic types to working class, from 5-90 yrs old. If only someone would make all those calls to get people to check out our live show in the U.S…

People ask me often in interviews how the Chinese people react to our music. I understand where this question is coming from, but it still strikes me as a strange notion. It’s about as broad as asking how Americans react to our music. Chinese are as diverse in their reactions as Americans. The conservatory students in Beijing aren’t just smitten with us because we’re foreigners; they’re waiting for us to prove to them that our music is worthy of their attention, and when hopefully proven, they ask questions about harmonies, modalities and intervals. In the jazz clubs in Shanghai there is a highly discerning mix of expats and local Chinese responsive to the arrangements and individual solos. In rural Sichuan at a chemical college, the students gather in droves to check out the foreign act and instruments (IE: the banjo) they’ve rarely gotten to hear at all much less in person. Every moment of the performance is a new discovery. At the animal husbandry college in Tibet we were the first foreigners EVER, period. Alien banjobanjocellofiddle invasion…we come in peace.

The more I think about it, the more I appreciate this question because it brings up one of the things I spend a lot of my time thinking about: the role of the nation state in self-perception. Does a person’s nationality imply a pre-ordained reaction in any instance to anything? I believe that the human is as diverse as there are people, no two humans alike. I hope that the unique and special qualities of each human being become the guiding light of the future of the goals of any evolving citizenry. I hope that the attachment to the nation-state is shortlived on this planet and merely used as a stepping stone from the more feudalistic forms of organized societies to a sense of ourselves as global citizens committed to the well-being of all souls caught in this web of existence, and committed to the preservation and dissemination of that which is beautiful about who we are, where we come from and where we are going.

Fun Olympics: A Review

What better way is there to bolster a strong sense of nationality in people than the Olympics? After my last blog about the No-Fun Olympics, I got different reactions from different friends. Some of which agreed with me and some of which didn’t. I admit that I only got to see a part of one Japan-USA baseball game and only really had four days in Beijing to "soak it all in" on top of the performing obligations. Friends who spent a lot of time going to athletic events and hanging out in Chinese and non-Chinese sections of the cheering crowds had an awesome time. They always seemed to come away with a newfound pile of international friends from their fortuitous spot in the stands. Friends also reported that the cheering was intense all around for generally great acts of athleticism. And as for my statement about tickets not being available, here is my friend, Todd Steed’s response:

“Anyone, including Chinese, can walk up to something like boxing and get tix at face value (8 dollars) or below. I have heard the police have been sending scalpers away, but it seems that's not so true anymore. A police guy helped me negotiate a ticket to the U.S. women's b-ball game with a scalper. I thought he was coming to bust up the sale.”

A fact that until now has flown low low below the radar is that The Sparrow Quartet was supposed to play an Olympic venue in Beijing. We did some very cool stuff like playing for a pile of students from universities all around Beijing at a private event arranged by the ACEE, taping a webchat for China.org, playing live on China Radio International and the Ambassador’s residence, but we didn’t play an Olympic venue. Early in the trip we were told that we were going to play Ditan Park last Thursday 8/21, at a time to-be-determined. On 8/20, we still had no certain location or time. There are a million reasons it may not have worked out, the most likely of which in my mind is the Chinese authorities’ concern about the shenanigans and protests that might occur as a result of a convening crowd, much in the image of the protests that occurred on the torch run’s “journey of harmony’ through France and some parts of the U.S. In China, you have to apply and receive approval for a protest. In order to win approval a boatload of information must first be supplied including the names and ID #s of all protesters. When I left, the tally of protests that had been applied for and denied were up well over 40.

In review, we were originally supposed to play an event in celebration of the opening of the new U.S. embassy, play in cities in Sichuan dealing with the aftermath of the earthquakes and play an Olympic event…none of which happened. After five music tours in China since 2004, and general sino-to-and-fro since 1996, I am not surprised at the immense last-minute change in plans. It’s always an adventure, and as always, all kinds of cool stuff did happen. I feel unending gratefulness to our U.S. government for supporting our trip. After all, in the words of Yann Martel, “If we do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination to the altar of cruel reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”