Taishan Muyu in America: An Unknown Treasure

by Su de San Zheng

"Once muyu has come to my mind, I start singing .... Forty years ago my hometown was liberated .... We worked very hard to build reservoirs .... I hurried on the road to Gold Mountain. People say that America is a paradise, where everybody makes money and becomes rich .... I believed I could enjoy life in America; how could I know that I would have to endure such hardship in my old age? .... If I had the opportunity to return to my hometown, .... how glorious and impressive would I be as the guest back from Gold Mountain .... I would first distribute money then the sesame candies. Between brothers we would have so many loving sentiments to tell that the talking would be endless ...."

       In a large classroom at New York University, a slim Chinese man stood in front of a large group of students and started to tell in Taishan muyu his own experience of coming to America. The song's sections told of his life in Taishan, arrival in Hong Kong, and experience in the U.S., with a coda - an imaginary return to Taishan.
       Though nearly 80, the singer, Sheung Chi Ng - or Ng Bok (Uncle Bok), as he prefers to be called - was still high-spirited and full of vigor, singing with a clear and sonorous voice and elaborating an embellishment on almost every note. His body was slightly bent towards the listeners, his arms tense, from time to time making some gesture corresponding to the lyrics. As he moved around, his eyes seemed to be looking into a mystical world. It seemed that he was entirely immersed in his distant memories and the overwhelming joy of singing. Finally, with an ultra-prolonged cadential note, Ng Bok finished the story. Ng Bok's face was brimming with excitement as he proudly smiled at the attentive crowd. The students and ethnomusicology professor Kay Shelemay were full of warm praise for the presentation.
       What is Taishan muyu? Muyu is a general term for an important genre of traditional narrative song popular in Guangdong Province and southern China from the early seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. It shares many features with other types of traditional narrative songs (such as pingtan, Jingyun dagu, Henan zhuizi) including content, textual structure, rhyme patterns, performance practice, and manner of transmission. However, because of the diversity of dialects spoken in Guangdong, the same muyu text may be sung to different traditional melodies as the text travels from one area to another. Taishan muyu is the local variation of this important musical tradition found in Taishan County in southwestern Guangdong.
       Taishan muyu is customarily performed unaccompanied, by one singer or a group singing in turns, often at ceremonies, festivals, and the like. Traditionally, the transmission of texts is both oral and written, while music is transmitted orally only. The texts, which are generally rhymed, are drawn from history, legend, and folk tales; religion and ethics also constitute an important part of the content. In the past, both literati and folk singers were involved in the creation of its texts, which circulated either in printed form or as hand-copied booklets.
       The length of a given text can vary tremendously. The shortest have only several dozens of verses and can be sung in just a few minutes, while some of the longest stories have thousands of verses and take hours, even days.
       The basic verse structure is the heptasyllabic form, and the conventional subdivision of each verse is 2+2+3 (Example 1). In addition, an octosyllabic verse form is also used usually for reciting a document or a letter; the verse then is subdivided into two phrases with the structure of 4+4 (Example 2). However, what is written in a textbook cannot truly reflect the reality of actual performance, because an indeterminate number of padding syllables are spontaneously added by the singers to the fixed texts during performance.
       The singing is fundamentally metrical, though the last note at the end of each verse is often freely prolonged as in shange style, and some rhythmic nuances and irreguarities may occur. The word setting is almost completely syllabic; each verse is sung to anywhere from five beats to more than ten beats, depending on the number of padding syllables added. Ornamentation is essential in singing; a good singer embellishes almost every note, using downward or upward glidings, rapid tremolos and passing tones, etc.
       Corresponding to the heptasyllabic and octosyllabic verse forms, the music also has two distinct modes: the singing mode (Example 1) and the reciting mode (Example 2). The music of Taishan muyu is built upon a combination of persistent patterns and inspired improvisations intimately connected with the linguistic tones, the rhyming structure and the syntax. It has several sets of melodic formulae each followed by a fixed cadential note, in shang (re) or zhi (sol), and their applications in performance are determined to a large extent by the rhyming scheme of the text, which is frequently grouped into couplets or triplets. The lower even tone rhyming syllables together with the cadence note zhi mark off the ending of the couplet or triplet and other important structural points of the texts (see Example 1, verse 5 and Example 2, verse 4). Its melody flows within the range of one octave, and emphasizes tonal and syntactical functions more than musical description or abstraction.
       The majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States have historically come from the Taishan area; today, Taishanese still constitute one of the largest Chinese groups in America. Some of the elderly Taishan immigrants have kept the tradition of muyu; their songs can often be heard among Chinese-American senior citizens.
       Although people from Taishan assert there was a time when everyone from the region could sing muyu, Taishan muyu was almost unknown by the outside world until Robert Lee, Director of the Asian American Arts Centre, "discovered" Ng Bok on the streets of New York's Chinatown in 1987. My own first encounter with Taishan muyu was in 1989, when I was called upon by Robert Lee to work with the Centre in its folk arts program, especially in the research on Ng Bok and his songs. Subsequently, I decided to undertake more extended fieldwork and research in 1990-91. I was particularly interested in the relationship between the Chinese immigrant experience and its reflection in the preservation, use, and dissemination of Taishan muyu among the senior citizens. I conducted interviews in the Chinatown Senior Citizens Center. Joseph Chu, Assistant Director of the Center, told me that of the Center's over four thousand members, about three hundred came to the Center everyday. The majority were from Guangdong, with natives of Taishan constituting the largest group. The Center offers various opportunities for music performance by the senior citizens, including monthly birthday parties, and Christmas and Chinese New Year celebrations.
       I was invited by Joseph Chu to attend a birthday party at the Center, during which a one-hour music program was presented by the Center's instrumental ensemble and several singers. The repertory included Cantonese opera songs, art songs, as well as Taishan muyu sung by Ng Bok and a lady in her seventies identified as Mrs. Guo. In a gentle and soft voice, Mrs. Guo enunciated these sorrowful words: "The fourth flower I embroider is the crab-apple flower blossoming in spring, but seeing the jade-like petals only makes me heartbroken.... The sixth flower I embroider is the peony; her glorious name is spread everywhere. You said you went to Gold Mountain because of the poverty at home; you promised to return in just a few years. But now I am left all by myself, accompanied only by loneliness..." This popular traditional muyu song is called "The Embroidery Song," describing most delicately the grief and distress of an immigrant's wife back home, abandoned and lonely. It was a familiar song to the audience, composed mainly of women of Mrs. Guo's age. Some women seemed to recite the text along with Mrs. Guo, and at the end, all responded to the singing with very loud and warm applause. It is not difficult to understand why many of the women present at the party could identify with the heartbreaking experience described in the song since, due to American exclusion laws, none of the Chinese wives of American citizens were admitted into the United States until after World War II. Thus, in performance, an individual expression was transformed into a collectively registered memory.
       At the birthday party, Ng Bok sang again "Uncle Ng Comes to Gold Mountain" (quoted in part at the beginning of this article), which he wrote in 1981, one year after he arrived in America. This song expresses Ng Bok's personal view of history, of events, of life, and of his values in a characteristic folk style, with the skill of a talented storyteller. The language is most straightforward, the descriptions attractive and the observations vivid and humorous. At the age of 69, after much hesitation, Ng Bok reluctantly left his beloved hometown where he had worked as a farmer for most of his life, to journey with much courage and hope toward a mythical American dream, as did so many of his compatriots. Ng Bok worked for years in a Chinatown garment factory before he retired. Although he appreciates his present life and finds it much better than before, he still regrets deeply never realizing his American dream. He didn't just sing a song, he expressed himself and interpreted his own life experience: "Uncle Ng Comes to Gold Mountain" sustains a flow of history. In the song, the American experience is framed in the context of Taishan, either as the realistic past at the beginning, or as the imagined future at the end. We learn from the song not only the facts, but also the commentary and the reflections of an individual on the societies, the cultures and the events he lived through. It is in the singing of his muyu song that Ng Bok re-lives his life, recollects the most meaningful events, redefines his cultural values, recreates the sense of himself and reconstructs his imagined reality. Thus, the expression which is caused by things without also becomes the extension of the inner experience; what Ng Bok could not experience in real life, he experienced symbolically through his singing.
       During my research, I found that the selection and preservation of muyu repertory by individual singers are closely related to or influenced by their personal life experiences; songs are the expression of their feelings and thoughts, and are intimately linked to their everyday lives. For example, songs associated with the immigration experience took a very prominent position in Ng Bok's personal muyu textbook collection which consists altogether of more than twenty texts of different lengths. In addition to "Uncle Ng Comes to Gold Mountain," I have collected four other songs pertaining to emigration from China to America: (1) "Uncle Writes a Letter to His Nephew," written by Ng Bok in 1949 when he still lived in Taishan. The song is in the form of a fictitious letter to a nephew, already in America, who seemed to have forgotten his family responsibilities. The letter admonishes the nephew and asks him to send money to his wife and children in order to save them from desperation. (2) "The Embroidery Song" (partially quoted earlier), which Ng Bok learned in his youth from a textbook. (3) "Discourse on the Journey Across the Ocean to Gold Mountain" and (4) "Discourse on Gold Mountain," which, according to Ng Bok, were both written by a schoolteacher from his hometown, in his father's generation (the late nineteenth century). Ng Bok learned these two songs in his early youth. The texts vividly recount the pioneering Chinese laborers' horrendous experience of sailing across the ocean, and the severe hardships endured by early migrants in the gold mines of California. These songs are all hand-copied and totally unknown to the scholarly world.
       I believe that the study of Taishan muyu can offer useful perspectives on the study of Chinese narrative songs in general, and especially as a living folk tradition. Furthermore, the recognition of these valuable texts will certainly make a contribution to Asian American studies, and to furthering our understanding of Chinese Americans' cultural and musical history and traditions.
       Ng Bok, congratulations to you as the first Chinese American to receive a National Heritage Fellowship; I wish you a long, long life!

Su de San Zheng is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, and board member of the Society for Asian Music. Her recent publications include "Music and Migration: Chinese American Traditional Music in New York City," in The World of Music, 1990, Vol. 3.

Cantonese Opera Project

Cantonese Opera Movements
       A demonstration of the integration of the various disciplines required for the performer's art: makeup, costume, stylized gesture, acrobatics. Male (sheng) and female (dan) character roles are demonstrated by Luo Weihua and Zhu Yingying of the Guangzhou Cantonese Opera Company with bilingual narration. The Educational Alliance, 197 E. Broadway, NYC. November 1, 2:00 PM.

The Art of Singing in Cantonese Opera
       Cantonese opera is distinguished from other regional styles by its vocal lines, songs, modes, percussion and instrumental accompaniment. Professor Bell Yung of the University of Pittsburgh's Ethnomusicology Department will talk about the vocal and musical performance of Cantonese opera with live demonstrations by singers and musicians. Chatham Square Regional Library, 33 E. Broadway, NYC. December 5, 2:30 PM.

Composition Prizes

"Five Elements" (for di, yangqin, zheng, pipa & erhu) by Fang Xiaomin
       The Chinese view of life as a continuous cycle of change and development is embodied in the five elements that are the sources of all life - metal, wood, water, fire, earth - which may be complimentary or diametrically opposed. This metaphysical concept is explored using the pentatonic scale. The composer is a lecturer at the Xinghai Conservatory in Guangzhou.

"Guo Feng" (trio for di, erhu, zheng) by Wang Ning
       Borrowing certain structural and musical characteristics of the da qu (grand opus) form of imperial court music of the Sui and Tang dynasties, this work is a contemporary interpretation of the "national" character of Chinese music and instrumentation. The composer is on the faculty of the Composition Department of the China Conservatory of Music.

News and Notes

       CHINOPERL (Conference on Chinese Oral and Performing Literature) held its annual meeting from April 2 to 4 in Washington, D.C. Attendees heard a variety of talks on different genres of traditional performing literature, such as tanci, and on the relation between written and oral literature. Three videotape presentations were also made, including one on the art of muyu, a narrative style discussed elsewhere in this newsletter.
       The semi-annual meeting of the Association for Chinese Music Research took place at the same time, also in Washington. Three talks were given: "What is Heterophony in Chinese Instrumental Music?" by Ying-fai Tsui (University of Pittsburgh); "Harmonizing Chinese Tunes: A Recording Sampler," by Rulan Chao Pien (Harvard); and "Travels of a Guqin Field Worker in China During the 1950's " by Wang Di (Research Institute of Music, Beijing/Harvard).

       The newly published History of New Music in China: Collected Essays by the Center of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong contains four volumes: 1885-1919, 1920-1945, 1946-1976, 1885-1985 Retrospective. The fifty-five essays, edited by Dr. C.C. Liu, include a kaleidoscopic range of perspectives by Chinese scholars, music historians, musicologists, composers and musicians from China's mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas. For information, contact: Center of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong; telephone: 859-2463, fax: (852)559-5884.

       A concert showcasing "Lutes of Arabia, China & Persia" was presented on March 15, 1992 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by The Society for Asian Music in association with the Museum's Department of Musical Instruments and the World Music Institute. Pipa soloist Wu Man performed selections from the instrument's classical, folk and contemporary repertoire. Appearing on the same program were Simon Shaheen on the Arab 'ud and Reza and Madjid Derakhshani on the Persian tar.

       Music From China launched its 1992 Sunday Tea Concerts Series with a demonstration-performance of "Jiangnan Silk and Bamboo Music" on May 10 at the Oriental Gallery. This is an unique style of regional folk music notable for the genteel sounds of bamboo winds, bowed and plucked strings (formerly of silk) in undulating, embellished melodies. Pipa soloist Tang Liangxing, who comes from a family of musicians who practice this tradition in their native Shanghai, outlined its musical components and led the musicians in the performance of three classical piece: "San Liu," "Zhonghua Liuban," "Xing Jie."

       Professor Wen-chung Chou, founder and director of the Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange, has been honored by a John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award, "for making a significant contribution to the understanding, practice and study of the .... performing arts of Asia." The Center brought together Mainland and Taiwanese composers for the first time in a conference on "The Tradition and the Future of Chinese Music" at Columbia University in New York in 1988 and organized the Pacific Composers Conference at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan in 1990. More recently, the Center is undertaking the Yunnan Project that will serve as model for the preservation and continuance of regional arts in China.

Article Index
Newsletter Vol. 2, No. 2
Summer 1992
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