Along the Roaring River

Hao Jiang Tian

Description

Since his 1991 debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Hao Jiang Tian has appeared on the world’s greatest stages, more than 300 times at the Met alone. How he got there is a drama of bittersweet humor, mortal danger, heartbreaking tragedy, and inspiring triumph—more passionate and turbulent than even the grandest opera. In Along the Roaring River, Tian relives his coming of age in China during the chaotic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and his dramatic journey from hard labor in a Beijing factory to international opera stardom.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Along the Roaring River
• Biography
• History of the United States
• History of China
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620458631
• Langue: English

Extrait

Along the Roaring River
My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met
Hao Jiang Tian
with
Lois B. Morris
FOREWORD BY ROBERT LIPSYTE


John Wiley Sons, Inc.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2008 by Hao Jiang Tian, Lois B. Morris, and Robert Lipsyte. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Wandering Ch ing Ling Stream in Nan-Yang, by Li Po, translated by David Hinton, from The Selected Poems of Li Po , 1996 by David Hinton. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Goodbye at the River, by Li Po, from Five T ang Poets: Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-yin , translated and introduced by David Young, Oberlin College Press, 1990. Reprinted by permission of Oberlin College Press
All photographs courtesy of Hao Jiang Tian except the following: p. 8, Tommy Ng; pp. 43, 50, Lois B. Morris; p. 222, Arnaldo Colombaroli; p. 226, Bonini; p. 274, Carol Pratt; p. 285, Beth Bergman, 2001; p. 297, Mark Kiryluk
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Tian, Hao Jiang, date.
Along the roaring river: my wild ride from Mao to the Met / Hao Jiang Tian with Lois B. Morris; foreword by Robert Lipsyte.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-05641-7 (cloth: alk. paper)
1. Tian, Hao Jiang, 1954- 2. Basses (Singers)-United States-Biography.
3. Chinese American musicians-Biography. I. Morris, Lois B. II. Title.
ML420.T49A3 2008
782.1092-dc22
[B]
2007046849
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Martha
Out of respect for their privacy, we have changed the names and other identifying information about some of the people who appear in this book.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Robert Lipsyte
PRELUDE: Yuan
P ART I The Beast with Eighty-Eight Teeth
1 Music Torture
2 The Little Emperor of Destruction
3 Mama Nature Sings
4 So Long, Beijing
5 Embracing the Beast
6 What Was I Thinking?
7 Yellow Hair Blues
8 My Mother and the White-Boned Demon
9 A Card Game
10 Son of a Gun
INTERLUDE: Circling
P ART II Big Old Yankee
11 John Peking
12 Facing the Music
13 Love Conquers All
14 Hao Giovanni
15 A Night at the Opera
16 Playing the Devil in China
INTERLUDE: Wandering Ch ing Ling Stream in Nan-Yang
P ART III Fishing
17 Millennium
18 Where You Come From
CODA: Goodbye at the River
Acknowledgments
Index
FOREWORD by Robert Lipsyte
In the summer of 2002, Lois B. Morris and I were in Shanghai following Itzhak Perlman s program for young string and piano prodigies, which we had written about for the New York Times . A friendly woman named Martha Liao, who was involved in the Perlman group s joint workshop with Chinese youngsters, introduced us to her husband, Tian.
Who knew this was yuan -what was meant to be?
We had seen Tian on posters all over town. He had a big, handsome face with soulful dark eyes and lips about to break into a mischievous smile. He was giving a recital. Our attention was elsewhere. The Itzhak Perlman-sponsored young musicians were practicing with their Chinese counterparts. While the music was grand, the culture clash was startling: the Americans were polite and respectful, but the Chinese were rude and arrogant, often text-messaging during rehearsals. Lois and I realized that our advance reading hadn t prepared us for twenty-first-century China; we reeled through the hot, wet, teeming streets of Shanghai.
And then, in the cool, hushed lobby of our hotel, we met Tian, a man of both twenty-first-century and ancient China. When those eyes sparkled and the smile broke out, the young players and their cell phones faded. And when that impossibly deep voice began to tell tales of a teenager growing up wild on the streets of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, we were enthralled. We sat for hours in the lobby bar, oblivious to anything but the vivid saga of this lifelong rebel and Red Guard-for-a-day; this lover, smuggler, factory hand, accordion player, and dreamer, who had educated himself with stolen books and had outraged authorities by singing songs heard on Voice of America while shaking his hips like Elvis.
At first, the stories sounded like fantasies from an alternate universe. We were only two days into our first trip to China and were overwhelmed by the new sights and sounds and smells. We had no idea that Tian-we weren t yet able to pronounce his name properly-was a historical character. He was the first world-class opera singer to emerge from China.
A few days later, we found out that he was also a singer of rare and thrilling talent. Along with Itzhak and Toby Perlman and some voice and drama coaches from the Metropolitan Opera, we went to Tian s recital at the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Once again, he enthralled us. Speaking in English and Chinese, he reached out to the audience with the same intimate warmth we had felt in the lobby. He sang arias, lieder, Chinese folk songs, Danny Boy, and Some Enchanted Evening. This last number, with Martha at the piano, was a collaboration they would repeat two years later when Lois and I were married in New York.
Who could have imagined that a pleasant afternoon in a Shanghai hotel lobby would turn out to be the unrehearsed overture to a friendship that would open a window on the return of China to the world stage of art, business, and politics and put us on the path to this book?
Now that s yuan !
The sense of fate and karma, of what was meant to be, was a recurring theme as our relationship with Tian bloomed. Because he was kind and generous, he was our introduction to such Chinese artists as the composers Tan Dun and Guo Wenjing, the pianist Lang Lang, the violinist Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin, the film director Zhang Yimou, the novelist Ha Jin, and many others who were catalysts of their times, transforming their arts and making connections to the West. Because Tian was so modest and humble, it was a while before it became apparent that he was one of those catalysts, a transformer and a connector in his own right.
Like many other artists whose characters were tempered in the heat of the Cultural Revolution, Tian s struggle for survival eventually became a struggle to achieve a higher purpose. It was an idealistic vision that unfolded slowly, like a flower opening. First, he refined his gifts with the best teachers in China. Then he dared to think about learning from the best in the West. The dream expanded; he would be successful in the West, an inspiration to other Chinese, and a wake-up call to Americans and Europeans of the huge Asian talent pool that was ready to reinvigorate classical music.
When we met Tian, he was taking the next major step: now an American citizen, he was returning to China to develop young musicians who would compose and perform modern works melding East and West, creating a new tradition for the world.
Some task! But there is a steely purity in the idealism of those who survived the Cultural Revolution as youngsters. They saw not only the dangers of a country turning on itself and punishing its best and brightest, they also saw the resilience and passion of Chinese artists. These are men and women who place art before commerce and their heritage before themselves-they are dedicated to the possibility of bringing back China s ancient role as a cradle of creativity and innovation.
This isn t all that simple in today s China, which is reveling in its role as the emerging world power. In Xi an, visiting the terra cotta soldiers buried with the First Emperor, we were lectured by our tour guide. We will be number one in the world, he told us. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but my daughter will live in a China that is number one.
In four trips to China that included Lois s visits to the villages where Tian s mother and father grew up, we came to realize that the tour guide was echoing a national sentiment. From year to year, skylines changed, old neighborhoods disappeared, new stores appeared and bulged with expensive goods. Cars were replacing bicycles in the cities. The Forbidden City had a Starbucks!
Artists were changing, too. The younger musicians we met did not have that same idealistic purity