Music in the Park

There is a small city park near the center of the old city of Suzhou.  The people I work with - the younger people - joke that the park is a place for old people to go to.   And so it is.  If you walk through the park in the morning you will find older citizens practicing their Tai Chi.  As morning turns to afternoon, the park fills will grandparent-baby-sitters.  I think the grandparents come there as couples, usually pushing their prized grandchild in a stroller.  Once in the park, the couples split and regroup by gender.  Groups of older men gather under the trees and argue with each other and share cigarettes.  There is a similar gravity that draws all the grandmothers and the strollers together.  I'm not sure, but I think they take turns bragging on their grandchildren.  That is a safe guess.

On week-ends and holidays and warm summer evenings, the park fills with music.  People with talent bring their musical instruments.  People without talent bring a boom box.  People sing.  People dance.  People just enjoy themselves and enjoy being with their neighbors.  They sing all the old songs and, in the process, teach them to the grandchildren.  I suppose this is what village life was like in the days before air conditioning and television and 1500 square foot apartments.  People have gathered around the village commons like this for thousands of years, to share a common fire and to make their own entertainment.  In the truest definition,  "community" is not a collection of buildings, but rather is a collection of people who are actively living with one another.

The modern world has a way of killing off the old definitions of community.  In the U.S., I think that suburbs and air conditioning and television have pretty much erased the traditions of barn dances and community gatherings.  I suppose that in China, the modern world will win in the end.  Maybe these gatherings in Suzhou park are the last vestiges of a dying tradition.  Maybe the current generation - my co-workers - will opt to spend their retirement years surfing the Internet rather than to go out and sing, or dance, or argue with others under the trees in the park.

The holidays of New Year brought out the people in Suzhou City Park just as if it were a week-end or warm summer evening.   On the second day of the New Year holiday, I found several groups of people playing traditional instruments and music.  These were not professional performers or buskers.  No one had a hat out for donations.  It was cooperative Karaoke.  A person in the crowd would take the microphone and ask the old musicians to play a song.  The musicians would play and the person with the microphone would sing.  After the song, everyone would clap.  Then someone new would grab the microphone and request another song. 

I love the faces of the old musicians.  These are old guys.  Workers.  Farmers.  Fathers. Grandfathers.  People who struggled through the hard times of the 1960s and 1970s and sacrificed so that their children and grandchildren might  have better opportunities.  Maybe I'm sentimental, but their faces remind me of my grandfather.  Faces hardened by a hard lives, but the eyes still showing  warm hearts inside.

Not all the people in the park come to sing.  Some come to dance.  There is an pavilion that serves as the community dance floor.  Someone...I don't know whom...brings a monster boom box and sets it up on the grandstand.   The play list varies from traditional Chinese music to country-western to disco.  The people dance. They waltz.  They boogie.  They line dance.  Some of the couples appear to be man and wife.  Other couples appear to be grandmothers killing time dancing together while their husbands are arguing and smoking cigarettes under the trees.

Karaoke is big in China.  The photo above shows and enterprising fellow that has built a portable karaoke studio on the back of an e-bike.  You can see a lady, just right of center, holding the microphone and singing away.  The bike...the pink and red thing...is actually a tricycle.  Between the two rear wheels are a huge battery pack that is used to drive the loudspeakers and computer equipment.  You can see a blue plastic bench atop the seat.  On top of that, there is an LCD monitor.  The man hunched over the tricycle is managing the laptop computer that drives the whole thing.   The people come and request a song.  The man pulls up the song from the laptop.  The song plays and the monitor displays the words for the singer to sing along.

There is more than just music going on in the park.  The photo above shows people fishing in the park ponds.  I don't think there is a fish in that pond more than two inches in length.  But the people go crazy to rent fishing poles and buy bait as if they were on a fishing holiday in Canada.

The photo above shows a calligrapher writing poems on the sidewalk of the park.  Chinese characters are traditionally written by brush and ink.  It is a difficult skill to master, even with a small brush held in hand.  This gentleman is generating perfect characters using a four foot brush.   The people appreciated his skills as much, or more, than the musicians'.