The Songstress of Kunming

11.07.07 | 12:48 PM ET

The early morning sun slanted down in luxuriant warm rays over the broad downtown thoroughfare of Dongfeng Dong Road, bathing the concrete and glass bunker of the Workers’ Cultural Hall, one of the last truly Soviet-style buildings in a center dominated by spotless green-blue skyscrapers and neon billboards and designer boutiques. I was enjoying my stroll immensely, high on the giddy cheer exuded by the passersby, marveling in the gilt light. Yet, I wondered, how does Kunming, a city of 1.2 million deep in a part of southern China so remote it had served as a realm of exile since the 13th century, manage to induce such delicious languor with such new, soulless and increasingly commercialized architecture? Without knowing exactly why, I nevertheless ambled along feeling blessed, and sensed that something sublime awaited me.

A grinning, spiky-haired young man in a rumpled dark suit waved in my direction, and seemed to be inviting me to come sit with him and a group of elders on a bench beneath a vine-entangled concrete bower in front of the Cultural Hall. I looked around, wondering if he really meant to signal me; he nodded eagerly that he did.

I sat down next to him. Before I could say anything, he put his forefinger over his lips and urged me to look and listen.

“She’s eighty-four!” he said softly in Chinese, nodding toward a dowager who stood up, and, by her dignity, commanded the group’s attention. She started to sing. Her soprano wavered, tremulous with grief, evoking lyrics of Tang-dynasty poetry of lost love and parting and moonlit bamboo groves. In tune with her, two slope-shouldered old men in Mao jackets strummed a tinny-sounding er hu and a san xian (Chinese string instruments), their faces impassive, their eyes drooping and mournful. The dowager’s teeth were white and strong; her taut, café au lait skin and salt-and-pepper hair belied her age. I couldn’t understand the words of her dirge, but her rendition was exquisite. Might she be a member of the intelligentsia exiled from the cold north during the Cultural Revolution of Mao’s time? Many such exiles had fallen in love with Kunming’s climate and the laid-back attitudes of its people, and refused to return home after Mao died in 1976.

A middle-aged woman led her hunchbacked mother into the circle and seated her on the bench next to me. Teenagers drifted over, garbed in grunge boots and gansta jeans, and squatted beneath the songstress, entranced. The dowager crooned on, her voice growing shriller and more plangent, and eyes watered all around.

She finished and looked down. I felt my own eyes watering. Then, to my surprise, she turned to me and bowed. Beaming, she announced in a birdlike voice, “I know one word in English! Sank you!”

“Oh, wo xiexie nin!”(I thank you!) I answered, my voice almost cracking.

I arose and, bowing, repeated my words. Why did I, a talentless interloping foreigner, one who certainly had enjoyed a spoiled life in comparison with hers, deserve her thanks?

Because I was a foreigner, still a novelty here, and a guest, I later surmised. Everyone else turned and smiled at me. She began another song.

I sat down and marveled. When I was born 45 years ago, these old folk were roughly my age now. The Cold War was on, communist China and the United States were enemies, nuclear doom appeared to await mankind, and, to be sure, few places on earth would have welcomed me less readily than Kunming, in a far-flung realm of exile.

At the time, history’s course seemed fated, these realities immutable. Yet they had vanished, confounding us all, and allowing us, if we so choose, to travel across borders and reaffirm our shared humanity through simple acts like singing and smiling and strolling in the sun.

We should never trust the doomsayers and dividers, I thought, watching the light play through the bower’s branches on her beautiful, if careworn, face, as her voice rose and trembled anew.

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