Riding
out along Peaceful China Avenue, at around 7:20AM, past my daughters’
school. Normally I’d turn left in
and drop them off. Today the gruff
cab man is driving. Clearing his
throat violently. What can you
expect? We’re right now onto
Tianbei St., off to the airport. I
only just got back and I’m off over the brine again. This time to Hong Kong.
Surrounding the ears we’re back from Brazilian techno-samba
and post-urban hip hop acid drops to solid hard bop. I set someone up the night before on my Rdio sync so I could
ingest someone new to discuss this post.
It is only second time, (that second-time-listening magic again) I’ve
heard this track by Charles Tolliver, the trumpet player born in Jacksonville
Florida in 1942. Studying at
Howard University, he decided to give up a career in pharmacology to pursue the
horn up in New York where he lives till this day. So glad you did.
After coming up in Jackie McLean’s band he came in to his
own with his first release in 1968.
That particular disc isn’t available, but I caught up with him the next
year. This is a song suggestively
titled “Plight” from the 1969 release “The Ringer.” I feel like I’m home with this majestic, angular swing
lifting me up and setting me down somewhere thoughtful, in a way I understand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Tolliver
We had a family movie over the weekend, more than one in
fact and the first worked out well.
I don’t know why, but I don’t always think to watch a movie if its up to
me. Then, if I do, and we’re on a
couch after diner, I end up zonking out.
This particularly if it's a Chinese film everyone’s enjoying and I’m
playing catch up with the sub titles. And if I’m all fired up for a film with thick
Manchester accents, or Jamaican patois, it won’t be one that my wife wants to sit through. But we had a good thing going Saturday
night. I’d had a nap before
hand. Huge. The film was in Chinese and English in
equal measure and, contrasted the two countries in a manner genuine and
respectful. Everyone enjoyed
“Mao’s Last Dancer.”
My wife went from a small town in Shandong off to a larger provincial
city around 1979 to attend a model arts academy. She was a dancer and focused on mastering the nation’s
various folk dance traditions.
Approximately two years later, a young ballet dancer from Beijing who
also hailed from small town Shandong, Li Cunxin, had a chance to perform at the
Houston Ballet. Based, I’m not precisely
sure just how loosely, on Mr. Li’s life, the film has him perform brilliantly,
fall in love and defect to the U.S.
In the end, his parents are allowed to travel from Shandong to see him
perform.
There are many, many ways that a story like this could fall
off. On the balance though, I
found the American triumphalism measured, assumed perhaps, and the depiction of
Chinese people and the China’s world view, complex enough to sustain
complicated characters whom I could believe. There was the obligatory scene with the totalitarian
truncheon falling as goons wrestle delicate Americans to the ground. The naïve hero is restrained against
his will as he visits the Chinese Consulate. Is
there an American left who can still enjoy undiluted haughtiness watching a
nondemocratic form of government kidnap and restrain their own people?
Even here though, the Chinese come off looking practical and
restrained, as the hero is released, unharmed.
And most of the movie, of course has nothing to do with this pivotal
moment. Rather, there is exquisite
dancing and a plausible journey from a village that looked very, very familiar
to all of us, to a dance program that my wife was uniquely capable of attesting
to the veracity of, on to a journey into an America that could gobsmack a
Chinese person by its undeniable physical modernity in a way that will never be
the same.
A period piece: it is humbling to consider 1981 as
“pre-modern” history, but its been about thirty-five years since those waxing
Reagan years. The change in China
is certainly a much more dramatic migration than the view backwards from when I
was fifteen, thirty five years prior to the what the world was like for America
in the late 1940’s. My little
girls labored to imagine their mom in such a school, in such a time, in such a
China. And all of us held our
breath when Li Cunxin leapt up and turned again and again, 手舞足蹈[1].
Four thumbs up for “Mao’s Last Dancer” among our quartet.
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