Me and the mountain singers.
Believe it or not, yesterday I was forced to get up and sing during a Chinese mountain-song competition.¬ The girl I was traveling with and I went to stay at her student’s house at a village about an hour and a half away from Kunming.¬ On¬the first day of the new year (Chinese, that is), we went into a nearby town called Kunyang.¬ We visited Zheng He park, which honors the ancient admiral who led an expedition all the way to Africa in the 1400’s.¬ It turned out there would be a Chinese mountain-song competition in the park.¬ Mountain songs are these rural folk songs, and I think they are designed as a way to send messages from people on one small mountain to another.¬ They are VERY loud, and people use them to tease each other, insult each other, and flirt.¬ In a typical competition, one person makes up a passage, sings it, and the other person has to respond to what they sing immediately.¬ Basically it goes back and forth until one person loses his/her voice, gets tired, or can’t think of anything else to say.¬ We watched an old-ish (60+?) lady compete with an middle-aged man, and then a woman in a Bai minority headdress came up and sang too.¬ The student, May, asked the Bai woman to come over and sing for us a little when she finished.¬ She made up a song on the spot for the person I was with, about being a flower from over the sea, and then the old lady got curious and came over too.¬ We chit-chatted, they started singing against each other, and other people joined in whenever one of them got too tired and took a rest.¬ The next thing we knew all these people were telling us we had to get up and sing, and they even told the emcee we were going to do it.¬ Power went out, and we were hoping that would save us from having to participate, but unfortunately after a short wait it was restored.¬ It turned out the only English songs we both knew¬was “My Country ’tis of Thee.”¬ We were pushed up on stage and had to sing in front of a crowd of like 100.¬ A lot of them were minority villagers (in native clothing, which was interesting), and seemed surprised that the song was so short.¬ I guess they were expecting a mountain-song type of thing.¬ We were asked to do an encore, but the only other song we could both sing was “Jingle Bells.”¬ We finished, and everybody looked at each other like, “That’s the whole thing?”