Ma Shangyou: I can never forget the sights and sounds of Lanzhou and Xinjiang where I used to live. I know part of my life is eternally framed by the image of the juvenile me, who will never stop pulling my heartstrings.
From childhood to adulthood, I have always been a "problem person." Problem children who lose their innocence prematurely often find themselves insecure and easily depressed. Such negativity may take a lifetime to overcome. As far as I am concerned, I am bothered by the puzzling dark shadows of my childhood even today and I realize there is little we can do about what transpired in the past. I took on the task of writing the theme song for the documentary series I Am from Xinjiang, with a strong sense of commitment due to my childhood experience, indelible memories, and the stories that lay dormant in my heart for years. I was born in Urumqi. My grandfather was a successful caravan merchant from Erenhot. So, I have some Mongolian blood. My father was an excellent dancer who had received rigorous training ever since he was a child. My mother was a belle canto singer at Xinjiang Art Institute. When I was a child, we lived in a courtyard compound shared by Huis, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs. We had to bring water from a well on a hilltop. Much of the water that spilled out of the buckets ran downhill and froze into a large, thick expanse of ice where children played. However, I could never join them because I had to play piano. One day, while getting water with a cousin, we went sledding on the ice. In a fit of excitement, I accidentally plunged an iron hook into a boot of a Uyghur senior. That was my only pre-school act of naughtiness that I could ever recall.
The multiethnic kids in the yard got along very well, but I seldom played with them, and may have seemed strange to them. I was, instead, a pianist who played piano every day. I started learning to play in the early 1970s, when I was three years old. The Dongfanghong Brand piano cost my family quite a fortune as far as I remember. From then on, the piano seemed to be the only thing in my childhood and my time was totally lost in the keyboard and musical notes. Looking back, I feel I have grown up overnight, and the only benefit of that is professional. Besides the piano, I learned the violin, the bassoon, and the tambourine, which prepared me for writing string and windpipe music and developing a good sense of rhythm. So, I see my childhood as a trade-off for my current life, which is an escape for my pent-up feelings-an exit left open by force. The wider open it is, the less pressure I feel.
Another memorable thing about my childhood was frequent train rides. My mother was transferred from Urumqi to work at Lanzhou City Song and Dance Troupe. She took me with her when she commuted between the two cities. The scent of the trains, painted green, is still fresh in my memory.
Maybe due to constant migration, I became sort of a romantic drifter in my early teens, not from my own choice, but due to the change of environment caused by my parents’ job situations. My gipsy lifestyle grew more apparent after I was admitted to a music school attached to the Central Conservatory of Music (CCM) in Beijing before finishing elementary school in Lanzhou. I can’t say if it was good or bad because it happened in my days of innocence and I didn’t have any say in decision-making. From the way the adults reacted, it seemed to be a big deal. For me, however, it meant several years of communal life without parental supervision. It was 1982, and I was 11 years old.
My head teacher’s name then was Zhang Limin. When I visited her during Spring Festival 33 years later, she asked, “You gave me a present just before you left school. Do you remember that?” I said no. “I’ll show it to you, but you can’t have it back,” said Zhang. She showed me a dagger that I immediately recognized as mine because I had wrapped its handle with a distinctive cloth. I can’t remember exactly how I felt when I was forced out of school that year. But why did I give my indispensable dagger to her? It was certainly not out of hate because she and another teacher were the ones who gave me a lot of love and encouragement. I could never forget them! I must have been through a mixture of love, pain and brokenness when I parted with that favorite toy of mine. There must have been guilt for having disappointed those who loved me.
After being expelled, I lived like an exile in Xinjiang. My parents’ loss of hope in me became a convenient reason for me to give up. I didn’t mention my music school experience to people, nor did I show anyone my piano skill, nor did I want to be asked about those things. There used to be endless snow in the frigidity of winter that seemed to take forever to melt. I wandered aimlessly in places like Urumqi, Shihezi, and Xinjiang Petrochemical Company, and my relatives never thought twice about giving me food and accommodation. I spent time with friends seven or eight years older than me. No one bothered to ask about my past or what I was doing for a living. I felt as if I had closed a door on myself and wanted to dig a hole under a wall and run away. This desperate feeling sustained me and caused me to part with “my other self” about two years later. It was a violent process, physically and spiritually, for myself and those around me.
Just as everyone thought I was about to have a troubled future, the wall preventing me from breaking through cracked in an unexpected way. I had a neighbor, a nodding acquaintance, who was the local police chief. One day he came to my mom and said, “It’s time to discipline that son of yours!” My mom was shocked when the chief told her that, in addition to brawling with people, I was messing around with bad guys who were blacklisted. “If left idle, your son could become one of them,” he warned. Because of what he said, I was sent on a lone train trip to Lanzhou. Once I got there, my parents stopped providing for me and I had to live by myself in a small room assigned to my parents while they worked in the city. Forced to survive on my own, I learned to be and keep being strong as I started doing my own laundry, even on the eve of Chinese New Year. I was glad I got the hang of living on my own.
Starting in the mid-1980s, reform in the music and performing arts circle saw the emergence of many performing groups that made extra money through itinerant live performances across China. When some of my mother’s friends at Lanzhou Song and Dance Troupe found out I used to be a music student and played the piano, they asked me if I could play the keyboard for their troupe, earning five bucks for each show. I happily agreed and joined them. What I wanted badly to run away from became my subsistence at the time of greatest need. Isn’t that fate? Though I never got to be a professional pianist, through the performing tours I learned to get the right feel for pop music. As proved in my case, an apparent loss may well just be a blessing in disguise.
In the early 1990s, a friend told me a KTV saloon in Lhasa wanted a keyboarder for their band. As a young man who felt I could travel anywhere, I soon left Lanzhou for Lhasa. Once I got there however, my ID went missing and I couldn’t go anywhere. In the following 10 months, I played the keyboard at the KTV with great commitment. The greatest impact of that experience for me was spiritual. At Jokhang Monastery, I saw, for the first time, waves of pilgrims prostrating themselves in prayer, chanting mantras and counting with malas as their fur robes collected the dust. I was stupefied as I stood watching. Since childhood, I frequently witnessed Muslims performing Salah in mosques, especially during holidays. But the sight of such mind-blowing Buddhist rituals shocked me. I believe part of the reason faith empowers people is that it purifies the soul through emotional shocks. Ten months later, I returned to the city I thought I would never return to because I got to know a Tibetan brother who gave me 90,000 yuan to start a Tibetan trinkets retail business at Asia Grand Hotel, which was a new line of business in Beijing.
I didn’t know how to do business at all. I knew nothing about inventory control or personnel management. I thought I could simply hand the register keys to the sales associates and just collect the money every weekend. Due to my laissez-faire attitude, my salespeople began using the counter I rented to sell their own goods. Although I wondered why my goods didn’t sell even though there were many customers, I chose to believe the salespeople’s excuses. So, you can imagine how it ended up. After that, I gave up the idea of running a business because I have learned that I am capable of nothing except music. That didn’t bother me too much since I had entered rock music circles with my first album, known as China Fire 1. I realized the important role of the producer behind the recording console and it greatly impacted my future work.
Either due to my nomadic gene or because I’m a born drifter, I left Beijing for Chengdu just as rock music began to flourish in China, for no apparent reason other than I fell in love with the southwestern city. As one of the most avant-garde cities in China, Chengdu was home to many pop bands. I met many like-minded pop music friends there who remain friends today. It was there that I started writing pop music, gained a deeper understanding of it, and had a sense of belonging.
However, three years later, I left Chengdu for Hangzhou and began my career as a bar singer and pianist. At the height of my career, my fans followed me from one bar to another. With a good following, I became a selling point for many bars and had a lot of bargaining power. I could decide where to sing, when to sing, and for how long. Finally, I was master of my own life. I willfully vented pent-up emotions, spent every night in ecstasy, and trashed people’s love for me. During my eight years in Hangzhou, I sang all eight years nonstop and lived through my first marriage. The good and bad parts of marriage are very hard to judge. They may have nothing to do with love, may in fact be related to everything except love, such as faith, trust, dignity, and hope. I had to end that relationship as my ex-wife and I turned into total strangers.
The broken marriage left a great hole in my heart. Torn between depression and the great need to stay strong, I wanted to feel the city that had showered me with love. I knew I could not return to Xinjiang or Lanzhou, so I consulted a friend about returning to Beijing for new opportunities. He said only those talented and confident enough should seek to develop their career in Beijing. Since I was often considered talented in Hangzhou, I thought I may as well try in Beijing.
Thus, after nearly 10 years, I returned to Beijing by train, just like I did when I first came here as a child. However, the city had become completely strange and different, and I had no clear goals except a desire to achieve something. Though I had friends with whom I could chat and drink, I didn’t feel I could mix or feel at home with them. To force myself to settle, I remodeled the rental housing, treated myself roughly, fought back and hid my sensitivities, and pretended to be excited around friends. Later, I had a chance to serve as music assistant for the established singer Tian Zhen. My first rehearsal, pretty much a test, went well and I got the job.
Gradually, I made my name as a professional in the musical performance industry. A highlight of my music career came in 2005, when I was invited by my former classmate Luan Shu to perform at Xu Wei’s concert at Beijing Worker’s Stadium. The following year, also with help from Luan Shu, I recorded and released my first song, Missing You. Next, I produced a maiden MTV piece entitled I Am Coming, written by me and sung by Jing Gangshan, who attended the same music school I did.
As a bandsman, I was concurrently song writer, composer, and music producer. I wrote songs even though I had no idea if they would sell. Once, an established musician accosted me and suggested I use his name to promote my songs (i.e., allow him to be the presumptive author of my songs) so singers would be willing to sing them. I wanted to refuse, but he handed me a pen and piece of paper and asked for my work experience. I had nothing to write, so I called a friend nicknamed Little Tiger for advice. Little Tiger asked me one question: “Do you want your children to have someone else’s family name?”
My experience with movie soundtracks began in Hangzhou, when I composed background music for a documentary. Today, a major part of my job is to write music for movies and TV dramas. To my understanding, the role of a soundtrack composer is to depict what is outside the images through music. This is mentally demanding as it involves not only sophisticated composing skill, but also knowledge of movie language, postproduction, and a lot of emotional input. As my experience grows, I increasingly feel I am nothing more than a recorder of my feelings inspired by the God of Music. Frequently, I find it very hard to figure out or remember what I was thinking and how I wrote a particular piece. So far, I have composed soundtracks for about 50 movies and TV dramas, including works by famous directors. Because soundtrack composition is done behind the scenes, recognition within the industry will not necessarily make me well-known.
What made me actually known to the audience was Sing My Song, a program produced by the same company that produces The Voice of China. While I worked as musical director for Na Ying’s trainees in The Voice of China, the company was planning Sing My Song. As I was about to join the latter program, someone advised me against it and recommended the former. By that time, I had released some songs written by me and transitioned from an amateur to a professional singer. So, I knew clearly that Sing My Song was a better platform for me. As I vacillated for days, my wife said, “Don’t regret at age 70 that you missed out on a singing opportunity you could have grabbed!” That was the ultimate tiebreaker! I enrolled in the program and showed up on stage as a competing singer. Looking back, I clearly see how incomplete my life would have been without that experience.
I met my current wife, Wu Haoqing, at a party in 2001 and fell in love with her at first sight. She is an imaginative intellectual with deep, brilliant ideas. By coincidence, she was born on the exact same day I was, and I see that as a perpetual, happy surprise. In fact, she is more than a happy surprise; she is a friend in need. She was with me through good and bad times, and she married me while I still suffered from depression and took antidepressants. “To love is to be brave,” he used to say to me. Maybe because she reads and thinks a lot, she is amazingly tolerant about interpersonal, cultural, and religious differences. Her tolerance is reflected in her attitude toward me and my faith, and her own choice of faith comes across to me as an unexpected eternal blessing. I was born in a traditional Muslim family where faith and life are merged. After we married, my wife, not a Muslim, chose to learn more about my faith through reading. Not long after, she decided to convert to Islam. As a modern-minded woman, she does very well balancing religious belief with human desire. During the festival of Eid al-Adha in the year she converted to Islam, an imam gave her an old lamb nobody wanted because it was too smelly to be delicious. I was very upset and felt guilty about it, but she saw it as an exceptional case not representing the religion or community as a whole.
My wife is my partner in work and daily life, with whom I have built a harmonious relationship that makes it possible for us to confront all problems together. She is the fountain that inspires the music within me. After I enrolled in Sing My Song, I quickly decided to sing the song She I had composed for her in 2004. The lyrics were written by Liang Mang, a good friend who knew my wife and me very well. The song was a kind of “declaration of love.”
My psychiatrist told me the violent nature of my relationship with my dad was a primary factor that triggered my depression. I never wanted to blame him. No one who lived during that era would have known that the then common phenomenon of child abuse could impact a child for life. Abusive parents force their children to suppress ideas and feelings, bear premature burdens, and close their sense of equality and spiritual freedom as a result. I have never talked about these things with my dad. As he gets older, I have nothing but respect and best wishes for him. I want my parents to remain safe and healthy.
A great influence my extended family has had on me is religion. My dad is a traditional Muslim who performs five Salah each day. His primary requirement for buying a new house is proximity to a mosque. I always go to my dad when I have questions about religion. Religious topics are our favorite topics for conversation.
My grandmother used to say no misery is too hard for a willing heart. One’s potential will not be fully tapped until he or she is in an impossible situation. I am happy where I am now, with work, family, and faith, but I can’t get over some of my painful memories. As I often say to my wife, “if only I could go back to the old days and address those issues….” That may sound naïve, but I believe that’s the kind of feeling everyone could have. In the reality of life, I may be the not-so-ambitious type who hardly cares about how much money to make or what position of power to gain. I am content with what I do every day-working, solving all kinds of problems, and habitually doing trivial things similar to the petty mischiefs I used to do as a child, so I may find joy within me.
Several years ago, I took great pains to transport to Beijing the piano I had while learning to play as a child in Lanzhou. As I lifted the piano lid, I saw my fingerprints on the keys. When I touched the keys, I seemed to feel the splash of my tears again. How I wish to return to the old days and start over with a childhood full of joy and laughter!
I now find myself in an awkward situation. When back in Xinjiang, the people there see me as someone from Beijing. When in Beijing, I am seen as someone from Xinjiang. I can never forget Lanzhou and Xinjiang, where I spent my tender years as a child and youth. I know part of my life is eternally framed by the image of the juvenile me, who will never stop pulling my heartstrings.
It was with the passion of a juvenile that I wrote the soundtrack and theme song for the documentary I Am from Xinjiang. To do a good job, I sought all the help I could find and I am very grateful to those who helped.
Through the song Where am I from, I seem to have travelled into the past and revisited the youth I used to be. As I said in the lyrics, “however far you travel, you are as youthful as ever.” I still have a long way to go, whether by train, plane, or SUV. “Where I am from” and “where I am going” are well-known philosophical propositions that I have never given much thought to. They simply crossed my mind when I met and talked with the documentary’s Chief Director, Kurbanjan, for the first time. I used them as lyrics because I thought it was quite an inspiration. The lyrics of the song, coauthored by my wife and I, truthfully represent our understanding of, and views about, life.
(selected from Xinjiang: Beyond Race, Religion, and Place of Origin by Kurbanjan Samat, translated by Wang Chiying, published by New World Press in 2017)