Ah Xiang often remembered the images of Dong songs left by her father.
Her real name is Zhang Guodan, she is a post-90s, born in Zhongluo Village, Sanlong Dongzhai, Liping County, Qiandongnan, Guizhou. Her grandmother was a Dong singer and her father was a barefoot doctor and music lover. After graduating from university, Ah Xiang engaged in foreign trade work in Guangdong and earned a very good income.
In 2015, his father died unexpectedly, and Ah Xiang returned to the village to deal with the aftermath and found the precious Dongge video data taken by his father before his death. These videos have limited clarity, ranging in length from a few minutes to ten minutes, and many songs are not recorded. After thinking about it for a long time, Ah Xiang decided to quit his high-paying job and stay in the village to fulfill his father's wish.
Since November 2018, Ah Xiang has made a short video of her rural life and Dong culture, which was posted on the "Village Girl Ah Xiang" douyin number. So far, she has gained 1.13 million followers and 8.58 million likes. Relying on live streaming with goods, Ah Xiang supported the livelihood of the whole family and led the clan to get rich together. She did not expect that one decision she had made would change the economic situation of the entire village.
"If you don't sing, you can only bring it into the coffin"
Ah Xiang's story is a romantic pastoral song from a distance, and it is the cruel but almost idealistic truth of life at close range. Recently, her experience has been adapted into the micro-film "Looking for Zhang Xuecheng". As a part of the douyin creators' series of micro-films "Respect Yourself", the short film presents the young girl's mental journey. The story begins with the unexpected death of his father.
In October 2015, the weather in Guangzhou was still very hot, but the deep mountains in southeastern Qiandong were already preparing for winter. Ah Xiang did foreign trade business in Guangzhou, and could have a surplus of more than 200,000 yuan a year. She planned to take her parents and three younger siblings to live in the big city. But that time my father said, you go first, and I will go after I have done my work.
My father worked as a village doctor and was always shuttling between villages, and it was common not to be able to get through the phone. So two days after he went up the mountain, Ah Xiang's uncle panicked. In the morning, my uncle called and told Ah Xiang: Your father is missing. In the afternoon, my uncle called again and said, "Your dad is gone."
Ah Xiang drove home for ten hours all night, and even forgot to lock the door of her home in Guangzhou, and the next day her colleagues helped her lock the door, only to find that all valuable things had been stolen.
TikTok creators micro-movie stills
The father was crushed by eucalyptus. In order to prepare firewood for the winter, he went to the side of his grandfather's barn on the mountain to cut eucalyptus trees. Ah Xiang couldn't believe it, his father was only in his fifties, how could he say that he was gone? The mother was even more sad, and a fire burned everything her father loved before he died: musical instruments and the score of the Dong song.
His father was a music lover, something That Ah Xiang had known since childhood. In her eyes, her father has always been a person with musical talent and artistic feelings. Piano, siren, ox leg piano, violin, all the instruments Ah Xiang has seen on the market father will, when Ah Xiang went to play in a neighboring village in the fifth or sixth grade, others were vying to invite her to dinner, Ah Xiang later learned that others were enthusiastic about her because her father had gone to different villages to teach Dong songs since he was young.
Ah Xiang's father
Dong song is an ancient singing art of the Dong people, before the Dong people did not have their own writing, so cultural customs are passed on by Dong songs. In 2006, the Great Song of the Dong nationality was listed as one of the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage, and in 2009, it was added to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
Inheriting this custom, the elderly Dong singers are highly respected in the local area, but more and more young people can no longer sing. Many of Ah Xiang's peers, as well as the next generation, do not even speak Dong dialect. Ah Xiang remembers that when she was a teenager, her grandmother in her seventies was always anxious: To whom do we pass these thousands of Dong songs?
Grandma was one of the few old singers in the village of three thousand people who could compose thousands of Dong songs, and a lot of her father's knowledge of music came from her. However, the sudden death of his father, the younger generation are working outside the home, this vein seems to be about to break.
The mother burned almost everything her father had, leaving only a computer. The four brothers and sisters took turns trying the password, and it took three days to finally open their father's last relic. Ah Xiang knew that her father had begun to record Dong Ge ten years ago, but she did not expect that there were a large number of precious video materials hidden inside.
There is a piece of Ah Xiang who remembers very clearly, an old man sitting on a bench in front of his house said to the camera, I am so old, don't shoot me. My father said I would just play with it, and the old man said that since I wanted to shoot, I would sing, and if I didn't sing, I could only bring it into the coffin.
At that moment, Ah Xiang and his family hugged and cried.
The re-ringing of Dong songs
Ah Xiang did not return to Guangzhou. First, out of realistic considerations, she had to stay in her hometown to take care of her mother, and second, inspired by her father's ideals, Ah Xiang decided to collect and spread Dong culture on his behalf. Abandoning his well-paid jobs in big cities and returning to his hometown, Ah Xiang was considered "crazy and stupid" for three or four years.
Before earning money from vibrato, even her family didn't understand her. Her mother tried to persuade her to go back to Guangzhou to make money, and the fiercest quarrel was that her mother threw Ah Xiang's things in the courtyard outside the house, saying that she would break off the mother-daughter relationship.
At that time, Ah Xiang's only source of income was to sell fish. She spent 70,000 or 80,000 yuan of savings to transform five acres of farmland into fish ponds, earning 30,000 or 40,000 yuan a year. She put more energy into her father's unfinished career, she went to the village, where there were festivals, she would go to shoot, where there were old singers she would go to study.
In order to leave a clear picture, she first bought the Action Camera GoPro, and in the second half of 2017, she added a Canon 5D4 camera. In this way, Ah Xiang traveled to almost all the villages in Liping County, and by november 2018, when she uploaded her first short video on Douyin, she had stored four or five thousand Dong songs in the material library.
She cut the scene of the autumn harvest in the Dong village and the picture of the Dong girl walking on the country road with rice into a short video and posted it on Douyin. The first month only accumulated more than a hundred fans, and Ah Xiang, who was bent on spreading Dongge culture, was a little frustrated.
"Maybe it's still a mirror." After studying accounts such as Li Ziqi that show rural life, Ah Xiang finally realized the crux of the problem: only the picture, there is no clue character that makes fans have emotional projection, and it is useless to shoot it no matter how exquisite it is. So Ah Xiang began to adjust the strategy, she hired a neighbor sister as a photographer, and embedded herself in the Douyin video.
On the one hand, Ah Xiang shows her daily life in the countryside, going to the field to pick bracken in the spring, catching fish with her bare hands in the fish pond, using dustpans to scoop moss in the river and stepping on the stone mortar before the black rice festival to prepare fragrant sticky sticks, on the other hand, Ah Xiang uses herself as a medium to graft the bridge of Dong culture to the outside world.
Most of the time, Ah Xiang is wearing national costumes on camera, when cooking she will introduce the traditional food of the Dong people, during the festival she will take netizens to watch the grand scene of the Dong people singing Dong songs, she will teach netizens the way of disc hair of the Dong people, and she will also bring the singers of the Dong songs to the short video or live broadcast room to sing together.
Ah Xiang's adjustment did pay off, and the number of fans accumulated, but at this moment, new anxiety arose. Although Every time she appeared on camera, Ah Xiang seemed brisk and unsettled, she knew that the savings she had saved in the big city were about to run out.
She was the eldest daughter, and after the death of her father, she took on the responsibilities of the whole family, her uncle suffered from congenital thalassemia, did not start a family, and the obligation of support always fell on her shoulders. Although it is not enough to sit on the mountain and eat the sky at present, but what about the future? Ah Xiang did not know.
The "A Xiang" who came out of the mountain
On June 18, 2019, Ah Xiang uploaded a video of stepping on a stone mortar to make chili sauce. It was originally prepared to give back to the fans who often tip her live, but to her surprise, the video received 1.44 million likes. People keep asking in comments and private messages: Can this pepper be sold? Ah Xiang didn't remember how many orders she had received that time, she only remembered selling 3,000 catties and selling out the peppers of the villagers in several neighboring villages.
This inadvertent willow insertion immediately brought commercial inspiration to Ah Xiang. She does not reject e-commerce, if even the problem of food and clothing can not be solved, then it is difficult for her to adhere to inheritance and dissemination.
After that, Ah Xiang helped his uncle's family sell six or seven thousand catties of rice. After deducting packaging and freight, each order can only earn five or six yuan, but the business model is established. Ah Xiang also helped her sick uncle find a new career.
Ah Xiang often uploads videos of Dong wedding and funeral customs, and fans will ask: Where did the flat shoulders, stools, and baskets in the picture come from? Ah Xiang told them that his uncle had done it himself.
After receiving the order for handicrafts, my uncle, who was unable to do heavy work due to illness, was suddenly injected with vitality and became positive and sunny. He was no longer depressed by physical problems, and if Ah Xiang needed any help, he would rush to do it.
And Ah Xiang's mother finally approved of her daughter's choice, and she was no longer so angry about the sudden death of her husband. Although she still did not have the courage to stand in front of her husband's tombstone, last year she was able to look at the grave and worship.
Ah Xiang's Douyin video changed a lot of people. A local Dong singer, who used to live a good and respected life, lived to be more than sixty years old and still like a child. In 2019, her husband suddenly contracted stomach cancer and died less than a month later. In order to pay off the debt owed by the medical treatment, her son went out to work, and soon after, there was an accident. Many people thought she was unlucky, so they stopped asking her to sing, and she became more and more depressed, almost cutting off all contact with the outside world. Only Ah Xiang sympathized with her plight.
As a modern-educated woman who has worked hard in big cities, she has her own considerations about what is the essence and which is the scum in the Dong culture. "Her talent should not be buried because of this problem, it is a bad habit that is particularly unfair to women."
Ah Xiang invited the singer to shoot videos and sing in the live broadcast room, and some fans came to the cottage to play with fans to see her. It is under this recognition and encouragement that the singer gradually came out of the haze and found the motivation to live again.
"Vibrato not only allows us to improve our lives, but more importantly, it brings a sense of value." Ah Xiang said, "Like my mother, she wants to help me take care of things, and there are pigs and chickens in the house, but she now has a smile on her face every day." "In Ah Xiang's view, douyin can not only make individuals shine, but also the most suitable platform for Dong Ge, an art form that has an infectious but no specific text." Douyin's data analysis and push is very accurate, and it will help you spread to people who like you and need you, which is very beneficial for us to be seen and remembered. ”
Ah Xiang's fans not only have Dong people, but also many foreigners who did not know about dong people before.
An engineer from Jiangsu watched all of Ah Xiang's videos and wrote two articles about the Dong people. He lamented that the scenes of the agricultural era and the signs of traditional culture were completely preserved in Qiandongnan, and said: "The lively etiquette at the wedding, the large number of neighbors who came to help, and the crowds of people dressed in Chinese costumes and singing and dancing at the festival, this scene is full of human feelings, which is exactly the taste of the people in our city." ”
After reading it, Ah Xiang was touched and had a sense of accomplishment, she said: "Very distant people sincerely like our national culture, which really makes me happier than making money." ”
In March this year, Ah Xiang contracted a 200-acre orchard on the mountain, a twenty-minute drive from the village. There are cherry trees, loquat trees, plum trees, peach trees, and orange trees in the orchard, and at the first sight, Ah Xiang thinks it is a paradise.
In her vision, the orchard will not only be an agricultural base, but also an experience garden that integrates Dong cultural tourism. The pipa songs and embroidery of the Dong people can be learned as long as people outside like it.
Ah Xiang said that a special place was set aside to do this because he did not want to commercialize his village. "We sing from the heart, not performance, so I want to attract people who can sink their hearts and feel the charm of Dong culture, rather than a bunch of people who come to us to punch the clock."
Today, Ah Xiang's whole family is focusing on the orchard. The mother is in charge of the cultivation of crops, the uncle helps to find manual workers, the second sister manages the after-sales service of e-commerce, the third sister manages the finances, and the younger brother is responsible for taking care of all the hardware facilities. The family is in a kind of future with a head and something to do, and Ah Xiang is particularly satisfied.
In December 2021, Ah Xiang was certified as a non-hereditary heir of the Dong Great Song. She thought that if her father was still alive, she would be particularly pleased.