Dahe News Yu video reporter Zhou Bin
If there is no live broadcast, Xia Wanqing may still be "rushing the field" now, and playing guzheng on folk stages across the country is her only livelihood. When she graduated in 2012, she earned two hundred from a performance, and four years later, she rose to five hundred, but even then, she was barely enough to feed herself — the performer did not reimburse for food and lodging, and she did not receive performances every day.
Compared with many well-off music students, Xia Wanqing was never the lucky one. For as long as she could remember, poverty was an insurmountable mountain, and she lost many possibilities, and to this day, she still can't presuppose another path: with her love and talent, if the family is in good condition, what can she achieve?
Fortunately, it was not too late. After finding another stage, she finally no longer had to eat and sleep in the wind, nor did she have to endure cold eyes and loneliness. The story of this girl in a mountain village in Henan is not a fairy tale that became famous overnight, but an ordinary life.
"You don't know how good kids are from elementary school to older"
Xia Wanqing found that she liked music when she was in kindergarten. There was a treadmill at school, and she thought it was magical. "Why do you make a sound when you press the keyboard?" When she went home to cut grass in the field with her mother, she drew the keys on the ground.
Xia Wanqing was born in a remote mountain village in Nanyang, Henan Province, and his family made a living as a farmer. After being enlightened by the pedal, on her sixth birthday she wanted an electronic keyboard with three sets of keys. That piano cost two hundred yuan, which in the nineties was equivalent to half a year's living expenses for the whole family. At first, her parents disagreed, she cried loudly, and did not come down to eat for a while, and by four o'clock in the afternoon, her mother finally softened. Many years later, Xia Wanqing realized how embarrassed the family was at that time, and her father failed to run a brick kiln factory, and he owed more than 100,000 debts outside.
In this way, Xia Wanqing began her "music career". The kindergarten teacher had a sheet music book there, and she ran to "class." Amazingly, many melodies she can sing out the score just by listening to them once. She also likes to sing, and when the villagers gather at the mouth of the village with rice bowls, she often jumps on the big rock to announce to herself: "Below, please invite Xia Wanqing to bring you a folk song solo "A Big River". At that time, a Fujian boss who went to the village to collect shiitake mushrooms heard her singing and suggested that she go to the children's music competition, she listened to it, she was very excited, but when she learned that the registration fee alone was more than 10,000, she had to put an end to the flag. At that time, there were not even ten thousand yuan households in the village.
But since then, the dream of the stage has been buried in Xia Wanqing's heart. She decided to take the path of music, using a five-set keyboard keyboard given by her uncle who was working outside the home, and she taught herself a simple version of the "Turkish March" and was admitted to the music class of the county high school. Music classes can specialize in piano or guzheng, and because the piano is too expensive, Xia Wanqing chose guzheng.
Without Tong Zi Gong, and wanting to catch up with other students as soon as possible, Xia Wanqing spent the rest of her time practicing the piano every day in addition to eating, sleeping, and attending cultural classes. For the first six months, the fingers grind blood bubbles, fall off, grind blood bubbles again, and finally reach the point where the fingers are unconscious. Even so, she was not able to enter her ideal conservatory. In his third year of high school, an uncle in the village who worked in Beijing, Xia Wanqing went to a music professor at the Central University for Nationalities to take classes. Listening to the sound of the piano, the professor shook his head: "You don't know how good a child is from elementary school to adulthood." ”
Back in Henan, she found a guzheng teacher in the music department of a local university, took thirty classes with 9,000 yuan borrowed by her father, and finally studied at the university with a student loan. In those four years, in addition to attending classes in school, Xia Wanqing was working outside, she saved money, but until she graduated from college, she still failed to fill the hole left by learning the piano before. (She couldn't understand why her father went into the mountains every day to collect shiitake mushrooms, and from three o'clock in the morning until twelve o'clock in the evening, the family was still so poor.) ）
"Hurry up and go to bed, tomorrow morning at eight o'clock in the morning I will have to rush!"
After graduating from college, Xia Wanqing became a folk guzheng actor and began a life of more than five years of upheaval and displacement, in her own words, every move was like "escape".
She has been to countless folk stages, as far north as Hohhot and as far south as Haikou. She has no fixed residence, and her clothes for spring, summer, autumn and winter are tucked into a 28-inch suitcase. In order to facilitate the movement of the guzheng, she often drags a small cart with wheels, and the car grunts and attracts onlookers everywhere she goes. Every time she went up the stairs, she could only move these two behemoths one step at a time, and when it rained and snowed, she couldn't spare her umbrella. "At this time, I always think about who can help me take something, and I am grateful to him for a lifetime."
At that time, she only earned two hundred yuan a day, and in order to save money, she lived in a simple hotel of thirty or fifty yuan a night, and there was nothing in the room except the bed, the table, and the noise next door. She is also reluctant to take a taxi, every time she carries eighty pounds of luggage to make a bus, everyone will look at her with strange eyes, sometimes she is stuck in the subway security checkpoint can not pass, many people will think she is slow. This life is insecure, and she often feels confused when she wakes up in the morning: Who am I? Where am I?
She longs for a stable stage and for the company of her family. After the first Spring Festival after work, she stayed in Hangzhou. Her mother asked her to go back, she said that she usually did not perform, not only can she get double the remuneration for the Spring Festival, so she will stay outside and make money. Her father choked up on the phone, and she had never seen a father so soft since she was a child.
In those years, Xia Wanqing had almost no friends. Every day, eating alone, sitting in the car, performing, and closing the curtain, I really can't stay up, so I sit on the side of the road and cry, and then continue to rush.
After four or five years, she finally had an offer to act for a month. That time she earned ten thousand yuan, got paid, and she laid out the bills one by one on the bed of the small hotel and showed them to her mother. Until two or three o'clock in the morning, she was so excited that she couldn't sleep, and finally her mother had to urge: "Hurry to sleep, tomorrow morning at eight o'clock in the morning!" ”
In fact, Xia Wanqingqin played quite well, she went to participate in the audition of the "Walk of Fame", broke through from three thousand people to stand on the final stage, but such an appearance did not change her embarrassment.
"Finally turned over!"
A few years ago, the live broadcast became hot, and Xia Wanqing started broadcasting with the idea of trying it out. "The audience really appreciated my talent, and on the first day I felt like I had found the right place." On November 28, the summer evening sun officially began broadcasting. From morning to night, she sang and played the guzheng for her fans for twelve hours a day, and she was afraid that the number of people in the live broadcast room would decline, so even if her hands were too sore to lift, she did not hesitate. Years of stage experience have accumulated more than 600 song lists for her, and the "Iron Blood Dan Heart", "A Laugh in the Sea" and "On the Beach" often ordered by fans in Douyin are even more handy.
However, just when she thought her life was going to be better, her grandfather, who had always loved her, was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer. She rushed back to her hometown to take care of her grandfather and stopped broadcasting for a while, but where can the family afford to pay 2,000 yuan a day for medical expenses? She could only replay. "I didn't say anything to the people in the live broadcast room, I just thought that I could earn a little bit and let Grandpa live a few more days."
That year Chinese New Year's Eve, her parents were in the hospital with her grandfather, and she made money by live broadcasting at home alone. On the seventeenth day of the first month, my father brought my grandfather home. That night, Grandpa was gone. Later, looking back, Xia Wanqing always felt contradictory, grandpa's last days, she did not accompany her, but on the other hand, the more than 60,000 medical expenses earned by live broadcasting really solved the urgent need of the whole family. "At least I didn't give up because I didn't have any money."
This incident made Xia Wanqing have a deeper affection for live broadcasting. "I'm thankful to these fans, who let me at least not have to travel all year round, rent a house, and have more energy to do what I like." In the past two years, relying on live broadcasting, Xia Wanqing has finally paid off all the debts of the family.
"Oh my God, that feeling is that I've finally turned over, even though I can't afford a house." Now Xia Wanqing has rented a three-bedroom house in the suburbs of Hangzhou for five thousand yuan, two bedrooms reserved for her parents and herself, and another for live broadcasting. At the end of the year, she took her parents out of her hometown. They were all in their sixties, their hair was white, and they had not yet been blessed. "I wish I could work a little harder, they would work a little harder."
In Xia Wanqing's heart, there is also an unfinished stage dream. When she went to the whole country to catch up, she always thought that if one day she stood on stage purely to express artistic feelings rather than to survive, if the audience came to see the performance purely because they liked her, how good it would be. "Douyin is a little bit of a dream, many viewers said that I play the piano well, so many years of hard work has finally been recognized, really happy." And many people will come to see you every day after they know you, and finally feel that they are valued. ”
In the live broadcast room of the summer evening, new guzheng enthusiasts will join every day, and many parents will bring their children who have just learned guzheng to listen to the performance. "Because most of the pop songs I play are easy to play, so everyone can understand it." The most common sentence said by fans in the live broadcast room is "Listening to you play the piano is very calm, all the troubles can be dissipated", every time I hear the audience say this, Xia Wanqing feels comforted: "I feel that my existence is very valuable." ”
After so many years of busyness, she can finally relax now. She goes to bed early and gets up early every day, broadcasts for two hours in the morning, eats the meal made by her mother at noon, learns to draw and practice calligraphy in the afternoon, if she is in good spirits at night, she will broadcast an additional broadcast, if she does not want to broadcast, she and her mother will go to play badminton and square dance. When the epidemic situation is slightly better, she plans to return to professional performance, go to the conservatory audit student or find a professor to take a personal lesson.
There is no way to make up for the skills left behind in childhood, but she still wants to compensate for her twenty-something self who has no choice — fortunately, it is not too late.