When writing Ma Youyou's manuscript, Li Feiran, the author of "People", was simultaneously operating two other manuscripts: Xu Yuanchong and Fu Cong. In the face of the suffering of life, Xu Yuanchong digested with contention, Fu Cong digested with silence, and Ma Youyou provided a third answer, allowing himself to go to a wider crowd and discover the beauty of others — optimism, enthusiasm, purity — to integrate them into music, live in themselves, and then use music to pass them on to more people.
Wen | Li Feiran
It took a long time to write Yo-Yo Ma's manuscript, to be precise, it took three topics to choose. During that time, I wrote about three very different people—the translator Xu Yuanchong, the pianist Fu Cong, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The biggest test of these topics is how to understand time, because they all point to the same proposition: how a person faces his own time.
For a long time, the average age of my interviewees was about 80 years old, and they often mentioned to me the word climate, fate has climate, era has climate, life also has climate, winter to spring, and the cycle repeats. A person is often misplaced with his time, and people who can live in the climate of the right era are extremely lucky, and many people do not have such luck.
Translator Xu Yuanchong chose to return to China in 1951, when he was just 30 years old, ended his study life in France, and when he returned, he joined the army, became a teacher, and wanted to translate books. But it was the winter of translation, and for more than 30 years he had to live in silence. Every night he would translate until the wee hours of the morning, filled boxes with translations, and the replies he received would not be published.
Pianist Fu Cong first went abroad in 1953, when he was very young, participated in piano competitions abroad, and saw a beautiful spring in music. He overheard Ashkenazi's playing in the lobby of the hotel where the contestants lived, and stood up selflessly to applaud his competitors. Later, he chose to buy a plane ticket to the United Kingdom, and the trajectory of his life changed.
The third person facing a choice is Ma Xiaojun, Ma Youyou's father. He studied composition theory and music history in France, where he studied composition theory and music history, with a particular focus on children's music education. In 1953, he accepted the invitation of the musician He Luting and quit his job in France, intending to return to China to continue his music education. He had 1,000 kilograms of the most important music book score that could not be bought in China at that time, and he wanted to donate all of them to the school after he returned, so he applied for a 100 pound subsidy, but life still trapped him with the smallest details, and he dragged his family and waited for more than a year without waiting. When he found out that he had a second child, he wrote a letter to his old friend and said goodbye to his desire to go home.
Ma Xiaojun's official letter for applying for subsidies is the source network
Three people trapped by luck answered their fate in three ways. In the winter of the times, Xu Yuanchong always spoke loudly, he was called Xu Dacang, when he held meetings, he fought for right and wrong, competed for high and low, quarreled until his face was red, he was fighting, he wanted to translate, his colleagues described it this way to this day, the struggle was always living on his body, until he was 100 years old. Fu Cong was silent, always hiding in the dark to play the piano, he said less and less words, shrinking himself to the depths of his heart, he only spoke to the piano, only let the piano speak for him, and music became the almost only expression of his life.
The existence of Yo-Yo Ma is the third answer to the dilemma of the times. This is the underlying logic of Yo-Yo Ma's manuscript. At the level of explicit textual ideography, this is the story of a cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a child who grew up to become a musician from elementary school piano. But I hope that within the scope of feasibility, this manuscript will accommodate a hidden narrative at the deepest level to answer the proposition of the times - in an era of light and dark, how does a person choose to live?
Yo-Yo Ma Image source cfp
This hidden story is Ma Xiaojun's choice. In 1955, he wrote in a letter in clear letters, forgive me for misunderstandings or "non-connection" in the country, returned his travel fee application, and said that we had decided to temporarily stay in France. In the autumn of that year, Yo-Yo Ma was born. The father left all his love to his children, listening to his favorite Bach to the two children, playing games with them, teaching them to speak Chinese, write brush characters, and teaching them to call each dish in Chinese when eating. Ma Youyou has a natural affinity for his father's classical Chinese culture, he likes to speak Chinese, when he went to Harvard, he always read "Dream of the Red Chamber" in the library, talked about the new album when interviewing, and his favorite track came from the Chinese composer Wu Tong, on the grounds that its melody reminded him of the Song Dynasty.
Because of this, Yo-Yo Ma's interview gave me a great impact, and I got a lot of specific factual details in the interview to support his goodwill and purity, but Yo-Yo Ma's purity is a result, and its existence has a source. If you understand and describe his personal story in isolation, without pursuing the source of the facts, the logic of facts will be full of confusing whys - why does Yo-Yo Ma show such purity? Where does this purity come from? What is this pure factual underpinning? Do the facts stand?
Therefore, I hope that Yo-Yo Ma's manuscript will present a potential theme of father and son. This is the second layer of story that I try to bury in the text, the story of one father, the fate of another generation and their choices.
During the writing period, I reread Yang Kuisong's "Unbearable Care", Chen Hand's "Whether People Know If They Are Sick", as well as "Interview with Zeng Yanxiu" and "Wu Mi's Diary" from that period. Each person records a common era with a different side, which is the answer of the witnesses. The book is the past of the last century, but it is still deafening to read, and they force me to face many bitter questions, how to understand time, how to face the times, and how many answers can there be in life.
The day before the interview with Yo-Yo Ma, I was still running Xu Yuanchong's interview at the same time, the two people chose two paths, and then Fu Cong died, and many details during the writing period will remind me of Yo-Yo Ma in the interview. In the face of the suffering of life, Xu Yuanchong digested with contention, Fu Cong digested with silence, and some people digested with revenge, transferring their unrealized musical dreams to the next generation, ordering his life to be successful, in order to dissipate the suffering left by the times. A more common way of digesting is to pretend to be forgotten, and the river freezes and melts, as if winter had never come.
Yo-Yo Ma is the third answer I've seen, allowing myself to go to a wider crowd and discover the beauty of others — optimism, enthusiasm, purity — to incorporate them into music, to live in myself, and then to use music to pass on to more people.
Ma Youyou said that at the beginning of his life, he did not take the initiative to choose music, the word he used at that time was fell into it, and the music was the background sound of his father around the cradle, and he fell into it as soon as he was born. When he learned to play the piano, he was only four years old, and many of the beliefs were given to him by the people around him, what music he listened to was picked by his father, how to practice the piano was decided by his father, what was the meaning of music, and the original answer came from Bernstein, Casals, his sister, his mother and his father. Many of the traits that exist in Yo-Yo Ma are the shadows of the people he meets, and they constitute the third possibility of digesting bitterness.
Young Yo-Yo Ma and his sister play the Picture Source Network
In the interview, Ma Youyou lives like the sun, he is a very good interview object, like the sun to release the energy of goodwill throughout the whole process, he also has no shelf, has to answer questions, accepts interviews like chatting with friends, is very relaxed, and always wants to make each other laugh. The interview answers are also beautiful and pure musical ideals. In fact, it can be written just based on these beautiful answers, and many articles about music are written like this—the ultimate innocence, purity, and beauty of writing, but I don't want to take it so lightly, and I can't do it. Because people are complex, and the real world is also complex, I must make the manuscript face the truth, and I cannot escape complexity.
The biggest writing crisis of Yo-Yo Ma's manuscript is that it will make the pure flow on the surface, and write the pure like a god three feet off the ground, the reader reads a person who is so beautiful that he is almost god, and when he reads it, he feels so beautiful, and when he closes the article, he is still his own bitterness and bitterness. In fact, music, like life, is not only joy, it also has pain, choices, compromises and cruelty, which Yo-Yo Ma has experienced firsthand, and many details in the interview have confirmed that he not only knows the existence of these sufferings, but also uses his own actions to promote change and live himself as an antidote to these sufferings. This was the answer his father had taught him, and in the days of his difficult life, his father gave him a comforting Bach; in the days of confusion about fame, Casals taught him to be a man first; and when he witnessed the tearing of society, Bernstein told him that from now on we should make music more powerful, better, more focused and more moving than ever before. Together, these teachings from our fathers constitute the answer to a musician's life, and this is our answer to violence.
Music became Yo-Yo Ma's answer to survival, and he became a cure for suffering. In interviews, he always likes to say alive back, he gets strength from the crowd, he has always returned this power to the crowd, playing the piano for homesick strangers during the epidemic, taking the piano with him when he is vaccinated, and playing "Ode to the Virgin" for others. Before Ma Xiaojun died, Ma Youyou described his imaginary kingdom of heaven to his father, played the cello for his father, comforted him with Bach, and music turned the pain of dying into warm memories, which reminded me of Fu Cong's belief that there are many joys and sorrows in the world, and only music can turn these things into beautiful things.
After being vaccinated against COVID-19 at a community school, Yo-Yo Ma took out his cello and played it live, saying it was just a little reward for others. Screenshot of the source video
The existence of Yo-Yo Ma is a confirmation of the possibility of being alive – and people can live in this way. It is not unusual for a person who has not suffered to remain naïve, but a person who knows suffering still chooses to be pure. I think this is the part of him that is worth writing, Ma Youyou has faced complexity and cruelty, still retaining his own purity, where does this precious state of life come from, I want to share such a story with my readers. I have to try to present the truth behind this nuance of human nature, maybe I may not be able to do it well enough, there will be limitations in understanding, there will be limitations in writing, but I must try to understand the complex, present the complex, give the reader as many angles of information as possible, so that the reader can hear his voice, see his actions, can identify the group environment in which he is, what other people are doing, what he is doing, what he has done in the past, what he is doing now, and providing the reader with as many valid facts as possible. Let everyone make their own reading decisions based on multi-dimensional material and experience what kind of person the interviewee is. If there is any role that we write in today's articles, it may be to share and examine the life of another person in this way, and to understand another person who lives in the same era as us.
If you understand my industry according to the title of the online article, in the past decade, it has been declared to decline, sink, collapse, resurrection, outlet, decline again... But no matter what people say, every day of what I've really experienced has never changed—interviews, reading books, writing manuscripts, and so on. The biggest difference in work is nothing more than moving from one office to another, and I started meeting every Wednesday, then Tuesday, now Monday, and everything else, it's all the same thing.
Writing has me believe in a lot of things that are no longer popular, like time will tell. It is true that a person is often misaligned from his own time, but people will always have their own answers. The times vetoed Xu Yuanchong's translation, but most of the days of his life, he was translating, turning when he could produce a book, and he also turned when he could not publish a book, and on the night of the beating, he secretly closed the window and had to turn it over. The negation ended 30 years later, and he, who is in his 60s, has published books every year since then, at least one book a year, until now. No matter what happened, Fu Cong practiced every day until his death. In the year of Fu Lei's rehabilitation, he was allowed to return to China, and after his return, he continued to play the piano, hold concerts, hold piano master classes, and teach more young Chinese people to play the piano.
Ma Xiaojun was unable to return to China or transport the 1,000 kilograms of the most important music book score back to his hometown, but his heart did not disappear. He still became a music educator abroad, and in 1962 he founded the Children's Orchestra Society, a non-profit organization that helps children develop a interest in music and give them the opportunity to perform with professional musicians.
After these three articles were published, I sometimes wondered, what is the climate like today? In a seemingly increasingly polarized world, it is fortunate that my editorial department can still allow me to write such a selection of topics, and readers are willing to read what I write, and there is still room for such a story to survive. Their existence is a testament to the fact that our survival can also have another answer.
In the year of graduation, the seniors who taught me to write a manuscript said that newspapers can far surpass the life of a day, and no matter where they are in the future, they must make progress in this direction. This is the advice given to me by my most cherished predecessors. It is not easy to do this, until now I often doubt whether I can do it, but I still want to continue to try, there are many people in this world worth looking at, there are many stories spanning one after another 30 years to this day, I want to write them down, because I know and believe in this truth, between people, there are thousands of answers to the way of life.