Wherever I May Roam

On a cold Sunday afternoon in Hangzhou,I heard the the swelling, poignant notes of the Chinese violin echoing across a park near the West Lake.
It was one of the classics that every player knows. The men on the bench scarcely had an audience; they seemed to be there for themselves, two musicians together in the outdoors.

I complimented their playing and one of them spoke; I struggled to understand what he said. His roughly-hewn, colloquial slur was a far cry from the clean diction of the classroom. His deeply-creased face told a story all its own, with the contented smile of someone who loves what they do. I said in stumbling Mandarin that I had begun to learn the instrument, but wasn’t very good. He chattered excitedly. Seeing the confused look on my face, he simply held the instrument out to me. All I had learned to play were scales - something I definitely couldn’t explain in Chinese. I looked nervously to his companion, who nodded enthusiastically. As I reached out, he rose from his seat and motioned for me to sit.

I went through the checklist in my head, gingerly positioning the instrument, my fingers and arms properly. With focussed deliberation, I played the scales. When I looked up, I was startled to see a sizeable crowd of elderly Chinese people. My musician friend had rustled up an audience to see this curious lao wai play the erhu. He beamed at me expectantly, motioning for me to continue. But that’s my whole repertoire, I thought, ready to utterly embarrass myself.

Then I remembered the wild card: messing around one rehearsal, I had figured out roughly how to play ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ as a bit of a joke. It was all I had, so I decided to try. I played with all the swagger I could, concentrating hard and even adding some vibrato for effect. I hit a couple of bum notes on the way that I had to correct quickly. I looked up again, proud to have pulled something out of the hat – to utterly mystified faces. They’d never heard the song, let alone heard it played badly. I searched through my vocabulary for anything useful and told him it was an English song. It all made sense now – he smiled, turned to the crowd and announced, “It’s an English song!” to a delighted and collective ‘Ahh!’ I handed the violin back before I could further dent the reputation of English music, and went to mingle with my new fans.

In that chance encounter in the corner of a small park in China, I learned that even famed locations have hidden gems, if you dig.