This is one of the best renditions of the piece on the guzheng/zither. I’ve heard many different versions of it through the years (since the 1970s). The first time I heard it I instinctively asked myself, Is my Tai chi chuan form as good? I’ve also heard it on the pipa/lute. One time on the cruise to the 3 Gorges and the Great Dam on the Yangzi River, it was played by a young Chinese woman on the boat.
In my imagination it was during a full moon. I am always looking for the best performance. Perhaps it was the influence of Rodolfo C. Vidad (Uncle Rudy) whointroduced me to a large repertoire of western music. (See the essay “Thinking of Uncle Rudy” in my book of essays.) I was really ignorant at the time and did not know much about music. I had a few lessons in the violin but I never went far because the teacher stopped coming to our town. Whenever I saw Uncle Rudy (that’s what everybody called him) in his house in the Sampaloc district of Manila, after my martial arts lessons in Chinatown, he would play several versions of a piece. If it was Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Concerto, we would listen to 3 or 4 by different pianists. He did the same with Tchaikovsky’s Violin in D. It was a great education for me. I got to know not only the composers but also the performers like Emil Gilels, Vladimir Horowitz, Jacqueline Dupre, Leonid Kogan, Fritz Kreisler, Leonard Bernstein. I think I also developed an “ear” for quality music.
Now this is probably weird. When I was in Boston in the 1990s, I used to go to the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plains and do my martial arts forms beside the bonsai section. I honestly wanted to be like those dwarf trees! I knew how the bonsai were “trained” to assume their shape – early on they were pulled by their roots, chopped, twisted, and wired. It was cruel and loving at the same time. It was how my Dragon Tiger Fujian Temple Kungfu master Johnny Chiuten trained me back in the mid-60s. He made me stand in a “horse” posture for about 3 hours while pushing and sweeping me off my feet and inflicting on me the traditional tests for an indoor disciple of the art. It was like what I saw in the Kungfu movies where the novice was made to do hundreds of repetitions of a movement until he was bone-weary and his sweat pooled at his feet. I was – am — grateful for it. Mercifully my mentor in poetry Len Roberts did not inflict any physical pain but he was as demanding. He was generous with his praise but he was also generous with his criticism. He was always there to critique my poetry for 20 years since 1985 when he was a poetry professor at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. When I learned 15 years ago that he passed away I was about to pay the cashier at Wegman’s and I could not hold back my tears. I still have his notes written on the margins of the poems written many years ago.
The bonsai photos were taken when I was at the Shanghai Arts Museum.
