Amy Tan's Hidden China
Photo of Dimen Village by Lynn Johnson
In May's all-China issue of National Geographic, novelist Amy Tan explores life in a minority ethnic village deep in the green mountains of Guizhou in southern China. The village might as well be in another millennium, as the Dong people who live there follow the same lifestyle as their ancestors did 1,200 years ago. Their language has no written form, so they preserve their heritage through songs that have been passed down through generations. Here's an excerpt from Tan's story about the village Dimen:
In Dimen people sing nearly every day. In classrooms students sit with perfect posture at their desks. They repeat in perfect a cappella pitch what their teacher has just sung. On weekends a troupe of older girls dressed in jeans and pink tops stand before the Singing Teacher and practice fast-paced songs, each taking a solo. Two gravelly voiced elderly women, respectfully called za by all, guide the younger children in reciting simpler chorals.
One of the za has blue-tinged eyes. At first I thought this was a genetic remnant of outsiders who had come through the region—perhaps foreign traders diverted from the Silk Road. Dimen has had many invaders, the blue-eyed za told me. "In 1920 a Chinese warlord kidnapped my mother's 16-year-old aunt to make her his ninth concubine. No one heard from her again." In those days, the blue-eyed za said, people who came stole our things and killed people. Each time, she and her family put sticky rice in their baskets and ran into the mountains to hide.
When the za asked me for eyedrops, complaining that her eyes were cloudy, I realized the blue in her eyes was cataracts. Several people had already told me she was the only one who knew all 120 verses of the epic song of Dimen's history, hours of a bluesy repetitive melody. According to this anthem, the original Dong ancestors of Dimen began as a people who wore no clothes. Invaders had driven their descendants to Dimen. "That old song is boring," two teenage girls later told me. "We're too busy to learn something we don't like."
You can hear a sampling of the songs of this village here, and see more amazing images from Lynn Johnson online at National Geographic magazine's website.

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