The View From Tai Shan
I would be lying if I denied that some of my literary fathers are rock musicians. I grew up loving the music of bands like The Police and Rush, both of which came up with some of the best lyrics rock music has ever seen. I don’t know how evident the influence of Sting and Neil Peart is in my poetry, but I know that they were extremely influential with regards to what went on (and goes on) in my mind.
In recent months, one of my favorite musical companions has been the Rush piece “Tai Shan.” Both its music and lyrics have resonated for me during my prolonged stays in Shanghai and my travels to other parts of China in 2008.
I’ve named this blog in part as tribute to this song, but if you know much about China’s Tai Shan, you recognize the deep history that lies behind the lyrics. It was atop Tai Shan that Confucius said that “the world is small” and Chairman Mao said that “the East is Red.” It is a locale with a long and rich history.
I’ve accordingly named this blog Tai Shan because I plan to make it a space for writing about China and things Chinese. I plan to include some travelogues, some thoughts on language learning, and some reviews of various cultural products, whether ancient Chinese poetry or contemporary Chinese movies and music. I am hoping to include some posts by guest bloggers from time to time too, if that can be worked out. (Do contact me if you’d like to be a guest blogger here.)
Chinese scholar Guo Moruo calls Tai Shan “a partial miniature of China.” In naming this blog after that sacred mountain, I hope I have not been presumptuous. I cannot hope to provide a similar microcosm of the world that is China, but I can offer you my perspectives on my interaction with that world. I hope you’ll enjoy the journey with me.
I thought of time and distance
The hardships of history
I heard the hope and the hunger
When China sang to me…
When China sang to me
– from Rush’s “Tai Shan”
lyrics by Neil Peart
Great post, Shelly. I’m really excited about this blog, and I’m glad you’re on board.
Thanks! I’m looking forward to the interaction here. It should be fun!
cool! sounds like a perfect blog for you! I love the back ground here! and I had no idea Rush had a song about China…cool! amazing the things that came together to lead you there!
Thanks for popping in, silken! I hope the blog turns into an enjoyable place for you and others who’d like to read along.
You’d like Rush’s “Tai Shan.” They also have a song about travel through Thailand (“Passage to Bangkok”), but I don’t like it nearly as much. It’s too pop-sounding, too “cute,” and the lyrics are not nearly as good as those of many of their other songs.
雪丽，你好！你开着个博客，很适合你。也相信你能写出很多的东西。
要向你学习。等我工作差不多定了，我也应该多写一些东西。
谢谢，淑娴！我知道你会喜欢这个博客，因为我这里写的都是我跟你学习的东西！
你写的博客我很愿意看吧。希望你能快点开一个！
I’m going to look forward to coming to this weblog. I’ll start with a question.
In all the times you and I have discussed China and Singapore in various blogs, blogging communities and e-mails, I don’t recall ever directly asking you how a young woman from Texas ended up “discovering” China in such a personal way that she ended up deciding to make that part of the world her home. Did you go there for travel at first and then end up finding more and more that meshed and merged with who you are and who you are becoming over time?
Curiously,
Malcolm
Hi Malcolm, and thanks for stopping by.
The process you describe for how a relationship between a person and a place might develop is pretty much what happened to lead me to Singapore. I came to Singapore as an exchange student during a summer program when I was 17, and things continued on from there, developing quite naturally. I fit very nicely here, and so ended up moving here immediately after I finished my undergrad studies.
With China, it was a little different. I was a freshman in college when the Berlin Wall fell, and had completely not anticipated that event. Later that fall, there was a big event in Beijing that put the question in a lot of people’s minds whether something similar would happen in China. (I think China has proven many wrong in thinking that something like that was needed — she had a very different idea about the internal reforms needed at the time, and has done a very nice job implementing what was necessary.) I remember a particular article by Cline Paden that got me to thinking about whether I might not like to make it an aim to live in China. I began making visits to the Middle Kingdom shortly after I moved to Singapore (and had already started studying the language immediately upon moving to Singapore). The relationship was much slower to develop than the one between Singapore and I had been, even making me doubt whether things would ever develop between us, but it took root in time.
When I began visiting Shanghai on a regular basis about 6-7 years ago, that’s probably when I really fell in love with the country as a whole. It isn’t that Shanghai is the only place I could love in China — and in fact, several different locations (both rural and urban) have their hooks in pretty deep too — but it’s more a matter of Shanghai and I being at the same place at the same time.
That’s the history of the love affair. I suspect it will continue for a long time yet.
[...] history. (For what it’s worth, you can see my reasoning behind the name of this blog in the first post.) I haven’t yet stood on this famous mountain, but one [...]