Last night I went to KTV, or kareokee, with some new Chinese friends.
A few months ago in Wisconsin I heard an episode of radiolab about music and there was small segment on perfect pitch. A female professor from California had conducted a study that concluded about 7/10 of Chinese children have perfect pitch, while a much, much smaller percentage of American kids do. (Like 3/10?) Anyway, after spending a couple hours in a small, dark, smoky room with very loud, very bad speakers playing dumb-downed musical renditions of old Chinese and American pop songs that seemed to have no rationale for selection and were accompanied by the most baffling videos possible, I found myself really wishing it was 100% of people everywhere. That would have been one agreeable ingredient. Alas. As usual, there's not a lot to do but laugh in that sort of situation, and the folk I went with were all lots of fun so we laughed together.
This is a photo of my so far favorite building in Beijing. It always calls to me, I'm not sure why. When I shared this with a friend he said, "Because it looks impossible." And suddenly, I understood why people think it's easy it is to do ANYTHING in China. Though there's lots of hoops to dance through, everything in this country seems to be saying Yes! to change, development, and imagination. As long as you can pitch it through the government, you'll probably find support.
I'm familiar with the concept of feeling like an "other." The only girl, white person, intelligent person, whatever, in a group, when secretly, I'd really just like wear that dress of belonging. The past few days I'd been feeling a little lonely. I am very obviously not Chinese, so that puts me in an "other" category pretty quickly. And most of the foreigners I see living in ChaoYang are probably here for business and wear suits, carry briefcases, or at least have much better and more expensive tastes than my small town American self will ever endure. And a lot of them don't seem that friendly...I'd think we'd have some sort of comraderie, being strangers in a strange land, but smiles are not often returned, especially from women. I didn't realize it, but it was kinda getting me down. Thankfully I woke up today not really caring and had a great time cleaning the apartment, walking around the city and listening to wonderful music.
By the way, the subways are really clean and cheap, though often extremely crowded. There aren't a ton of supercool new electronics, but a lot of people play playstation doublescreens on the trains. And EVERYONE has a cell phone and EVERYONE text messages. I really and truly hate this!
I'm still trying to establish a good diet (Walmart has the only organic vegetables I've found,) and exercise routine. I have been doing yoga daily in the living room; thanks Liz, Norman, and Faye. Since it's vacation time, everyone goes out to eat a lot. If I'm with Chinese people, we order way too much food, eat really fast, and continue to pick at the dishes because we don't want to go outside. If I'm with other ex-pats, we usually eat American food, which is so expensive (relatively), and sparse that I want to eat all of what I'm served. And of course the street food and sweet snacks are delicious and mostly fried in oil. Funny how much I miss the good organic food from Nottingham, Open Sky, and Rolling Ground!
(So glad Cari is not riding on this saddle through Argentina. Or J-Dick messengering in Chicago. Although, it has springs...)
2 comments:
I LOVE radio lab! That episode was amazing. They have such great sound engineers!
Actually, most children worldwide are born with perfect pitch, something like 95 out of 100, but only very very few recieve the training necessary to translate a sound into a word like "A 440". But virtually anyone can do it if they are trained early enough to name the sounds as such. My high school music teacher vowed this was so, and since he had successfully raised 3 children with perfect pitch, I was inclined to believe him. Many folks can also pick out certain pitches. Years of guitar tuning has enabled me to pick out E2 with ease. Also, if someone can successfully pick out one tone and then train their ears to hear relative pitch, they can have surrogate perfect pitch. For instance, someone who can pick out A4 can recognize C5 by identifying its minor-third position in relation to A4. See if you can recognize a certain pitch or two. Then you can earn perfect pitch.
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