冬天的故事

Shakespeare’s play “The Winter’s Tale” is a well-known tragedy & comedy.  But it really has nothing to do with the winter except that it is "A sad Tale best for Winter to tell about”.

Chinese new-year always falls between late January & early February in a cold winter season.  However, we call it Spring Festival (春節).  To most people, it is a festive winter event. Back to our good old winter days in Taipei, we school kids had to suffer in a classroom without heating systems.  I remember we shuddered in the corner of 木造楼 between the classes. Nobody dared getting out to play.  The best moment was to buy 熱騰騰的燒餅 inside the building between classes. Some street vendors got very creative to give us the service, 真是一大德政 .  I sort of envied the kids in southern Taiwan as the weather there was much milder. I found that in winter we kids spent more time inside & had more time for study, read & write. It seems it should also be true for most adults.  But to my surprise, I had a hard time to recall good literary work, music or art related to winter.  Meanwhile most people can name a lot of them related to spring, summer & autumn. Perhaps people play mahjong or poker more often in winter instead of something more productive. Anyway, here are some I can remember.

四時田家苦樂歌, 鄭燮
This can be called “Four Seasons, Chinese Style”
冬天
老樹搓枒, 撼四壁, 寒声正怒. ... 茅舍日斜雲釀雪, 長堤路断風和雨. …田家苦.
砍松枝帶雪, … 秫酒釀成欢里舍, … 官租完了離城郭. 笑山妻塗粉过新年, 田家樂.
This shows the Chinese New Year really falls in the winter season. There seems no music composition exists for this fine literary work.

岳陽楼記, 范仲淹
若夫霪雨霏霏, 連月不開, 陰風怒號, 濁浪排空, 日星隱耀, 山岳潛形, 商旅不行, 檣傾楫椎, 薄暮冥冥, 虎嘯猿啼.. 登斯楼也, 則有去國怀鄉, 憂讒畏譏, 滿目簫然, 感極而悲者矣.
So winter is not the season to get excited about. You feel depressed, sad & dejected. It is hardly a positive season. Even Napoleon & Hitler got wiped out just because they couldn’t finish the campaigns before the winter came.

Unknown Author
大雪紛纷何所似? … 灑塩空中差可比, …未若柳絮因風起.
I have been in Milwaukee this winter. This is my version:
大雪紛纷何所似? … 白蝴小蝶滿天飛

飲馬長城窟行, 漢樂府
枯桑知天風, 海水知天寒, 入門各自媚, 誰肯相為言.
This really shows the importance of the family.

天淨沙, 馬致遠
枯藤老樹昏鴉,, 小橋流水平沙, 古道,西風瘦馬,. 夕陽西下, 断腸人在天涯.
This one is actually 秋思. But 枯藤老樹昏鴉, sounds so destitute, it really belongs to winter. If you have ever visited New England in October, you know what Autumn looks like---紅楓银杏滿山谷. I just have to assume 馬致遠 drank too much XO on the day he wrote this 元曲.

The music that carries the title of Seasons:
Tchaikovsky's “Four Seasons” is a piano work. Three pieces related to the winter are 聖誕節, 爐边 & 狂欢節.

Haydn's “Seasons” is an oratorio (清唱劇) composition.

Glazunov's “Four Seasons” is ballet music.  It starts unconventionally with winter first then spring, summer and autumn.  The winter contains frost, ice, hail and snow.

Vivaldi's “Four Seasons” is a set of four concertos.  The winter contains three movements: Cold, Rain and Wind.  The second movement has a mellow and slow tempo, can be viewed as Snow or Rain. I listened to this one while I was in Milwaukee.  I was in the living room right next to a fireplace, a glass of red wine in my hand.  It was in the early evening, snowflakes flying around in front of the yard. I felt so cozy and comfortable and the scene outside was so beautiful and white.  It was truly a White Winter. The following YouTube link is a good one to view:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc_yKk0k5XE

Schubert “Winterreise” is a song cycle. Winterreise is Winter Journey (冬之旅) in English.  It portrays a wanderer sings about his beloved, loses his beloved, feels lonliness, solitude & tries to gather his strength to carry on.  There are 24 poems written by Wilhelm Muller. Schubert read it & put his emotion on music.  The most famous one is the #5, Lindenbaum (linden tree or 菩提樹). We all learned the tune when we were in high school. Here are the translated lyrics:

By the fountain, near the gate,
There stands a linden tree;
I have dreamt in its shadows
So many sweet dreams.

I carved on its bark
So many loving words;
I was always drawn to it,
Whether in joy or in sorrow.

Today, too, I had to pass it
In the dead of night.
And even in the darkness
I had to close my eyes.

And its branches rustled
As if calling to me:
"Come here, to me, friend,
Here you will find your peace!"

The frigid wind blew
Straight in my face,
My hat flew from my head,
I did not turn back.

Now I am many hours
Away from that spot,
And still I hear the rustling:
There you would have found peace!

You can listen to the song in the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC7gEVSgf9k

The Chinese lyrics we learned are a slightly modified version:
我家有菩提老樹, 枝幹密綠葉蔭繁. 回憶我別離家園, 曾工作綠茵边, 我对樹發下誓願, 並刻字在樹間. 倘若希望不能遂, 我誓永遠不歸返, 我誓永遠不歸返..

The original lyrics are sad & despairing.  The Chinese lyrics change the mood to desiring and promising. So the way to sing the song should be quite different. This also shows the power of music as a universal & versatile language in influencing people.  Lindenbaum reminds me of a good old movie of 1956. In Taiwan, the title of the movie is 菩提樹.  I bet most of us watched this German movie. The movie is not released in the US.  However, I found a Youtube link related to the movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vkg3HEXLx8

This is the last scene of the movie.  The Trapp family was in the detention center of Ellis Island.  Their stay in the US depended on the financial sponsors.  They were in the brink of losing them. Desperately they sang the Lindenbaum.  Suddenly everybody is silent & listen.  The combination of the video & music is so touching & powerful that changes the whole thing.  If you have visited New York & Ellis Island, you will easily understand the whole meaning here. In the video clip, watch carefully, you will see the Statue of Liberty looms in the background outside the window, a sign of hope & freedom.  This final scene was well done & the music was the main theme to make the whole thing incredulously heartwarming.

PS: The Trapp family & the story are portrayed in another famous movie “The Sound of Music”, 1965. This is an American musical written by Roger & Hammerstein. Julie Andrews became a very popular actress after this movie. The movie was a blockbuster for several years.

Secret Recipe

Everytime I vsited Taiwan, I was always amazed to see "secret recipe" all over the places. Ancient secret recipe, palacial secret recipe, or family secret recipe, and so forth. Not that other countries don't have secret recipes, but they seem so ubiquitous in Taiwan (I assume China is the same though I have never been to China). The most famous secret recipe is probably the recipe of Coca Cola which is even insured.

A secret recipe must have started with a good product (a unique food, drink, medicine, etc.) which the proprietor claimed to have been made with secret recipe. As the product gained recognition or commercial success, competitors began to copy; and before long the marketplace would be flooded with similar products with their own secret recipes - real or not. Here is an example. In late 2000 I was in Puli to see my family and the damage caused by the earthquake the year before. I found so many little store fronts selling salty crispy chicken (yien-su-tzi) and each claimed to have prepared the chicken with old family secret recipe. I didn't think there was such food even 30 years ago, so any such recipe couldn't have been old. It turned out, a lot of people had lost their jobs after the earthquake. To make a little extra income, many people whose home had a street front would set up a small stand with a big wok for frying the chicken. And to compete, the minimum culinary credit would be the secret family recipe. Just in downtown Puli, there were no less than 30 of them. There is little doubt that none of the stores actually has its own secret family recipe. It just shows the marketing magic of "old" and "secret" in our society.

Anything with secrecy attracts attention, for curiosity is a human nature. Sometimes, secrecy even commands superiority. It is not unusual in China for a teacher to keep one or two key knowledge from his pupils. This is understandable if someday the teacher and his pupils would become competitors - another case of survival tactics. But withholding knowledge is a costly drawback to the advancement of civilization.

We have heard often about "ancient Chinese secrets" which Chinese people are generally quite proud of, and are often envied by people around the world. Here the problem is "ancient". It implies that since the ancient time, we Chinese have been incapable of doing better; all we have been doing is following the recipes from long time ago. For generations we have been just a bunch of pharmacists grabbing herbs according to an Rx written hundreds of years ago by some doctor; as in Chinese "Tsao Fuang Zwa Yau". It is hard to believe that through generations, no one has raised the questions such as why the recipe works so well, or what happens if one of the ingrients becomes unavailable. But I have never seen any claim like "modern improved Chinese secret" anywhere. It is also quite embarrassing to keep being proud of our "ancient stuff", to which we contributed nothing, without having anything of our own generation to speak of. Are we really so inferior to our ancestors? And for so long?

Some may say that by attaching "ancient" and "secret", you imply it has been proven for a long time and is not publicly available, thus jacking up its scarcity and value. But since it is not publicly known, how can we know it will do us no harm? Or how can we know it will do us wonder?

Since we are at it, I will throw another one in here. We often hear people say, "my father used to say ....", or "my grandfather used to say..." or "my mother used to say...". As if any saying by elders automatically commands credibility. Well, how do we know his/her elders actually said it? And it gets quite entertaining when a middle aged man says, "when I was a kid, my mother used to say so and so." Now, when he was a kid, his mother probably was younger than he is now. This means that after accumulating more years of life experiences than his mother had then, he is still not confident enough to assert his own so and so.

Cheers.