Helping Children in China

I borrowed this from my sisters blog:

This is a great story! It's long but well worth reading. My dad is still traveling in China and sent this email to the family. For the last several years my dad has been organizing concert tours for music groups from the United States to China with his business partner Tang Cai. We always love hearing what dad is up to on the other side of the world. Thanks DAD!

Hi everybody!

Thanks for the birthday and Father’s Day wishes! I often forget these things because I am usually traveling during June. I really appreciate your remembering!

This year, Tang Cai and his family also remembered. Tang Cai’s son, Tang Jiwei, is back in China for the summer from his studies in France. So Tang Cai, his wife Wu Caifang, and his son organized a special dinner and some other surprises. As he usually does, Tang Cai cooked up a storm!

Let me tell you a bit about one of the highlights of my past couple of months. I didn’t find time to write to you about it earlier:

Several years ago, I first visited the small village school where Tang Cai grew up as a peasant farm boy. Later, after he managed to complete middle school, high school and was the only young person from the area’s villages who attended the university, he got a teaching degree. He then taught for 7 years at the small elementary school in his own village where he had first gone to school and at several other village schools in the area. (Later, as you know, he went on to corporate work and to a law degree from a prestigious university.)

Several summers ago, while visiting his home region in Heilongjiang Province in the far Northeast of China, I insisted that he take me to visit his village school and also the other schools where he was a teacher. The physical facilities were very meager, but the older teachers all remembered Teacher Tang warmly, and the kids were curious and eager. I took some photos of the teachers and students…including of the music teacher in Tang Cai’s old village, whose only resource was an old erhu (Chinese stringed instrument) hanging on the damaged wall of the small shared faculty office.

Almost immediately after that, I began to talk with Tang Cai about an idea that was hatching in my head: We do a lot of international work and bring wonderful professional musicians to China. They perform in urban centers at theaters, universities and music conservatories. In contrast to the people in those audiences, most of the village school children may never experience much beyond their farm work, may not be able to imagine a life beyond their village and the limits of their local experience, and may never think that they can accomplish anything important. So, wouldn’t it be wonderful to surprise the kids in the village with a visit by some foreign musicians! At the very least, it would be a unique experience in the lives of the kids, and if even one child were inspired to think about going to high school or beyond, it would be a complete success.

(I also think often about how I grew up in a coal mining town where the broad experiences of “culture”…literature, music, art, history, language, international interests…were not parts of the imagination of some of my young classmates. Somehow, I had parents, family, and others around me who encouraged me to seek the broader world, even though they often didn’t really understand why all of that interested me!)

One problem with my idea has been the fact that it is expensive to fly musicians to that northeastern area, and we had never been able to arrange for concerts in the region. But this year, Tang Cai finally managed to get a gig for our piano/saxophone duo…wonderful musicians from Indiana University…in Heilongjiang’s provincial capital, Harbin. So we worked to carve out some free time in the schedule when we could drive them to Tang Cai’s village. Tang Cai spoke on the phone with the school’s principal, and we tried to figure out what would give a lasting benefit to the school and the kids. For Tom Walsh, it was no problem to take his sax to play for the kids. But we couldn’t carry a piano for Luke Gillespie, of course.

Tang Cai and I wanted each child and each teacher to have something. So while we were still in Dalian, we went shopping at a big bookstore and found enough bilingual (Chinese/English) children’s books to buy one for each of the 71 village kids from kindergarten to fourth grade. We brought those to Dalian in my luggage. We also went to many music shops and decided on a very good electric keyboard and asked one of Tang Cai’s friends in Harbin buy it from a music store there.

The evening concert in Harbin at the lovely old music hall was a real success! Then, the next morning, one of Tang Cai’s friends drove us to the village, where the teachers and all the children had crowded into one bare concrete classroom. We unpacked the keyboard…and the IU two guys played piano/sax tunes: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, etc. while the kids clapped along! The guys had also learned a couple of traditional Chinese pieces for their concerts, so we got the music teacher to bring his old erhu to play with them, too!

The children were really excited about the books, and many of the children were still clutching them later when we gathered in the dirt schoolyard for photos. To the surprise of the principal and the teachers, we also told them that we were donating the keyboard to the school.

After that, we walked through the village and talked with local folks. Of course, all of them know Tang Cai…he’s a local celebrity…and many of them have gotten to know me a bit, because I am the only foreigner who ever wanders around the fields and houses there! We went to the home of Tang Cai’s number one older brother, Tang Yi. His wife cooked up a farm feast for us and we ate outdoors in the yard.

It was all very satisfying! And I kept wishing you could all have shared it with me. At least, I can send you a few photos.

I love you all and look forward to seeing you soon!

Dad

PS: I'll send a lot more photos later...I have to run to the airport now.

I love you!