Chinatown is an uninspiring place. Although hundreds of tourists visit it everyday and find it somehow attractive, many people live in there because they have no choice. They are stuck in there. We don’t know how many elders who live in Chinatown have never walked outside of its border. There is an impression among Chinese people that the elders living in Chinatown are mean. To me, this is not a stereotype; it’s a truth. I don’t want to discuss the reason behind their meanness, because it is complicated and not worth mentioning. And this is my impression of Chinatown. It neither changed since I first set foot on it more than five years ago nor after I finished this neighborhood project.
Going back to arts. The artwork that our group chose for this project was the statue of Confucius in the Confucius Plaza. The reason we chose this statue as our artwork was because Confucius is a symbolic figure of China, and Confucius Plaza is a landmark of Chinatown. Every time I ask my mother how to get to a certain place in Chinatown, she would always say walk towards or away from the Confucius Plaza. Tourists must take a photo in front of the Confucius statue before they leave Chinatown. The statue itself is not especially artistic. What is important is Confucius’s teaching. His teaching has set the Chinese moral standards and cultural values. He is regarded as the wisest scholar in Chinese history. Because of that, people put his statue in the most prominent location in Chinatown to remind themselves not to forget his teaching. While I have never read “The Confucian Analects”, the basic ideas of his teaching are deeply founded in my mind. Perhaps, this is more essential to me than his statue.
The Pearl River is too familiar to me. Well, I don’t mean the gift shop on East Broadway, though it is my favorite Chinese gift shop. I mean the real Pearl River. In my mind, growing up in Guangzhou is growing up along the Pearl River. It has fed me and saved all my childhood memories. I remembered my favorite place was the French concession along the river. I love its tranquility and western style architectures. The Pearl River is said to be the “mother river” for everyone who grew up in Guangzhou. I am glad that the gift shop is named “Pearl River”, because this river has bred the Cantonese people generations after generations, and it has witnessed the changes of its people in Guangzhou throughout time. It became a symbol of memory and nostalgia.
In addition to the Confucius statue, Cantonese opera is another prevalent art form in Chinatown. As a fan of the traditional Chinese opera, I cannot leave this blog without discussing the Cantonese opera. Cantonese opera is a traditional performing art form that is popular in the Guangdong Province, Hong Kong, and Macaw. While it has many similarities with the other Chinese local opera, Cantonese opera is smoother and softer, just like the water flowing down a small stream. This characteristic features the special culture of the Pearl River Delta region in southern Guangdong Province. While wandering around Chinatown for this project, we have experienced both professional and amateur Cantonese opera performances. The Columbus Park is a stage for Cantonese opera amateurs. During the weekends, retirees will gather in several groups to perform a part of a Cantonese opera or sing traditional Cantonese folk songs. Their audiences are the old park goers who also enjoy Cantonese opera. The Cantonese opera enthusiasts all entertain themselves at the park with their shared hobby. The free Cantonese opera event in the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (one of the oldest Chinese community centers) was a little more formal than the park performance. It was a gala events which the singers sang excerpts from several Cantonese opera repertories. Although the performance was more formal, the performers were not necessarily professional. How could singers carry out the feeling of the song if they couldn’t even remember the lyrics? Despite of that, the event was not a bad experience for a big fan of traditional Chinese opera like me. (I feel deeply sorry for my group mates, because I thought they got really bored at this. Please don’t hate me!)
As a native Chinese, it is really difficult to talk about Chinatown without adding subjective views, and so does its arts. Because performing artists don’t have achieve high status in the traditional Chinese cultural values, most of the Chinese performing arts are very down-to-earth, and so as the performing arts in Chinatown. For similar reason, arts are relatively independent from people’s daily lives, and it is true for all kinds of arts. Arts rarely influence people’s lives, but people’s lives influence the arts greatly. Because Chinatown is a relatively isolated and distinctive neighborhood, its inhabitants are able to keep the very traditional Chinese arts. However, is this a good phenomenon? I want to hear from you.
A little video for this project. Pleasant memory!
