Night Class Teacher: Being a Wizard in the Cracks of Modern Chinese Society "Presence·Non-Fiction Writing Scholarship"

Text/Huang Yuqing Edit/Xie Ding

1. The boy who suddenly went crazy

Alley's story, he told it very skillfully. He said that his family was very poor when he was a child, and his mother went out to work shortly after giving birth to him. He is not as tall as the shoulder pole, so he has to start carrying water. Of course, there is nothing strange about this, the children in the village are already headed home. Strange was his dream. He said that some spirits always appeared in his dreams and talked to him. When he wasn't dreaming, he held a stick or a stick of firewood every now and then, chanting and making movements of plucking the strings. No one knows where he learned this from. When he went to school, his classmates said he was crazy and would not play with him. Fortunately, his grandma was still alive at that time. Although this kind of situation has not happened in the village for a long time, grandma knows how to deal with strange things in tradition—to ask the fairy.

The so-called questioning the immortals is to ask the immortals. But ordinary people can't talk to gods, they have to go through some "teachers". "Teacher" is the Fusui people's respectful title for experts in folk belief rituals, similar to "Master".

A "teacher" performed a ritual on Alley. Tradition is very good, Ah Lei didn't have another attack for a while, and the family breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that it was peaceful.

However, it didn't take long for Aleigh to find that he was "abnormal" again. He is often confused, speaks words that he doesn't understand, and picks up things on the ground. After entering junior high school, the situation became more and more serious. He couldn't stay in school and dropped out in the second year of junior high school. For the young people in the village, there are only two choices if they can’t read a book: join the army or go to work. Alei went to the provincial capital to do loading and unloading at the construction site with his father. But within two years, he reverted to his old ways, felt uncomfortable all over, and ran back home again.

What can I do when I go home? Both parents are working outside the city, and my elder sister is studying in a health school. There are no idlers in the countryside, so he has nothing to do, so he has to follow his aunt to plant the land, cut hemp stalks, and carry firewood every day.

One evening, he didn't go to cut the hemp stalks. After nine o'clock in the evening, my aunt came home and found him sitting on the bed unconscious, shaking his legs, muttering words that others could not understand, as if something was controlling him in his body. The family members came back one after another, saw him go to light a stick of incense, and announced that his soldiers and horses would go to the "teacher" in Zambali Village to be their masters.

Some "teachers" nearby looked at Ah Lei's condition and said that he might not be bewitched by evil spirits, but an "immortal".

"Chuxian" is a literal translation of the Zhuang language, which refers to the power of the gods appearing in a person. More often, this word is equivalent to describing a person who suddenly goes crazy. They said that A Lei's ancestors also had people who were "teachers". Now, the Yin soldiers and horses led by the old ancestors have taken a fancy to A Lei, and they want to choose him as a "teacher" and teach him to "lead soldiers and horses".

The family members were shocked, Ah Lei was only fourteen years old, how could he do such a thing? But obviously, those shady soldiers and shady horses are not willing to stop, and Aleigh is going "crazy" more and more. In the end, Alei's family went to Buli Village to find Chen Wenhe, the "teacher" who later became Alei's master, according to the instructions of "Soldiers and Horses".

But unlike what the "soldiers and horses" hoped, Ah Lei's family asked Chen Wenhe to do a ritual first to temporarily seal those "soldiers and horses", at least until Ah Lei got married as an adult. Ah Lei later speculated that this was because "it is more difficult to find a wife in this line of work."

According to the wishes of the family, Chen Wenhe performed a ceremony in which a rooster was used, which is traditionally called a "golden rooster". According to the tradition, if the chicken's head faces the master when the chicken is killed for divination at the end, it means the ceremony is successful. But at the end of the ceremony, the golden rooster flapped around, with its head stubbornly facing the door.

Chen Wenhe shook his head and sighed: "It can't be sealed anymore, those soldiers are coming."

Tradition is like that. A Lei said that this means that Hua Po has received the scepter, and this person is going to be a "teacher". Hua Po, one of the most important gods in the folk system of the Zhuang nationality, is also honored by the teachers as the Holy Mother of Kao, and she is in charge of the "hukou" of all teachers in the god world.

Against the reluctance of his family, the 14-year-old A Lei set up an altar to worship as a teacher, and embarked on the road of cultivating immortals as a "teacher".

2. Getting to know Ale for the first time

The first time I met A Lei was in the summer of 2019, when I was still a graduate student. I was doing an internship in a museum in Nanning during the summer vacation, and I met Mr. Wu Bin, a fellow from the Zuojiang River Basin in southern Guangxi. Wu Bin was acquainted with A-Lei, and when he learned that A-Lei was going to have a wine-making ceremony, he invited me to go with him. Although I didn't know what the Tianjiu ceremony was at the time, as a student of film and television anthropology, the few remaining academic cells in my body reminded me that this must be an excellent ethnographic film subject.

We drove from Nanning, got off the highway, and walked the dusty county road for nearly an hour. Teacher Wu put an aria of the Tianjiu ceremony in the car, and told me that this was the "crossing the sea" part of the ceremony. I couldn't understand those old sayings at all, and there were many question marks in my heart: Crossing the sea? Do we have the sea here?

The only sea we are passing is the Sea of Cane. In midsummer, the sugarcane fields surged around us like turquoise sea water slowly flowing. Fusui is located in the south-central part of Guangxi. It is the easternmost county in the Zuojiang River Basin and the closest to the capital Nanning. It has a rare wide basin in the Zuojiang River Basin. Like many other counties in the Zuojiang River Basin, it uses sugarcane as its main cash crop and also grows fast-growing eucalyptus.

We turned into the country road and passed many yellow mud houses with holes in the purlins and broken tiles. Half of the mud walls were painted with faded white paint slogans: balanced development of compulsory education. The village in the afternoon seemed very quiet, only the old cow chewing slowly under the shade of the longan tree.

Teacher Wu said that his hometown is in the village next to Alei. But after passing by similar villages one after another, he also began to mutter: "Is this the road?" Just when we almost suspected that we had lost our way, a hut with hanging ribbons and decorated with fancy paper-cuts appeared in the grass . Teacher Wu said, "Hey, Teacher Lei is there."

I turned my head and looked out the window. Several Taoist priests in colorful "sheet" robes were standing near the shed. I was trying to guess which one was Alei when I saw a young man in a T-shirt and sweatpants wearing slippers. Come towards us.

He is at most one or two years older than me. He has a fair, pear-shaped face, thick eyebrows and big eyes, and a slightly fat body. He looks serious, but the little yellow face printed on his slippers is smiling. Teacher Wu spoke Mandarin to him: "I will park the car at your house?"

"All." Aleigh opened the car window, and also casually replied in Mandarin, "I'll be back in a while."

We drove into the village. Alley invited many "teachers" from different places to help out. Dojos are set up in the whole village, and the place where we met him was at the intersection of entering the village. There are also colorful sheds and some flags installed in front of the big banyan tree and the ancestral hall in the village, and villagers and teachers are busy beside them.

Alley's home is a small three-story building. Like other houses in the village, it has no exterior decoration except for a gray cement coating. Beside the door was a stack of faded hemp stalks dried in the sun. We entered the house through a small door facing the road and saw a bed full of clutter and corn under it. The back door of Alley's house—his house followed the strict orientation of the "teacher" in private space, even though the front door faced no traffic at all. Behind the cubicle is a hall, and there are ancestral tablets on the half-empty shelves against the wall. On the right side, there is a square table of eight immortals, which is full of tributes: plantains with leaves, dragon fruit, and apples arranged in a row. Bowls full of uncooked rice, red and yellow glutinous rice cakes, candies and biscuits are carefully stacked in red glass tall trays, flower vases are inserted, and there are even various cocktails in transparent glass bottles. A series of colorful paper cranes and paper flowers hang above the table, as well as a green papaya filled with red incense sticks.

It's hard for me to recognize so many complex devices at once. Although Ale and I are barely of the same family, this hall is beyond the scope of my experience in the past twenty-four years. I had never walked so directly into a home where a "teacher" was preparing a ceremony. Aleigh's home is probably a foreign land among my hometown.

At this moment, Aleigh's house was full of people. Many villagers are busy in the kitchen, most of them are middle-aged and elderly women. Teacher Wu greeted them one by one in the local Zhuang language. Not long after, Ali came back. Among a large group of busy old people, he looked very young, but this did not prevent him from walking through the hall and kitchen of his home with his slippers on, directing his aunts and aunts to prepare materials and food for sacrifices. . People in the village respectfully call him "teacher".

Teacher Wu introduced me to A Lei, and he nodded lukewarmly to show that he knew me. I half-jokingly said to him that I might want to make a documentary for him in the future. He listened casually, while arranging the sacrifices in the hall, and giving instructions to those who came to ask him from time to time. Just when I couldn't figure out what his attitude towards my suggestion was, he squinted at me and said lightly: "Yes."

I froze for a moment: Good guy, how can I shoot after this.

Aleigh ignored us and joined the crowd preparing for the ceremony, leaving me alone in a daze in front of a bunch of unknown devices. Although A Lei and I were both born in the Zuojiang River Basin in southern Guangxi, according to the classification of local culture by Zhuang scholars before, we belonged to "a cultural circle", but I was still very confused in such a "teacher"'s home.

Moreover, Aleigh is not quite the same as the "teacher" in my memory.

3. Familiar and strange end

For young Zhuang people of our generation, "teacher" is a familiar yet unfamiliar existence. Unlike educators under the sun, our "teachers" are not a profession that can walk in broad daylight. They are often mentioned in secret, just as people treat folk beliefs-we need them, but we should keep them secret.

Among the Zhuang people in southern Guangxi, "teachers" can be roughly divided into three categories.

One is Taoism, practitioners call Daogong or Shigong, they are most influenced by Taoism, with standardized rituals, using Chinese scriptures, often haunting funerals, sending away bad luck for people, or sending people away.

The other two categories can be understood as folk wizards, and they need to "become immortals" to do so. You will hear a lot of similar life stories from them: one day they suddenly feel unwell, go crazy or get sick, and they don’t recover until they set up an altar with a teacher. These folk wizards are said to be able to communicate with ghosts and gods, and to travel between Yin and Yang. They also especially like to "work the night shift"-they always start doing things after dinner at five or six in the afternoon, and keep going until four or five in the morning the next day, causing the audience and helpers to suffer from severe sleep deprivation.

Later, I heard a "teacher" talk about the process of her "becoming a fairy": She suddenly fell ill for no reason, was weak, lay in bed and couldn't get up, and was so dazed that she even picked up a kitchen knife to kill her husband and poured boiling water on herself. Fortunately, the two-year-old son was stopped by his family in time. When her family took her to ask the immortals, she herself told which master she wanted to worship and where the soldiers and horses came from.

Divided into details, this kind of folk wizards who "come out of immortality" can be further divided into "Xian Gong Xian Po" and Mo Mo. The scriptures and the gods to be worshiped are different. For outsiders, the most obvious distinction between the two is the magic weapon they use. At the end of the day, there are unique magic tools: a lyre and a copper ring made of gourds (at the end of the day is called a "horse").

Compared with the common fairies and fairies, the scorpions are mainly distributed in Fusui, Ningming, Longzhou, Pingxiang and other places in the Zuojiang River Basin in southwest Guangxi, and extend to Vietnam south of the border. Alley and his master live in this area. I also live here.

In these places, the Mo is more respected. People believe in a unique system of gods. Male practitioners are called Duo Gong or Mo (Mi) Gong, while women are called Duo Po or Mo Po. Duomo and their ritual system are considered by some scholars to be the unique folk belief system of the Zhuang-Dai-speaking peoples on the Sino-Vietnamese border. There is a folk saying among the Zhuang people that "Dao Gong sends his life, and Du Gong saves his life." When encountering disasters and dangers, at the end of the day, Zhuang will hold a ceremony to pray for disaster relief. During the ceremony, Mo Mo transformed himself into a member of the heaven (usually a general or priest) through his instruments and libretto, and led the Yin soldiers and Yin horses into the heaven and earth.

Scholars have not been able to produce any reliable archaeological evidence for when the Mo Mo first appeared. However, they found that the "Ningmingzhou Chronicles" compiled during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty contained a record of Momo: "The witch, named '魓po'...in the name of making friends with ghosts and gods, and using '匏' as a musical instrument, It looks like a huqin, and its name is 'Ding'..." According to the sorting out of the lineage of Fangcheng zimo in the early 1990s, some scholars infer that the local zimo has been inherited for at least two hundred years.

In fact, as early as the 1950s, during the social and historical investigation of China's ethnic minorities conducted by the whole country, the investigators discovered the existence of Mo Mo: "Gong Gong has scriptures to say goodbye to Gong Gong... When doing things, the hand Playing the two-stringed qin (ti: ŋ), with a string of copper rings hanging on the thumb of the left foot... There are not many Dai people... They are mainly engaged in agricultural production. During the reactionary rule of the Kuomintang, they did not have any political status. "Most of the people these investigators saw were old. They believed that the lineage would be cut off in only fifty or sixty years.

Their concerns are not without reason. In my memories of my hometown, there are very few people in Momo, and most of them are middle-aged and elderly people. Young people seldom get close to the end, especially in cities. I once asked my cousin who grew up in the city: "Do you know anything about Mr. Duo?"

She looked at me with wide eyes: "What is Duke Zi?"

Just as folks refer to the elderly as "Gong" and "Po", names such as "Gong" and "Po" carry some hint of the age of the practitioner. The old people also seem to let the young people avoid such a tradition intentionally or unintentionally, it seems to be a "bad" thing.

In 2022, when I was looking for Zimo, I found a young boy who was hesitating whether to be a duke. Arong is from Jinlongdong, born in the late 1990s. His grandfather was also an old man. When he was young, he liked to take down the piano hanging on the wall by his grandfather to play, but he never learned from him. The traditional way of playing the tianqin at the end of the day is for ceremonies. You can't play and sing easily if you have nothing to do, and you can't teach it to people other than your apprentices. When he was in middle school, Ah Rong wanted to learn Tianqin. On the twelfth day of the first lunar month of that year, he went to buy a piano at the house of Gong Gong Li Shaowei. Ah Rong bought the qin, turned it sideways, hid it under his umbrella, and walked back to his village around the path.

I asked him why he hid it, and he said: "At that time, I still had that kind of consciousness, that is, a young person bought this kind of Tianqin, afraid of being told by others."

I understand him. In 2013, when I went back to my hometown to look for traditional Zhuang costumes, I also met such "others". They said, "What are you a little girl doing in this kind of thing? Only old people wear it."

Momo is another kind of traditional clothing "only worn by old people". What's more, there is another possible crime for the end of the day-"feudal superstition", who is happy to let their children do the end of the day?

When Ah Rong went to the public house, he had to be careful not to let others find out. But in the end he met an acquaintance who asked him why he came here. When he saw the lotus root pond next to him, he was quick to think: "Come and play, just walk around and see if the lotus is blooming."

The lotus has not bloomed, they are still very small.

These cognitive experiences made it hard for me to imagine that the word "Diao Gong" would be attached to a post-90s person before I met Ah Lei. Ah Lei's master, Chen Wenhe, is obviously more in line with my understanding of the traditional end.

Chen Wenhe is over eighty years old, her hair is all white, and her body is thin and thin. When Ah Lei is busy, she sits hunched over among a group of old people, helping to cut paper umbrellas and horses for ceremonies, without attracting attention at all. You don't realize she's a "teacher" until villagers graciously greet her for meals and ask her for advice on arranging ceremonial objects. She looks gentle and kind, but when she puts on the red cassock and strokes the strings of the lyre, it is hard not to be awed by the majesty revealed in her hoarse lyrics, so you believe that she is really a commander in chief. The priest of the army.

Chen Wenhe started making zi in 1980. In the village where she lived, there used to be a man who was classified as a landlord during the Cultural Revolution and died. Later, people took a lot of effort to find the hidden magical artifacts in the "landlord"'s house: a string of copper rings, a sword and an official seal. They brought these things to Chen Wenhe's house and asked her to come out and sing. Chen Wenhe's father wouldn't let her go: "What are you singing? It's too ugly to be called a witch, so don't sing." Chen Wenhe was 49 years old at the time, showing signs of "going out of immortality". She said: "I can't do without singing, the soldiers and horses are already on me."

Once she decided to be a bait, she was particularly determined. Someone in the village pointed at her and said she was abnormal, she immediately fought back: "Don't talk nonsense, we are gods, there is a god named Naliang in Zhongya, and he is the one who came to me."

Soon, Chen Wenhe had a group of followers. In the traditional way of doing things for people, you can’t quote prices. Villagers will go to ask for help when life is not going well or if they feel unwell. You must help, and the reward is determined by the owner. To be critical or to complain.

In 2021, when I visited Chen Wenhe, she still lived in two red-brick houses, half of which were decorated as a shrine. The rice bowl of the shrine was enshrined with her clergy seal, and the lyre was placed on the couch. This is where she usually does things. On the beams of the house, the strings of paper flowers cascading down to the table like a cascade of vines reveal the seniority and title of the owner of the house as a lady-in-law—the higher the rank of the housewife, the longer the paper flowers.

Chen Wenhe always reminds me of an aunt who is a fairy.

My memory of before I was three years old is very vague, but in my family's narration, I sometimes think of this aunt sitting on the red lacquered wood sofa in our kitchen singing divine songs. Her eyes are not good, and her wrinkled face slightly raised into the air when she chanted, her expression was solemn and focused, as if she was gazing at the gods that we can't see.

The Zhuang people believe that people are the flowers in Hua Po's garden, and Hua Po is also in charge of the end. After a woman is pregnant or a child is born, she should ask the girl to hold the "An Hua" ceremony, praying for the flower woman to protect the children and not let them go back to the garden too early. It is said that the ceremonies I went through in my childhood were all performed by this aunt.

It would be difficult for my grandparents to imagine what life would be like without these "teachers". Clearing villages and cleaning houses, securing locks and flowers, replenishing grain and celebrating birthdays, almost all the major life ceremonies of a traditional Zhuang people require their presence. But when there is nothing to do, not everyone is willing to join them. I've known about them since I was a kid, but they don't show up except for major ceremonies. In daily life, the miners take off their robes, farm, sell vegetables, and work part-time, playing the role of ordinary people.

People even avoid them consciously or unconsciously. According to folk theory, in this business, Momo often deals with ghosts and gods. They and their families must abide by many precepts. If something goes wrong, Momo and the people around them will be in danger. In addition, it is said that if a person's life is light, it is easy to be disturbed by ghosts and gods when he is close to the end of the day. My father once told me that our ancestors also had ancestors who became immortals, and after a lot of effort, they asked someone to send away the "soldiers and horses" so that they would not be passed on to future generations.

Probably because of these reasons, or maybe because of other reasons, I didn't have many opportunities to get close to Momo when I was a child, and my family didn't approve of me going to Ale's house to shoot.

4. Those who follow the end

Maybe it's not just my family, but Mo Mo's family and even Mo Mo himself are conflicted about this. You will hear the stories of their "reluctantly becoming a mob" from many mouths. Those stories sound bizarre, but they all have a similar narrative logic: ghosts and spirits possess - family members object - struggle to accept.

But in their family's narrative, the stories sound a little different.

Ah Lei’s sister, Wan Qing, told me that when she learned that Ah Lei was going to become a fairy, her first reaction was to worry that there are very few boys at such a young age who would do this. What will happen to him in the future? Will there be no friends? Can't find the item? After all, Aleigh was not very popular in his youth.

Wanqing remembers that Ah Lei had a conflict with his classmates in middle school and stayed home for a while, but his family finally persuaded him to go back to school. When he returned to the dormitory, he found that his bedding had been thrown away by someone, along with all his daily necessities. He has never returned to school since.

But the current Aleigh is obviously completely different from the "socially impaired person" in the description. Although when I first met, I almost thought he had something against me. But as soon as we left Aleigh's house, he politely asked us on WeChat if we had returned home. After that, he enthusiastically invited me to visit his house every now and then, and we gradually became acquainted. I realized that Alei talked quite freely and lively, and he was by no means a "friendless" person.

When I started photographing Aleigh, I found that Aleigh not only had "no friends", he had too many friends. Every time he does a big ceremony, many peers will come to help. Not only the young people in the village and town, but also some young men from other places.

Ah Lei's cousin, Wu Chunfen, told me: "In the past, there were not many men in our place who were so young. After Mr. Lei did it, I saw so many of them one after another."

Wu Chunfen was one of the first to follow Ah Lei. She witnessed the process of Ah Lei from being a fairy to being a teacher. Not everyone who becomes a celestial being can become a master. To formally do "this line of work", you need to have a teacher, set up an altar, and learn the corresponding rituals. The learning process may last for several years, until the master thinks that this apprentice can be born. Master, hold the precept ceremony for him/her, so that he/she can start to handle the rituals independently.

Wu Chunfen was amazed at Ah Lei's speed of leaving the army. Even the "big sister" - Ah Lei's senior sister who has followed Chen Wenhe for many years, is not as proficient as Ah Lei in singing large-scale ceremonies. When Ah Lei performed ceremonies together with his master and senior sisters, he was often the lead singer.

After A Lei officially became a teacher, his mother, aunt, and cousins became the first group of believers and assistants. Afterwards, more and more people came to Aleigh to do his deeds.

To complete a ceremony, Momo needs to do a lot of preparatory work, and the symbolic items used in the ceremony need to be handmade in advance. During the ceremony, someone needs to rock the horse (shake the copper bell to simulate the sound of running horses), light incense candles, prepare tea and wine, etc. Ah Lei's female family relatives, Aunt Qiu, Wu Chunfen, etc., will assist him in rocking the horse during large-scale ceremonies.

The first time I photographed Alei for the ceremony all night, Alei sat in the lobby of his house playing the lyra and singing tunes to invite gods. Incense burners were placed on the ancestral table and the table for offering sacrifices to the gods, and the believers continued to burn incense. The lobby was filled with smoke, making people weep. At twelve o'clock in the middle of the night, I was so smoked that I couldn't stand it anymore, so I ran outside the living room to relax.

I took a few steps outside and found Ah Lei's mother, Aunt Qiu, sitting on the steps in the yard, so I also sat down on the steps beside her.

Aunt Qiu looked at me with a puzzled expression: "Will you sit when I sit? It's dirty. I dare not sit until I have a bath."

I said, "I didn't take a shower either."

she laughed. She has been busy all day, and now she has time to sit down and rest for a while. The T-shirt is stuck to her back, with several sweat stains printed on it. Probably because of staying up late for a long time, she is a little fat and always sweating profusely. Later, Wanqing told me that whenever Ah Lei performed a large-scale ceremony, her mother would go on and on for three or four days, and she might only sleep for an hour or two every day.

"I was busy making wine a few days ago. There were a lot of people. There was also a lot of work. The teacher went to rest at three or four o'clock, and we also went to rest. Take a rest, don't squint too much, or it will be over. Get up early to cook meals for the guests eat."

Aunt Qiu said.

Aunt Qiu no longer goes out to work. She rents out most of the family's land to help Ah Lei full-time. She also no longer opposed A-Lei's being a prince like she did back then. Maybe it was because after becoming a prince, A-Lei had a certain income, or maybe it was because A-Lei was finally able to settle down in one place.

Aunt Qiu also referred to her son as "teacher". Because her son is the father-in-law, she has many godsons and daughters. The Zhuang people like to make their children recognize natural objects or make them "parents". It is said that they can bless their children to grow up safely. A Lei is still unmarried, and those who belong to him cannot recognize him as a father, but only as a brother.

"I don't know when he will find his wife." She suddenly sighed. I reassured her that she would find it, but I couldn't find any examples of missing objects to support this reassurance. The only consolation, perhaps, is that Arey gets to know a lot of different people without ever going out.

After A-Lei left his teacher, there were always young people and children coming and going in the family, some were his sons and daughters, and some were A-Lei's peers. At first I was shocked that there were so many young Mo Mo, but later I found that Alei knew almost all the immortals in the entire Zuojiang area.

I asked him, "Why are there more young people becoming immortals now?"

He rolled his eyes: "Maybe the current gods like young people."

Alley later told me that the Internet played a tandem role. They have online social groups, will introduce "business" to each other, and will also help each other with large-scale rituals held by each other. Compared with the desolate scene I experienced in my hometown a few years ago, the online community of A Lei and his friends seems to be thriving.

I asked A Lei to pull me into one of the groups, and after entering, I saw the name of the group: "Tianqin Cultural Exchange Group".

5. The Rise of Lyra

In Guangxi, Tianqin has almost become synonymous with Zhuang national musical instruments. Few people know about Momo, but everyone seems to know Tianqin, and even the ritual that Momo performed later was called "Tianqin Ritual" or "Tianqin Ritual" by many people.

In fact, when Mr. Wu Bin asked me if I wanted to see the Tianjiu ceremony held by Ah Lei, he said to go to the folk Tianqin event. People from the Zuojiang area are well aware of this, and the folk Tianqin activity is a ritual of making the end of the day.

Tianqin (called "叮ti:ŋ" in Zhuang) is one of the main instruments used in the rituals of Momo. In 1983, scholar Liao Jinlei published an article in the magazine "Musical Instruments" introducing this unique folk musical instrument. The article shows the Tianqin of the partial people (Zhuang branch) in Fangcheng Autonomous County of various ethnic groups, and writes: "'Tiaotian' was originally a deceptive and strange form of superstitious performance... Tianpo's Tianqin is called the heavenly thing , you can’t move at ordinary times, and you can take it off and play it after offering incense sticks when necessary.”

Who first translated "ding (ti:ŋ)" into "Tianqin" is unknown. From the 1980s to the early 21st century, scholars successively went to Longzhou, Fangcheng and other places on the Sino-Vietnamese border to investigate the "Tianqin Culture". According to the recollections of the staff of the local cultural department and the records of some scholars, part of the investigation originated from the invitation of the Propaganda Department of the Longzhou County Party Committee at that time. She found out the existence of Tianqin from the old materials of the unit, and decided to develop it as a musical instrument.

In 2003, musicians Fan Sim and Liang Shaowu came to Longzhou to help the local government develop Tianqin. Fan Ximu and Li Shaowei, the Duke of Longzhou, have known each other for a long time. He was inspired by the tune of Li Shaowei's ceremonies, and composed the most popular song "Singing Tianyao" of Tianqin, and assisted the local cultural department to form "Tianqin Women" combination".

At the "Southeast Asian Style Night" at the Nanning International Folk Song Art Festival that year, "Singing Tianyao" and "Tianqin Girls Group" became an instant hit.

Xiaoying is a member of the first generation "Tianqin Girls Group". She told me that they formed a group more than ten days before the stage performance. Many people in the group were originally dancers. The artist Han Xing who followed Nanning practiced Tianqin day and night and played "Singing Ballads". "I've been singing this song in my dreams, you can't even sing it, little swallow, you can only sing sky ballads... your finger holding the pick is flattened."

The Tianqin made by Han Xing and others was deliberately distinguished from the magical instruments of the Momos. This lyre was played with picks, and later the number of strings was increased from two to three. After the "Southeast Asian Style Night", the Tianqin girl group has been invited to perform continuously, and the pictures of the "Tianqin Beauty" wearing a black robe of the Budai branch have been printed on the streets of Longzhou and in travel albums. Xiaoying and other members felt the taste of being popular and the interviews that came one after another, everything seemed to be going well. She never thought of going to the minions to learn the traditional Tianqin technique. Until one day in 2004, the group performed in Ningming County. After the performance, a reporter from Sina.com asked Xiaoying a question: "What does the string of bells represent?"

Xiaoying panicked. No one had ever told her what the symbolic meaning of this string of bells was.

Until now, she still clearly remembers the feeling of panic. She said: "I don't understand either. At that time, how did I know about the relationship with the master (referring to Gong Gong), and the more rings on the bell after reaching the level (such things)."

The "bells" mentioned by the reporter are actually a string of copper rings, which Mo Mo calls "horses". Its shaking can simulate the rhythmic marching sound of horses wearing neck bells. Shaking the copper ring is called "rocking horse". The moment it is shaken in the ceremony is the moment when Momo leads thousands of horses and horses in the fairyland to ride the clouds and ride the horses. But Xiaoying didn't understand it at all at the time, so she could only make it up now and say that it was a "talisman" that passed the test vaguely.

But Xiaoying cannot be blamed for this. The people who developed Tianqin seem to have formed a secret consensus. If Tianqin is to be promoted, Tianqin must be separated from the Momo culture.

In 2007, the "Tianqin Art of the Zhuang Nationality" jointly declared by Longzhou County and Pingxiang City was included in the first batch of district-level intangible cultural heritage lists in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and listed in the "Traditional Music" project category. The staff of the Longzhou County Cultural Center were encouraged and began to apply for Tianqin as a national intangible cultural heritage.

Nong Ruiqun, a local cultural expert who had just joined the Longzhou County Culture and Sports Bureau at that time, put forward his proposition that the "original ecological" Tianqin should be declared as a folk custom, not a musical instrument. Because it comes from the rituals done by Mo Mo, it belongs to the traditional folk belief culture of Mo Mo.

However, in 2010 and 2013, they submitted applications for the Tianqin ceremony twice according to the direction of folk customs, but there was no reply.

The magic of Tianqin seems to have disappeared, and no one has told them why this once-thriving "intangible cultural heritage" effort to step out of Guangxi will fail year after year. Only Liang Shaowu, who is good friends with the Longzhou cultural and tourism department, once hinted to them: "If you apply in another direction, it will be difficult for those who have anything to do with religion to pass."

They see no hope of Tianqin's declaration of national intangible cultural heritage. Until 2018, things changed a bit. Bordering on the southern part of Guangxi, Vietnam, a neighbor with many villages bordering each other and separated by a river, joined this action to "intangible cultural heritage" of the Momo culture and Tianqin.

6. Both ends of the border

Many topics are sensitive due to borders.

Shen Guangyu is an elderly man living near the border. His village is divided into two by the border, with the lower half in China and the upper half in Vietnam. He is a naive "old urchin". It is said that once when he was at home by himself and someone passed by the door, he pretended to be unwell and sat on the stairs to call for help. After the person entered the door and helped him up, he held him tightly: "Thank you for your hard work, let me give you a drink of water as a thank you gift." The thank you gift is a bottle of "mineral water" with wine in it. He is well known for his hospitality and wonderful sense of humor. He used to be a Red Guard who took the lead in smashing the temple of King Li in his village; he was also a Chinese militiaman in the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 and opened fire against Vietnam; later he became a Duke and married a Vietnamese wife.

In 2018, I went to visit Shen Guangyu with Nong Ruiqun. Before leaving, I made a phone call. Nong Ruiqun put down the phone and said that we had to go early, and that Teacher Shen would "go abroad for work" at night. As a result, not long after we arrived, Mr. Shen brought out the wine he made himself, as if he had completely forgotten that he was going to "go abroad". But to put it bluntly, going abroad is just riding a motorcycle, and it takes ten minutes to go back and forth, which is more convenient than entering the city.

In fact, it is not easy to distinguish between Vietnamese and Chinese near the border.

One morning, I was in Longzhou to visit another old woman, Jin Chao. We chatted very happily, and Jin Chao offered to play a piece of lyra for me. She asked her husband to light the incense, placed the fruits I brought on the table, signed up for me to pray before the gods, and then started playing. She played three different melodies, tactful and soft, and sang a folk song.

I realized that I had never heard this melody before, and it was different from the style sung by Fusui and Jinlongdong's Mo Mo on the border. Jin Chao revealed the answer to the mystery, and I guessed right, the tune came from Vietnam.

Jin Chao is proficient in more than four languages and characters. I asked her how she learned Vietnamese characters. Even for most border residents who have multilingual communication skills, mastering written characters is not an inevitable skill. She smiled and said that she was born in Vietnam, was adopted by relatives in China, and went to Vietnam to go to school when she was a teenager. Later, her adoptive parents became seriously ill, and she returned to China to take care of them, and then got married and had children, until now. Officially, she is a "Vietnamese" with a foreigner's residence certificate.

Ethnic groups that have the rituals of Momo and Lyra are transnational peoples. In China, this ethnic group is identified as a different branch of the Zhuang nationality, and the Momo culture is mainly distributed in the Zuojiang River Basin area where the Zhuang people live in southern Guangxi. In Vietnam, they are distributed in the northern provinces of Gao Bang, Lang Son, Bei Tai, Ha Giang, and Xuan Quang, where the Dai and Nong ethnic groups live together.

The Dai ethnic group is the largest ethnic minority in Vietnam and enjoys a high political and cultural status. In the 16th century, Gao Binh established the Mo family dynasty, which made the Dai people's settlement once the political and economic center of Vietnam. After the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a group of Dai people who participated in the revolution early held important positions. Nong Duc Manh, a member of the Dai people, served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Thanks to their efforts, the culture of the Dai people has been valued in Vietnam.

Hai Hua, a scholar who studies Sino-Vietnamese national culture, believes that these historical events promoted the development and spread of Dai culture, including the belief in Mo Mo. In addition, due to the research done in Vietnam by the French Institute for the Far East in modern times, the international academic community is obviously more familiar with the end of Vietnam, and the research results based on the Vietnamese Lyra ceremony are also more abundant.

In places such as Longzhou and Pingxiang on the Sino-Vietnamese border, there are local rumors that Vietnam competes with China through Tianqin. Since 2004, they have vigorously promoted Tianqin culture, not only encouraging Mo Mo to perform on stage, A series of professional schools were also established, and the official and private lines went hand in hand, expanding the distribution of Tianqin users from the north to the whole country.

By 2018, word had reached China. Vietnam will declare the Tianqin ceremony as a world-class intangible cultural heritage.

Chinese scholars worry that the Tianqin ceremony, which is an important part of the Zhuang culture, is listed as a cultural heritage by Vietnam, which will affect the identity of the border ethnic groups and further affect the national territorial security. What makes these scholars and officials even more disturbing is that although the belief in Momo spreads across the two countries, no one has actually verified it on the spot. Which country has the wider spread of this culture? Who has the longest history? However, Vietnam does have the strength to apply for World Heritage unilaterally. Lao Zhao, then director of the Institute of Ethnic Studies of the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, was worried about this. He believes that this culture is shared across borders, but Vietnam has not declared it jointly with China. He worried that Vietnam had something to do with it.

Nong Ruiqun told me that Lao Zhao came to the gate of his community on a rainy night and asked him to talk in detail about the Tianqin ceremony in Longzhou and the possible impact of Tianqin's application for world heritage in Vietnam. Some scholars told me that Lao Zhao visited several counties where Tianqin was distributed. After returning to Nanning, he worked with relevant Guangxi agencies to draft a report on Tianqin's application for World Heritage. The report finally arrived in Beijing and was criticized by high-level officials. In October 2018, the then Ministry of Culture sent a team to the Sino-Vietnamese border to investigate.

Opinions vary about what happened next. I have heard many different versions of the attitudes of these investigators towards Tianqin and the Mo culture. Some said they expressed "full support", while others said they thought the Tian Qin ceremony was nothing more than a feudal superstition and scoffed at it. The only certainty is that China did not "get ahead of Vietnam".

From December 9th to 14th, 2019, at the 14th meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage held in Bogota, Colombia, UNESCO presented the Practices of Then by Tày , Nùng and Thái Ethnic Groups) are inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

In 2020, the staff of Guangxi's cultural department finally received a reply from above, suggesting that they change Tianqin to an art form, and stop mentioning things like religion and folk beliefs.

They did.

I asked a cadre of a cultural center who participated in the application that the inheritors of intangible cultural heritage require a pedigree, which means that the inheritors they declare must only be performers of the modern Tianqin at the end of the day, without mentioning religion and folk beliefs. how do they do it

The cadre smiled meaningfully: "So applying for intangible cultural heritage is a technical job... Let's just write that Tianqin has gone through a process of evolution from entertaining the sky to entertaining people."

On May 24, 2021, the fifth batch of national intangible cultural heritage was announced, and the "Tianqin Art of the Zhuang Nationality" in Chongzuo City was impressively listed. In the same year, a report on intangible cultural heritage wrote: "Through the excavation and improvement of musicians, Tianqin gradually stripped off the ancient primitive religious color and became a charming national musical instrument."

7. Momo and their village

One evening in the summer of 2020, A Lei was invited to Pingxiang to give a food supplement ceremony to a family of Vietnamese returned overseas Chinese. Replenishment of food is a ceremony specially done for the elderly. People believe that there is a granary in the life of a person. When the elderly reach a certain age, the rice in the granary will be almost used up. It is necessary to invite the Duke to add food to the elderly.

When we arrived at the family's house, we saw several daughters of the master's family, but we didn't see the old man who wanted to supplement the food. It was only later that I found out that the old mother of the main family who wanted to supplement the food was in Canada with her daughter and son-in-law. But it’s not a big problem, the ceremony is originally a remote operation, and the objects that replenish the food don’t actually need to participate in the ceremony. The ones who perform the ceremony are the duke and the old man’s children.

The problem is that Aleigh brought a lot of materials for the ceremony to the scene, and did not bring his usual assistants for the ceremony. The one who met him in Pingxiang was a netizen, Xiao Lu, a lover of doomsday rituals. Although he is a hobbyist, Xiaolu is not good at doing these things. Alei calmly ordered the master to prepare glutinous rice, bamboo poles, and divide paper clothes, but the paper-cuts for other ceremonies—such as Mao Lang on the ladder to the sky—had to be done by himself.

"Can you cut it?" A Lei looked up at the second sister of the master's family.

The second sister hurriedly shook her head: "I haven't cut it yet, I don't remember who taught me about July 14th."

"Can't you cut it?" the eldest daughter of the host's family, Sister Hai, asked Xiao Lu.

Xiao Lu looked back: "My dad knows how to cut in my house. He said his grandma taught him."

For a while, the scene stared wide-eyed. And the more difficult thing is yet to come. Aleigh needs someone to rock his horse during the ceremony. Sister Hai searched all the neighbors who can rock horses, and found that they are all old people. Xiao Lu even started to think about me: "Wouldn't that one be, the one you brought?"

A Lei looked up at him, and said lightly: "Anyone can shake it, and you can too."

The ceremony that night was held on the sixth floor, the shrine where the family enshrines ancestral tablets. The weather was very hot and the shrine was airtight, and I was soon choked up by the smoke and burst into tears. With tears in my eyes, I saw Sister Hai turned on the video on her mobile phone, and a gray-haired grandmother appeared on the screen.

"Auntie, look, Master is here to give you food supplements to celebrate your birthday."

On the other side of the screen is daytime. Grandma is wearing a purple silk dress, her face is close to the camera, her eyes are narrowed and she is grinning. Sister Hai stood her mobile phone next to Ah Lei who was playing the lyre. The room with LCD TV and hanging lights on the mobile phone screen was like a small piece of white tiles, inlaid with incense candles, lyra, flowers and golden brass rings. in the real world. Sister Hai happily said to Grandma: "Health and longevity are eight hundred years old."

"The old people used to like to hear Master sing this." Sister Hai told me.

Pingxiang and Fusui's Zhuang dialects are different, and Mo Mo's libretto is often used in ancient languages, so she actually couldn't understand what A Lei was singing. But sitting in the shrine, listening to A Lei concentrate on pressing the strings and singing, and Xiao Lu shaking the copper ring beside her, another kind of solemnity appeared on her face.

At the entrance of the narrow shrine, a few elderly people sat nearby. They heard that a teacher was coming to perform the ceremony, and they climbed up to the six floors panting to watch.

The ceremony went on all night. Finally, under A Lei's guidance, the host's daughters solemnly added raw rice and coins to the rice jar symbolizing the old man's granary, and sealed it.

"When I was a child, I always felt very mysterious when I heard the sound of tinkling (lyra and brass rings) coming from other people's homes. Now that I'm making it myself, I don't feel it anymore." Alei once told me. I am actually the same as him, and the playing and singing of Mo Mo constituted the earliest mystical experience in my childhood. For a child from a closed village, the outside world is out of reach, but the mysterious world sung by Mo Mo opens the door to the sound of the zither: Mo Mo turns into a god general, leads soldiers and horses past the earth temple of the village, and comes to the sky above the village , Passing through different fairy gates with different lights, came to the place in ancient legends, crossed mountains and mountains, crossed the sea, met different gods, and had a dialogue with them.

In ritual, the deities also have their characteristics and personalities. On the way back from Pingxiang, Ah Lei asked me if I could understand the Vietnamese spoken by Sister Hai and the others. I said no, and asked him if he understood? He said he only knows a little bit, but there are exceptions.

"When?"

"When I invited God, I invited Vietnamese ghosts, and I suddenly spoke Vietnamese." A Lei was serious.

I haven't seen Vietnamese ghosts in the rituals he does, but I've seen less serious ones. The street-crossing part of the Tianjiu ceremony is one of the favorite parts of the onlookers. At this time, the "teacher" will descend on the gods - as for who will descend, no one knows. Once when crossing the street, Alei looked around suddenly with an angry expression on his face. The grandmothers around him understood and began to light cigarettes and toast him. After smoking a bag of cigarettes, Alei slowly began to "speak for God" before he sang halfway , the grannies around him were already leaning forward and backward with laughter, and the grannie who was closest to him blushed, covered her face and said, "Do you want to be so old?"

I asked Ah Lei's loyal "fan" Tan Sangu to help translate what Ah Lei sang. Tan Sangu burst out laughing and told me that the god he descended from fell in love with the grandma in front of him and said, "Last time, I made a love affair the month before last. , I only hope to be a couple with you when I come back.”

Every time Ah Lei performed a ceremony, the house was always surrounded by seven aunts and six aunts in the neighborhood. Alley jokingly called them his "fans." The "fans" are the most honest viewers, and when encountering a not-so-fun session, they just sit on the mat and fall asleep without any scruples. There are also some "fans" who actually come to get together to join in the fun. I asked a grandmother if she could understand A Lei's libretto, and she shook her head, "I don't quite understand." After the ceremony, the teacher himself had to cook the dishes and greet the guests for dinner with his family. The grandmas gathered together and lay side by side on various beds in Alei's house at night, chattering and bustling.

Tan Sangu is a relatively "professional" audience. She has followed A Lei for many years, almost every time A Lei does a bigger ceremony, she will come and help him cut paper. She has a pair of skillful hands and can make all kinds of ceremonial objects, such as paper cranes, paper flowers, mao lang, and can turn waste paper and the paper shells of old cigarette boxes into exquisite collage paper clothes. She is also one of the few literate believers and can speak fluent Mandarin. In fact, she was a bright young girl who had studied in middle school with excellent grades. The teachers liked her, but because of her father's bad background, she lost the chance to go to college, married early and had children. At the age of knowing the destiny, the children have grown up and worked. She is no longer content to stay at home with her husband who "knows nothing". the happiest moment.

Most of those watching the ceremony were female villagers. In some large-scale ceremonies, the uncles in the village will also come to help arrange the venue and kill chickens and pigs. For example, making Tianjiu for three consecutive days during the Fusui Zhai Festival is a blessing that Mo Mo made for the whole clan and the whole village on special days, and the whole village must participate. In Jinlongdong on the Sino-Vietnamese border, before the official start of farming in spring, people celebrate the Nongyong Festival. On the day of the festival, Momo performed a request ceremony for the whole village in the open space of the field. Every villager had to bring tributes to the field and place them in the field. Harvest.

The traditional jimo is responsible for holding ceremonies and praying to heaven for the village community. Even for villages governed by modern organizations, these rituals are not necessarily important.

In 2018, scholar Xiong Xun came to Jinlongdong to shoot a documentary about the Nongyi Festival, and my friend A Yi was a local interpreter for him. A Yi recorded in her diary their research process that year - in the village where Shen Guangyu lived, a village committee secretary told Xiong Xun: "This year I am too busy doing poverty alleviation, and I can't allocate funds for the work However, on the fourteenth day of the first lunar month of that year, Shen Guangyu still came to the fields in the early morning to worship the gods and pray for the village as in previous years, even though there were only about 20 villagers who came to the scene to participate in the sacrifice that year. He said that this is not a task, but his obligation.

Where there is trouble, traditional habits will be carried on. Zhuang folk tradition has the habit of burning paper in the wild on the roadside on July 14th. One year on July 14th, Alei and I went to the intersection near their village, where Aleigh wanted to burn paper for a ceremony. There used to be car accidents at this intersection, and it was known as the "Corner of Horror" in the whole town. Aleigh himself had to pretend to tremble when he said it. But when the fire lighted up and the sound of the copper ring sounded, I didn't think of any horror stories. I remembered that my grandma once told me that July 14th is the most important festival besides the New Year's Day, and everyone in the underworld has to go home , Lighting lamps and burning paper for them in the wild can provide a little money for the wandering dead so that they can find their way home smoothly.

Alei said that before he came out of immortality, no one in his village came to the intersection to worship the lonely soul without a master for a long time. But the villagers cannot be blamed for forgetting the tradition so easily. There are many wanderers, but few worshipers.

In the land where the last gods came, people rushed to a greater miracle—the city, although there were not many ways for them in the city: to enter the factory or go to the construction site. In traditional society, Mo Mo often performed ceremonies for the villagers while farming to make ends meet. But now, farming at home is no longer an option, and the price of agricultural products makes it almost impossible for farmers to get rich by farming. In fact, the main method used by the local government to lift poor households out of poverty is to mobilize farmers to go out to work.

Staying in the village means that the miners need to find other means to maintain their livelihoods. Some Momo began to charge fees for private rituals, but they had to be careful to separate their activities from "feudal superstition." When I followed Wu Chunfen to the Guanyin Cave in Baxian to watch the song fair, I met a fortune teller who could tell you a fortune for a few yuan. Alei’s family clearly "identified" such people: "These are Liar, (fortune-telling) is so easy..."

Momo doesn't think they are omnipotent. Alei's father told me that one of his fellow workers in Anhui wanted to ask Alei for help. Alei hesitated for a long time, saying that he didn't know whether his soldiers and horses could go so far away and whether he could get help from the local gods. Later, he invited soldiers and horses with the mentality of giving it a try. A Lei's father said that it was actually quite accurate.

Whether or not they respect the power of the gods and admit that they are only using the power of the gods to help others is the basis for them to distinguish themselves from the deceitful "great immortals" in their self-identification. relationships, gain acceptance from people.

As an intangible cultural heritage, Tianqin has become an outlet for them to put this self-identification on the table. With Tian Qin, they are no longer just "wizards", but also have a new identity that can be called "Heirs of Tian Qin's Inheritance". But in fact, almost everyone has a different opinion on what the "feudal superstition" is. As a kind of folk belief, the end culture is not so easy to distinguish from "feudal superstition". They can only falter in the cracks and try to find a way to go.

8. Survival in the cracks

In China, after Tianqin was established as a national intangible cultural heritage, Chongzuo Municipal People's Congress held many meetings to discuss how to protect and inherit this "intangible cultural heritage". Where is the boundary between traditional culture and "feudal superstition"? .

Some scholars advocate looking at "whether there is a fee for the ceremony", while another more common cognition is much simpler-whether to light incense.

Many young people like to post their own ritual videos on video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou. Just as their group name is "Tianqin Cultural Exchange Group", most of the labels on these videos are "intangible cultural heritage", "Tianqin", and "ethnic culture". After going through the baptism of title ban and current limitation, they gradually figured out the secret of "passing the review"-the video of the joss sticks can be easily identified as illegal content.

It is absolutely not allowed to light incense on the stage. On April 16, 2021, the Guangxi Department of Culture and Tourism held a Zhuang Tianqin art exhibition to celebrate "March 3rd". Play together at the end of the day. He divided the performance into two parts, "traditional repertoire" and "new repertoire". "Traditional Repertoire" invited 5 singers to perform the ceremonial repertoire on stage, and Ah Lei also went.

This is the first time I have seen Chinese Mo Mo playing and singing ritual repertoire on the stage since I was a child. The singers seemed a little nervous, there were many places where they sang out of tune and played wrong notes, and Aleigh's sweat stuck his hair to his forehead. There were no ceremonial items or incense on the stage, only two futon cushions. Many cameras were facing them off the stage, and the whole performance was broadcast live in VR.

When the singers were playing and singing, Ah Rong was temporarily called to rock the horse for them.

After repeated setbacks in learning the lyre in the early years, Ah Rong later became an art student. He taught himself how to play and sing the lyre through his classmates and videos, and was active in various lyre and folk song performances. He also became acquainted with the young men. In the past two years, he has been a teacher and started to be a late apprentice.

I asked Ah Wing if he would sing traditional ritual songs on stage, and he shook his head.

"You don't light incense, what if something happens? Can't I sing some folk songs? Why do you want to find trouble for yourself?"

An official in charge of religious affairs said that he understands the mentality of the mobs. He said: "Look at those performances that go up the mountain of swords and down into the sea of fire, the backstage is secretly lighting incense. No incense is allowed, there is no incense to bless, and who will be responsible when something happens. But (if incense is lit) this is a folk ceremony. , it is not acceptable to enter the hall of elegance."

A scholar from Beijing once asked Ah Rong and Gong Gong A Hai to sing a ceremonial repertoire. Ah Rong worried that if he did not light incense to attract soldiers and horses, he would be dizzy, but lighting incense in front of experts would make them appear superstitious. In the end, they excerpted a very short passage and sang it upside down by mixing the lyrics of different passages, so as not to really alarm the "soldiers and horses".

Ritual songs are rarely sung on stage, and there are few newly composed songs, which makes the repertoire that Chinese lyre performers can sing very limited. Ah Lei doesn't like those new songs very much. When we went to drink milk tea, he held his roasted grass jelly milk tea and explained to me why:

"Others (referring to Vietnam) are also on the stage, but they are very gentle, and there are not so many. Tianqin's ancient religious blessings have an effect on our planting and crops." He made an analogy, Said that the Tianqin performance without the tone of traditional rituals is as dull as the lack of milk tea in the burning jelly - he is obviously a persistent milk tea party, "What will you get if you add coffee to the burning jelly?"

"I will get mandarin duck milk tea." I teased him.

He was speechless, took out his mobile phone and showed me the Tian Qin video in Vietnam.

Many Chinese singers will watch Vietnamese Tianqin ceremonies and songs through the Internet, including those performed on stage. Their singing forms are indeed more diverse and their tunes are richer.

Unlike the government's nervousness and vigilance over the ownership of "intangible cultural heritage", ordinary people on both sides of the border do not always distinguish between "you and me". At least before the epidemic blockade caused the exchanges between the two sides to almost come to a standstill, Chinese and Vietnamese border residents always participated in each other's song festivals, sang to each other, and intermarried. Jinlongdong's special festival "Nongyi Festival" is held in the form of taking turns to sit in villages. From the eighth to the fourteenth day, it is held in different villages on the Chinese side, and on the fifteenth day, it is held in Xialang, Vietnam.

Xiaoying was also shocked by the Tianqin performance in Vietnam. She still remembers that a few years ago, the China-Vietnam Culture and Art Festival was held in Shuikou, a border town in China. Light it up. It’s really incense, and light it with the incense you found.”

After watching a lot of vietnamese tianqin performance videos, I suddenly found that Alei's ritual singing is very similar to that in a certain video. The way Ah Lei sings the ceremony is different from his master Chen Wenhe. He explained to me before that the master's singing method is too long: "I can't think of the end after singing a sentence, and I am very tired. Singing for days and nights It's very troublesome. If you sing short words, the land gods will remember it better."

Many Chinese duo and tianqin lovers learned Vietnamese playing and singing methods by watching videos, and it is also possible that they learned it through exchanges with Vietnamese duo. Some scholars are anxious about this, worrying that "our" culture will be taken away by Vietnam, blurring the national identity of border residents.

But scholar Haihua is open to this: "What's the point? Vietnam will also say to learn from your Zhuang people. We should have this kind of cultural self-confidence." Learn the rituals, dress and songs of the end of China.

The well-known young man in Vietnam, A Shou, has a very good relationship with the Chinese men. He has come to China several times to participate in the activities of inheritors of intangible cultural heritage, and once asked Haihua to buy Chinese clothes for him. When the Chinese monks he befriended were doing large-scale rituals, he would occasionally come to help.

Ah Thou is a native of Lang Son Province, Vietnam. It is said that he began to learn how to make zither with his grandmother at the age of 13. Unlike Chinese zithers, which rely entirely on folk traditions, he once studied Tianqin playing and singing at the Vietnam Art College for three years. He was also invited to perform Lyra ceremony in Paris on behalf of Vietnam. Now, while farming at home, he holds large pujas for the rich to earn subsidies. In large ashrams in Vietnam, it is said that one session can earn thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan.

Haihua knows these things, and is therefore worried that many young people have gone astray, performing ceremonies just to borrow money from traditions, and eventually develop into "superstitious activities" to swindle money.

There are indeed people who are here to make money. I once met one of Aleigh's young apprentices at his home. This apprentice was engaged in investment, oiled his hair, and drove a BMW. I asked him why he wanted to learn 魓, and he said: "Investment can't be done for a lifetime. I think that when I get old, I will have a craft and earn a living."

Haihua said that the traditional moss is not like this. Traditionally, it is an irresistible destiny to ward off disasters and relieve worries for people. No old man has ever made a fortune because of a good ritual. Sangu Tan told me that she went to play at the home of Master Nong, Alei's junior sister. Master Nong is in his seventies and has been a concubine for more than ten years. Tan Sangu said that she only found out after she went there that "she lived a primitive life. The mosquito net was the same color as a used rag, and there was a big hole. When I looked up, a cat was squatting on the window. I dare not sleep, afraid Here comes the cat."

Before Tan Sangu left, Master Nong wanted to give her a bag of corn. She couldn't bear to take it, and jokingly said to her, "I don't want it, you live a primitive life, I don't want your corn."

Alley's family members remember the poverty at home in the past. Alei and Wanqing started working when they were five or six years old. One Mid-Autumn Festival, when Aunt Qiu came home from outside, she found that the children were eating porridge at home, and there were no mooncakes or meat. Ah Lei’s sister-in-law, A Dong, told me that the reason she returned to her hometown was that before she worked in a factory, she earned a lot of money, but she was always on the assembly line. When she fell ill, all the money she earned went to the doctor. A Lei's father also returned to the village after a serious illness.

Aleigh should have been working outside. When he first left school and went to the construction site, he still had good expectations. Sister Wanqing said that he worked very hard to do the loading and unloading with his father, and never complained about suffering or tiredness. He was paid the first month's salary. He couldn't wait to buy gifts for his sister and mother, and rushed back to give them to them. But he still can't settle down outside. After he started making podcasts, Aleigh finally settled down in his hometown.

Being a hero is the "job" that Alley has done for the longest time, and perhaps also the hardest he has done. Unlike Mo Mo, who was mainly engaged in agriculture in the past, he was on the way to the ceremony almost every day, from one village to another, from one city to another, singing seven or eight songs all night every few days with dark circles under his eyes Hour. Every time Mr. Wu Bin saw his "off-duty time", he would sigh: "Eating this bowl of rice is not easy."

Although Ah Lei occasionally complains that he is tired, most of the time, he enjoys this full-time job. He is used to his "soldiers and horses". Once when he was going to another place for a ceremony, he yelled that there were not enough cars and he had to drive two. I counted for him: "Your mother, your aunt, you, me, elder brother, five people, why is it not enough?"

He said, "Then where are my soldiers and horses sitting?"

Sometimes I get the feeling that Alley is grateful that "Soldiers" found him. When he recounted his experience of becoming a fairy, he said: "At that time, it may be because of poverty, and those ghosts and gods will know this. Such people will be better and guide people to be good." He believes that ghosts and gods are more willing to choose poor people. Just as the poor believe in ghosts and gods more than the rich.

But the very poor obviously can't do the end. Jinchao, the queen of the fairyland, learned from a teacher, and it took a long time before he officially became a teacher. The reason was that his family had no money to buy tribute and ritual supplies for the ceremony. After starting to make zi, the gods in the family should also be kept enshrined, and tributes are needed. Most of the things brought by the believers will be packaged and distributed after the tribute is paid. If you leave too much at the end, you will be criticized by the community. Alei had to work very hard to support himself with the income from the rituals. What's more, he just bought a house in the city with a loan.

"Why do you always sing at night?" Once I stayed up with Ah Lei for two big nights, and I was really about to collapse.

Alei rolled his eyes: "That's how the ancestors passed it down."

Later he told me that according to tradition, day and night are reversed between the underworld and the underworld, so the method of raising troops should be carried out at the turn of day and night. However, in order to adapt to the time rhythm of young people in modern life, he sometimes makes some fine-tuning, such as singing earlier during the Mid-Autumn Festival, so that he can finish earlier and go to the street with friends to eat barbecue and sing karaoke.

In fact, Alley has been careful to try to explain tradition with modern knowledge. In addition to his small group, he hopes to be understood by more people. He is also very good at explaining traditions with modern words. When he explained to me "Zhongfu Middle Road (called kjaŋ xa kjaŋ lo) in Zhuang language", the legendary location of the fairy gate of the fairy world, he said: "When doing things here, it is like the central road. No matter if you go to the city or another province, you must first tell the central government...Because the beliefs of gods in each province are different, you need to hand over the department here, just like The company's HR department and finance department have a file in the past."

He always emphasizes positive energy when vibrato, and he discusses Tianqin's quality tone with other people in the group. As a man who has received modern education, he would persuade those who came to see him for a ceremony when they were sick to go to the hospital first, saying that they should believe in science.

After going to Nanning to participate in the "March 3" performance, a reporter from the district TV station interviewed him and asked him, "Why do you want to learn Tianqin?" I put aside all the words I chose, and answered squarely: "Because this is the national culture, I have a sense of responsibility to pass it on."

Nine, the end

The new crown epidemic came roaring in when we were unprepared. In the spring of 2020, Alei widely posted on his circle of friends to persuade believers not to gather at his home. He drew a "disease-removing talisman" for everyone, and asked everyone to "do not touch and wear a mask" when they came to pick it up.

COVID-19 is obviously going on longer than we expected, and prayers from the poor are not going to help. In August 2022, the border will once again face a large-scale closure. Alei asked me whiningly for a day and a half: "Do I need to be quarantined when I go to Nanning now?" He was distressed by each blockade, and he couldn't move around at will, and his "work" was also affected.

Alei didn't know that this year, the People's Congress of Chongzuo City had held several meetings to discuss whether the Tianqin was a musical instrument or a magic weapon, and how to use the Tianqin was not a feudal superstition. He didn't know that the experts in Chongzuo City proposed a new development direction, trying to make Tianqin from a "folk instrument" used for accompaniment to a standardized "national instrument".

The mobs in Vietnam were separated. Chinese Tianqin lovers have lost contact with Ah Shou for a long time. Shen Guangyu's wife went back to Vietnam to visit her family after Shen Guangyu's death, but she has not been able to return to her home in China. A high wall was built along the border, and barbed wire was installed.

Border counties have been sealed off from time to time. When I was confined at home, I watched the video of the ceremony I took at Alei’s house for the first time. I saw him sitting cross-legged in the hall, singing that the paper cranes fly to the sky, sugar cane is made into wine; Borrow the staff from Yayin, and when the staff touches the moon, the moon will shine. I seem to have an illusion that in that small room, the old people who have never left the village are roaming the world with Mo Mo. It's a strange world that I've never really set foot in before.

But when I made this video, for me who didn't understand the libretto at that time, it was nothing more than the incense smoke that choked my eyes. I think of Haihua's emotion to me: Many scholars who study Tianqin can't understand the libretto sung by the celestial beings, and they can't rock a horse. Taking advantage of the rise of intangible cultural heritage literature research, Haihua received a project and is working hard to translate a late scripture.

The intangible cultural heritage of Tianqin has given the fans some opportunities to be noticed, and Ah Lei has thousands of Douyin fans. The March 3 performance organized by Mr. Su Yongliang, who works at the Center for Intangible Cultural Heritage, is probably the first time that many people in Guangxi heard and saw how the singer sang. Although the intangible cultural heritage boots can hold much of the content of the late culture, we have not yet known. Mr. Nong, who wrote the intangible cultural heritage entry for Tianqin of "Intangible Cultural Heritage Guangxi", told me that the entry review time was longer than the writing time, and most of the ceremony pictures were deleted. The few ceremonies that can be mentioned are Anhua and Supplementary food.

I remembered that in the early morning of the Pingxiang ration replenishment ceremony, Alei and Haijie sat on the mat on the balcony to rest and eat fruit. They chatted about the dead ends in the nearby villages, which old people had passed away, which young people had inherited their ancestral business, and some villages no longer had dead ends. There was a cage of chickens and a cage of ducks on the balcony. They poked their heads out of the cage holes, wondering what they could see in the dark. But they are still looking hard. The dragon fruit vines on the opposite building have faint outlines, and the roosters are crowing in the mist of the shadowy mountains in the distance. Maybe they are staring at the east. know what time it is.

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references:

Editorial Board of the Chinese Minority Social and Historical Survey Series: "Guangxi Zhuang Social and Historical Survey (7)", 2009.

Liao Jinlei: "Tian Qin", published in "Music Instrument", 1983(01), pp. 24-25.