I stood on the stage with The Composer and ten other musicians at the Shanghai Concert Hall—one of China’s oldest and most prestigious European-style venues—a gorgeous two-tiered auditorium painted vibrant shades of blue and gold with classical archways and renowned acoustics (Yo-Yo Ma had recently performed there). The place was filled to capacity with nearly one thousand audience members. Once they were in their seats, the lights dimmed, we walked out onto the stage, and The Composer pressed the Play button on the CD player. The sounds of almost-Titanic filled the Chinese auditorium. The eagle flew over the Grand Canyon. We didn’t have a translator on stage so The Composer didn’t make any speeches or tell any stories. After the last song we took a bow and were joined on stage by a handful of teenage girls wearing yellow uniforms with red sashes. They handed us flowers and we all stood there grinning, while stern-faced Chinese officials made speeches that weren’t translated. The Composer smiled his widest, most ridiculous velociraptor smile yet, the fear in his eyes more evident than ever.
The day after our Chinese debut in Shanghai, Chinese government officials canceled half of our scheduled concerts. Whether this was because The Composer’s smiling was freaking out the Chinese or because the highly musically trained Chinese elite could tell that we were doing the Milli Violini, or some other reason—I did not know. But the strangest thing about having half our concerts canceled was that the concerts we did perform were outrageously well attended. Our popularity was a mystery to me until, during one concert, a translator told me what was being announced to the audience of four thousand people: That we, the Ensemble, were the orchestra “that played the music in the movie Titanic.” It suddenly made sense why thousands of people had shown up to see us. And unlike in America, where such a false claim could lead to lawsuits, there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger in announcing to thousands of people that we were playing Titanic. It was as if, after years of deceit in America (it’s not Titanic), it took the Chinese, not known for their staunch copyright laws, to tell the truth: If it sounds just like Titanic, it is Titanic.
While I continued to have panic attacks, I often found myself so intrigued by the spectacle surrounding me—dozens of colorfully attired children handing me flowers, break-dancing troupes diving and jumping around to our music—that my panic wasn’t as severe as it had been in America. And unlike the God Bless America Tour, with its grueling pace and monotonous routine of drab hotels and chain restaurants, the tour of China consisted of short flights across stunning green mountains and wide deserts, and easygoing micro-bus jaunts through claustrophobic yet stunningly colorful urban landscapes. As guests of the Chinese state, we stayed in top hotels, ate our meals for free, and, thanks to the exchange rate, had endless amounts of cash. The trip felt less like work and more like a paid vacation.
With half the concerts canceled and ten other musicians to explore China with, I spent very little time with The Composer, though I did note that he was being yelled at regularly by angry-looking Chinese officials. I could never tell why they were so angry with him. I don’t think he could tell either. He grew thinner over the course of the three-week tour, and because he was already too thin to begin with, his appearance became alarming. There were no crates of apples from Maine, no boxes of Cap’n Crunch. Instead, each night, all of us sat down to a Chinese-style lazy Susan table in a restaurant or hotel dining room and waiters brought out dish after dish of mysterious yet delicious food: steamed lotus, flower petals, bats (their bat wings still attached, intriguingly chewy and crunchy), crawfish, water chestnuts, cow liver soup, red bean paste with steamed buns, chicken feet, chicken stuffed with fish, hot watermelon soup, broiled insects, eggs that did not come from chickens, handmade noodles, something amazing that I can only describe as meat jello, and bowls of fish soup with fish eyeballs floating on the surface, looking at us. While The Composer and many of the musicians stuck to white rice, I ate and ate and ate. I gobbled up the chicken feet, I aimed my chopsticks right at the fish eyeball. After the three months I spent on the God Bless America Tour, eating microwaved food from Ruby Tuesday and over-fried chicken gizzards at truck stops and the sad pizzas of the rural South, I couldn’t get enough Chinese food, which was fresh and light and full of interesting flavors. I gnawed on the bat wings and crunched on insects. In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston notices the number of ancient Chinese heroes who were ravenous at the table. “Big eaters win,” she writes. I was no woman warrior, and I was no longer fearless enough to become a war reporter, but I could still find international adventure in a fried bird’s skull.
While the Chinese government officials all seemed to share a universal distaste for The Composer—the smiling, effeminate purveyor of prerecorded concerts—they were generous hosts to the rest of us. In addition to ensuring we had delicious meals three times a day (often while filming us for local Chinese TV—American tries famous Shanghai noodle soup for first time!), the officials guided us on an array of adventures: a tour of a silk-making factory, a dance festival, a Mongolian prayer ceremony, a tea factory, a museum full of ancient Chinese musical bells, and several shopping malls, where the weighted American dollar enabled a continual shopping spree. There were more bizarre trips as well, including one to a real estate office where a group of businessmen tried to sell us lakefront real estate in Hangzhou. There was a disquieting trip to a circus, which, in a land with less oversight of labor practices and safety precautions, involved children ascending and descending a staircase by bouncing on their heads, their neck muscles as strong and springy as pogo sticks, the top of their heads landing on each stair with a thud, then springing from the neck to the next stair, their upside-down bodies rigidly upright in the air.
While the other musicians and I vacationed, The Composer grew desperate for the Chinese to like him. So he came up with a radical idea: The Ensemble would, for the first time ever, deviate from the usual CD track. The Composer would turn off the CD, and we would play a traditional Chinese song.
The Composer came up with this idea about an hour before we were supposed to perform for four thousand people in Lanzhou, a city in China’s northwest interior. The concert was also to be nationally broadcast on televisions around China. None of us knew any traditional Chinese songs, but with quick help from one of our government officials, we decided on a simple tune called “Jasmine.” We listened to a CD recording of “Jasmine” and then all ten musicians quickly got to work. Within thirty minutes we had transcribed the song onto composition paper. We scribbled furiously, breaking into teams, arranging the song into parts: strings, flute, percussion, piano. We practiced it once and then it was time for the concert to begin.
When we got to “Jasmine,” The Composer turned off the CD player, and for the first time in my Ensemble career, the sound of my violin mattered. Real sound floated down from the stage and into the ears of four thousand Chinese. We didn’t sound that bad, at least not to me, but then I’d never heard “Jasmine” before, a song as well-known to the Chinese as “Jingle Bells” is to Americans. But the applause for “Jasmine” was faint and short-lived—The Composer’s other songs were met with thousands of Chinese yelling: Titanic! Titanic!
During intermission our translator explained that a television celebrity would announce each of our names to the crowd. The celebrity, a stunning woman wearing a blue, rhinestone-studded ballgown, didn’t speak English, and as we repeated our names for her she became distraught. I didn’t care whether she pronounced my name correctly, but it was clear that she did. As the other musicians said their names aloud, the poor woman seemed to be panicking over the task of memorizing the correct pronunciation of ten difficult English names just a few minutes before she would say them on live national television.
She came up with a solution to her problem, one that I came to think of as apt retribution for all of the concerts over the years in which The Composer had announced me as Melissa, a fitting end to the last concert I ever played in which a large audience heard the real sounds I was
making on my violin. In her panic to memorize all of our names, the announcer decided to just use one name for all of us, perhaps figuring that all English names sound the same to the Chinese ear:
“On the violin: JESS-CA HI-MAY! On the flute: JESS-CA HI-MAY! On the drums: JESS-CA HI-MAY! On the piano: JESS-CA HI-MAY! On the cello: JESS-CA HI-MAY!”
God Bless America Tour 2004
Pittsburgh
The Castle of Make-Believe—yes, the one from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, with towers painted Mediterranean blue with white battlements and a red trolley running through it—is covered in dust, roped off in a corner beside an ancient kitchen sink in the Pittsburgh PBS station. Over one of the archways, where King Friday XIII once made speeches, a small sign has been taped that says, Look. BUT PLEASE DON’T TOUCH. You are shocked by how small the castle is (it seemed so much bigger on TV). In real life, it’s nothing but rickety, crumbling cardboard.
But it brings back memories you didn’t even know you had until you stand only inches away from its disintegrating walls, wearing your gauzy black concert dress, a violin in your hand. You couldn’t have been more than four or five years old, but you hated watching Mr. Rogers. You hated the way he spoke to you, like you were a little kid, hated it because it reminded you that you were, indeed, a little kid. “You’ll have things you’ll want to talk about,” he sang. “I. Will. Too.” You might be a little kid, but you knew you couldn’t talk to people on TV. You weren’t stupid. And you could never follow the bizarre plot twists in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Why were some people real and others puppets? Why did the puppets all sound like Mr. Rogers? Why was there a castle right next to a tree with an owl in it, and a trolley running through it all, with its fast-paced piano trolley music? And where was the trolley music coming from? Where was the piano? Was the trolley also a piano? Was that possible?
Very little about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood made sense to you, and you had the feeling that it was all a ruse to fool you into doing something you didn’t want to do, like eat your peas or drink your milk or go to bed. Years later it will strike you that perhaps Mr. Rogers wasn’t meant for you, a kid of the 1980s with wonderful real-life parents who indulged in imaginary play. Perhaps Mr. Rogers was intended for your parents themselves, kids of the 1950s. Your parents were raised by people of a sterner, more sinister generation. Your grandparents didn’t indulge childhood fantasies, didn’t proselytize childlike imagination. Perhaps Mr. Rogers was the dad that people of your parents’ generation wished they had, a greatest generation type who, despite everything that happened during the Depression and the war, still came home singing, put on a cardigan, and played make-believe. But as an actual child in the 1980s—the alleged target audience—you didn’t like Mr. Rogers. You had way cooler real-life parents, thank God.
But as you stand before the crumbling edifice of Make-Believe, your violin in your hand, all grown up, you do remember one particular episode of Mister Rogers’. The one where he goes to a trumpet factory. You had just turned five years old and for your birthday you had received a pink leotard with purple leg warmers and a shiny new marching baton, a girly twirly decoration that was heavy in your hands and you thought of as a sword. Mr. Rogers walked through his front door like he always did, but this time he was carrying a trumpet. You put down your sword and sat close to the TV. You wanted to see what was going on with this trumpet. Mr. Rogers tossed the instrument onto the bench where he changes his shoes. Tossed it there like it was nothing.
It turns out it is nothing, just a toy trumpet, not a real one. He puts it to his lips and jiggles his fingers around on the keys, but no sound comes out. And Mr. Rogers says, “I wanted very much to show you how it goes do-to-do-to-do-to-dooo when I blow in here, but, I’m sorry to say, that it doesn’t play at all.”
Well, no matter, because Mr. Rogers is on the phone with Wynton Marsalis, and Mr. Rogers is about to show you a trumpet factory, the only wonderful thing you will remember about him and his show, twenty years later.
The trumpet-making process is gorgeous and complex, the perfect union of high art and industrialization, beauty and hard work. It involves an astonishing number of people, each with his or her own job to do. The first worker cuts a sheet of brass into a circle, the second shapes the circle into a three-dimensional bell, a third makes the bell tail, a fourth spins the bell tail in a machine to mold and trim and smooth it into its proper size and shape. A fifth plugs the end of the bell tail, fills it with soapy water, and puts it into a freezer that looks just like the meat freezer your grandmother uses to store the deer carcass your grandfather shoots each fall. When the water in the bell tail is frozen, the man takes it out and bends the tailpiece like a piece of spaghetti, the frozen water keeping the brass from breaking. A sixth worker crafts the tubular innards of the trumpet while a seventh man assembles the valves. The eighth puts all the tubes together and solders them, the ninth solders on the bell piece, and Mr. Rogers intones, “You know, until you see something like this, you never realize how many pieces there are in a musical instrument.”
The trumpet is now completely assembled, but it’s not very shiny. So a tenth person polishes the trumpet on a fast-spinning cloth wheel, making the brass gleam. An eleventh tests the sparkling new trumpet, oils its valves and checks for air leaks. Finally, the trumpet is passed to the last person of all, a musician, who puts a mouthpiece on the finished trumpet and plays a jazzy riff. It is perfect and wonderful.
All of these people doing this complex, gorgeous work, all to produce a few notes that ring like a call from the sky. It’s enough to make you proud to be a member of the human race, a civilization that could think up such a wonderful process, a process with no value at its end other than the pleasure that sound brings to the human ear. If there is a true definition of making a living, this is it.
That’s what you remember as you stare at the crumbling Castle of Make-Believe, its creator dead and gone, its puppets silent. Not the imaginary stuff, but the real assembly line of that glorious trumpet factory. The first miraculous cries of the newborn trumpet.
What you don’t remember is this: After the trumpet factory tour, as Mr. Rogers feeds his fish, he talks about music in general. He says, “There are many different ways to make music,” and he imitates each one: “Blowing, plucking . . . striking on a drum.”
He finishes feeding the fish and continues, “But playing about something is a really good way to begin to do the real thing. If it’s something that you’re very interested in.”
He continues: “In fact, when I was a little boy, I used to play that I was a songwriter.”
He sits down on the bench by the door, about to change back into his work shoes.
“I liked to pretend that I was writing them to sing to families on television.” And then he adds, triumphantly, “And now here I am really doing it!”
Long after you play your last unheard note for the Ensemble, long after the God Bless America Tour of 2004 ends with a thankyou note from The Composer (“Thanks for all your hard work. Best wishes!”), you read an article about “imposter syndrome,” which is defined as “the inability to internalize achievement.” You are interested in imposter syndrome because you have recently gotten a new job, the first profession you’ve ever had that you want to keep working at for a long time. You are a professor. You teach writing.
You like being a professor. You like teaching college students specifically because college was the time in your life when you most needed help, but were least able to ask for it. Now, you observe your students closely and try to determine who is quietly drowning. Being in front of a classroom full of students doesn’t give you panic attacks the way being in front of The Composer’s audiences did. When you are teaching you feel relaxed, perhaps because you are focused on other people and what they need from you, perhaps because the work feels real; you see improvements in your students’ writing after they do things you have taught them to do. You teach at a public university with low tuition
and working-class students who are often the first in their families to go to college. When your students talk about struggling for The Money, you listen. You try to help. Above all, you try to be honest with them. You try to be hopeful, but truthful, about what they may face after graduation. The social and economic and political icebergs that can sink an entire generation, regardless of its work ethic. The joyful and miserable reckonings—financial and otherwise—of making a living.
Still, you sometimes feel that you are not a real professor, that you are merely someone who imitates professor-like behavior. Even though you have gone through all of the steps to become a professor, even though you do all the things that professors are supposed to do, the first time a student calls you “Professor Hindman” you feel the same way you did the day Becca hired you as a violinist for The Ensemble. The university has made a mistake in hiring you. There is no way you are good enough to do this job.
But after a few semesters go by, something dawns on you: Faking is pedagogy. Faking is teaching and faking is learning and faking is the way that all human beings grow, from babies faking speech to teenagers faking coolness to professors faking wisdom. You assign readings in your classes so that your students can imitate other writers, for it is in the faking of other people’s writing that one learns to write. And as for you, you fake Abigail Thomas and you fake Janet Malcolm and you fake Barbara Ehrenreich and you fake Nick Flynn and you fake Mary Karr and you fake Richard Rodriguez. You even fake yourself, zipping your person into the straightjackets of various pronouns. This allows you to pretend, for a while, that you are not really writing about yourself until one day you are able to look down on the page and say, well hell, this sounds like me. It is me.
Sounds Like Titanic Page 21