It can’t be sealed anymore, those soldiers are coming
Among the Zhuang people in southern Guangxi, the local people who can talk to immortals are called Momo. When people feel unwell, crazy or sick, they go to Momo’s home to worship a teacher and set up an altar in order to recover.
The author, Huang Yuqing, went to Nanning for an internship in the summer of 2019, and met Alei, a local “moment” in Zuojiang. A-Lei developed the symptoms of “coming out of immortality” when he was a teenager, and thus embarked on the road of cultivating immortality and becoming a “teacher”. There are quite a few local young people who make moss. Every time there is a ceremony, they will get together to help each other. They even launched an online community to share their business with each other.
The rituals performed by Mo Mo are mostly called “Tianqin Rituals”, because the instruments used by Mo Mo are Tianqin and copper rings made of gourds. Longzhou County began to apply for Tianqin Culture World Heritage in 2007, but it has never been successful. Until 2018, things started to change.
Today, I will share the first part of Huang Yuqing’s non-fiction work “Night Class Teacher”. This article is the second season of the “Presence Non-fiction Writing Scholarship” initiated by Matters Lab and Renaissance Foundation. As the world we live in inevitably moves into the same wave of patterns, there are still stories to tell about people’s occupations, heritage and destiny. Amidst the deafening din, all the voices present need to be left behind.
night teacher
——Being a Wizard in the Cracks of Modern Chinese Society (Part 1)
Written by: Huang Yuqing
Editor: Xie Ding
one
suddenly crazy boy
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 medical 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 meant that Hua Po had received the token, and this person was 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”.
two
Getting to know Ale
The first time I met A Lei was in the summer of 2019. At that time, 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 villager 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 movie “Once Upon a Time in the Tropics”
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 who 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, with ancestral tablets on half-empty shelves against the wall, and a square table of eight immortals on the right side, which is full of tributes: plantains with leaves, dragon fruit, apples stacked in a row in a row Bowls filled with 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.
three
Familiar yet unfamiliar
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.
The movie “Falling”
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 had a record of Momo: “The witch, named ‘魓po’…is named after ghosts and gods, and uses ‘匏’ as a musical instrument, shaped like a huqin, Its name is ‘Ding’…” According to the sorting out of the inheritance genealogy of Fangcheng Momo in the early 1990s, some scholars infer that the local Momo has been passed down 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 Momo: “Gonggong has scriptures that are different from Gonggong… 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. A Rong 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. He saw the lotus root pond next to him, and he was quick to think: “Come and play, walk around casually, and see if the lotus is blooming.” The lotus has not bloomed, they are still very small.
These cognitive experiences made it difficult for me to imagine that the word “Gong 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 refused to let her go: “What are you singing? It’s too ugly to be called a witch by others, 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 arranged as a shrine. The rice bowl of the shrine contained her clergy seal, and the Tianqin 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 woman – the higher the rank of the woman, 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 have been 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.
Four
follower of 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? Will the object not be found? 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.
Movie “The Sun Also Rises”
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 become a master. , hold a precept ceremony for him/her, and then he/she can start to handle 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 the gods. Incense burners were placed on the ancestors’ gods and the altars for offering sacrifices to the gods, and the believers continued to burn incense. , The lobby is 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 called her son “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 not finding a partner 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”.
Fives
Lyra rises
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 language) is one of the main instruments used in the rituals of Mo Mo. 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 deceitful and strange form of superstitious performance… Tianpo’s Tianqin is called Tianqin It is not allowed to move at ordinary times, and it can only be removed and played 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 don’t even know how to sing it, little Yanzi, you can only sing sky ballads… your fingers holding the pick are 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 the other members felt the taste of being popular and the interviews that came one after another, and 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 Mo Mo leads thousands of horses and horses to gallop through the clouds and fog in the fairyland. 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 list of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, listed in the category of “Traditional Music”. Encouraged by the staff of the Longzhou County Culture and Sports Bureau, they 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.
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(to be continued)
This article is the award-winning work of the second season of “Presence·Non-Fiction Writing Scholarship”. “Presence” was initiated by Matters Lab and the Renaissance Foundation to provide grants and editorial support to independent writers. You can follow the official website and Facebook to get the latest information on essays, lectures and other activities.
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