My daughter was one month old and went to the community clinic for a vaccination. When the needle was pulled out, my daughter cried out. My wife and I hummed a song together, and my daughter calmed down. I learned this humming technique from a parenting book written by an American. It is also written in the book that when changing diapers and bathing, it is best to accompany it with a special song so that the child can feel it. Whether this statement stands up to scientific scrutiny, I don’t know, it seems to work when used.
The song that my wife and I hummed to our daughter was the famous epic song, “Jerusalem of Gold,” which is a bit of a trivialization. “Golden Jerusalem” debuted a few weeks before the 1967 Six-Day Battle between the Arab-Israelis and was supposed to be a morale-booster. It’s said to be the tune that Israel’s Euthanasian soldiers hummed during that war to capture the Old City of Jerusalem intact from Jordan. According to their narrative, it was nearly 2,000 years after that expulsion in the first century A.D., when the Euthians returned to their homeland. Thus, as if divinely assisted, this timely song has the status of a second national anthem in Israel.
Humming this song to my daughter was my choice. We took our daughter to the emergency room once when she was under a month old. That time it was purely because of our nervousness and anxiety as parents that our daughter suffered in the hospital. That time our daughter had to deal with a noisy environment and a finger prick. We were in the hospital for almost 3 hours, surrounded by the cries and coughs of other children and the noise of adults. Most of the time, my daughter’s eyes were tightly closed and I hummed the song “Golden Jerusalem” to her almost constantly. I hope that this tune will never go away like a boat floating in the noise of the waves. Of course, I want my daughter to feel that her daddy is protecting her.
The choice to hum this tune certainly has nothing to do with the sadness of the Euthyphro people, but rather is due to some kind of coincidence. The Basques, an ancient people of Europe, have a lullaby, Pello Joxepe, which I love. Coincidentally, “Golden Jerusalem” is deeply influenced by this lullaby, to the extent that the latter’s creator, Naomi Shemer, was disturbed by it herself.
It’s because these two songs are so similar that I tend to string them together when I hum them to my daughter. Pello Joxepe is slightly faster and lighter, and Golden Jerusalem is slightly slower and a bit more staid, that’s all. I’d like to believe that these two songs have something hypnotic in common. Lullabies that have been passed down for hundreds of years by ancient peoples have survived the better part of time and tend to be persuasive. As for the principle, maybe it has something to do with brain neuroscience, cognitive psychology or something. Let’s leave those to the professionals. Anyway, my wife and I chose this way to talk to our newborn daughter.
She doesn’t have much memory of it now, but will her daughter call when she grows up and hears these two songs? In the past two days, I learned that Sister Wan’s child learned an English song at school and actually learned it in one sitting. He told his mom, Sister Wan, about this little miracle. Sister Wan said, “Nonsense, I’ve hummed this song for you thousands of times. I’m looking forward to my own daughter having a similar experience in the future, it’ll be fun, won’t it?
Being a first-time father, I’ve been concerned lately about how to play children’s songs for my child that are appropriate for her. A good friend of my family, Hannah, is Swedish and she just had her third child. At home, Hannah sings children’s songs to her three children. The children’s songs come from her mom, her mom’s mom. It’s a question that doesn’t seem so obvious when you think about it, but it’s creepy and rightfully so. I don’t remember what songs my mom sang to me. Some of the children’s songs I mastered as a child are “Farewell”, “Two Tigers”, “Little Swallow”, “I Found a Penny by the Roadside”, “Where is Spring? Most of these tunes have introduced genes, for example, “Farewell”, the words are by Master Hongyi, the tune is by an American. Two Tigers” is a French children’s song grafted on, with a lineage dating back to the 17th century. The remaining four songs are indeed local children’s songs, but if we look into the details, the biographies of the authors of these children’s songs are all connected to the colonial period. For example, the composer of “Little Swallow”, Wang Yunjie, was 16 years old when he played the piano score for a silent movie in Qingdao, then studied in Shanghai, and then at Tsinghua University in Peking, where he studied piano and composition. Pan Zhensheng, the composer of “A Penny” and “Tikli Tikli”, and Duan Fupei, the composer of “School Song”, are both from Shanghai. Their musical background is still Western.
Theoretically, there should have been children’s songs in the real national tradition, but I am afraid they only exist in museums. And the local children’s song production after 49 years is actually eating the old capital of the Republic of China. When the old capital is eaten up, where is the rest?
I have not read the relevant anthropological materials, but only infer from common sense that the production of children’s songs in the past needed to rely on the community and the vernacular, passed on by word of mouth, in order to continue from generation to generation. I am afraid that this kind of art, which has a clear social function, can hardly grow without the soil of the countryside. 49 years later, the countryside society was intentionally disintegrated and transformed. The countryside was transformed into communes, and some villages had fewer changes in geography and people, or still had communities of acquaintances. Cities were transformed into units and dormitory buildings, ruled by unit managers and street offices. This social ecology is like a plant in a bonsai, where the direction and thickness of the branches and trunks have to conform to what the scissors and flower pots take, rather than growing naturally. Even when some children’s songs are produced, they are heavily flavored with the tastes of the times. I remember hearing nursery rhymes as a child, such as “Three Red Flags” and “Liberate Taiwan”. I don’t remember any of the children’s songs.
Even this kind of nursery rhyme requires the existence of a stable community of acquaintances to ensure that it is passed on by word of mouth, modified and evolved in the fragile transmission. It was the dormitory areas of large organizations, the compounds of bureaucratic and military families, that were more capable of producing red children’s culture. after the 1980s, the original society gradually disintegrated and shrunk, and the transformation of the city certainly brought with it new ways of living and working. Power removed the burden of organizing and constructing society. People had unprecedented freedom in living and working. In the 20 years since the emergence of the country’s first commercial housing community in Fangzhuang, Beijing, in the late 1980s, the neighborhood model of high-rise buildings with parks has been replicated across the country, and the basic structure remains almost unchanged to this day. However, power has not loosened its grip on society, and acquainted neighborhoods are now popularized only among older groups of square dancers. Urbanites live in a society of strangers. Oral communication between neighbors is close to nil. To be more specific, it is almost impossible to exchange any knowledge or ideas about children’s education from our neighbors, let alone hear children’s songs, rhymes and fairy tales. Virtual communities may be a partial substitute for this exchange, but I have not heard of any results coming out of them.
The oldest of Hannah’s three children is Cloudy. That quirky and angelically beautiful brat always puts the word fart in front of my name whenever she greets me. Probably because I once took her toasted slices of bread. Every weekend now, Cloud would wear a white dress with braids and go to the neighborhood church to sing. These are the same songs Hannah has sung since she was a little girl, and the same songs Hannah’s mom sang when she was a little girl. I didn’t want to be religious, but I thought it was better to go to the community church and sing with my neighborhood buddies than to go to a school organized to sing songs that only grown-ups could understand. Honestly, if religion has any benefit today, I think it’s that it can help build and hold communities together, which in turn gives children a place to express themselves in groups.
And in urban China, we can rent a 70-year home for money, but there’s no way to naturally connect each other’s homes to form a truly synchronized social space-time. What about the kids?
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