The desert landscape of Xinjiang has received a flood of (Han majority) newcomers from other areas of China, especially after the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 (known here as the "War of Liberation") and more recently as part of campaign to "Develop the West." I'm currently reading Xinran's "China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation", and in it she writes:
When I first visited the Tibetan Plateau in 1981, my route took me close to the north-western province of Xinjiang. It was there I first heard a rumour that for thirty years the Chinese government had been building the world's largest prison. According to local hearsay, nearly 200,000 Guomindang [Nationalists, enemy of the Communists] prisoners of war and over 300,000 "Reform through Labor" convicts had been moved there from the east.In fact, these convicts built the the city of Shihezi, where PiA happens to have a post. (When I was choosing between posts, being in a Mandarin-speaking environment was at the top of my list, so I wasn't considering Shihezi, but PiA assured me that the city, despite being in Xinjiang, is actually an excellent place to learn Mandarin. Now I understand why.) Of the few students I teach who are from Xinjiang, only one of them is a Uyghur whose family originates from the region. But I digress.
Figuring out exactly what I've been listening to has been challenging, as the Uyghurs speak their own language which belongs to the Turkic language family but has been written using an Arabic script since the 1980s. Both Google and Baidu (the Chinese Google equivalent) yield few results. I'm out of my linguistic element here, but I'm completely fascinated.
One song, interestingly, is mostly in Mandarin Chinese. The song is titled "一见钟情“ (Love At First Sight). The group, 使者(shizhe, which translates to "emissary" or "envoy") consists of 4 Uyghur men from Xinjiang. The imagery in the music video actually makes me think most immediately of the new Zhang Yimou film "Under the Hawthorn Tree," which is a heart-breaking, innocent romance full of tentative hand-holding, misunderstandings due to lack of communication, and couples sharing bikes down tree-lined streets. (This comparison is probably fresh in my mind because I just watched "Under the Hawthorne Tree" on Youku, the Chinese Youtube, over several tortured sessions between grading, lesson planning, and waiting for it to load.) If you can see it, check out the music video below to see what I mean. [Note: Blogger doesn't seem to like Youku, but the video will load in Google Reader. Otherwise, click here.]
The song predates the Zhang Yimou film, but the fact that the video draws on what I perceive to be--and I'm no expert here--(Han) Chinese romantic imagery, and the lyrics are in Mandarin, not Uyghur, is an interesting artistic choice that seems fitting of a cultural emissary. [Edit: closer inspection reveals that the video is actually from a Korean soap opera or movie. Ok, so, East Asian romantic imagery. Thanks, Mom, for your ability to recognize Korean stars. I am not sure who made this music video, in that case...however, you can see what seems to be an official video for their song "Sophia" here. It's very different, but also in Mandarin.] The only music review I could find for the album "一见钟情” states: "...在保留西域曲风的基础上，重新用汉语填词，有望成为现代新疆本土音乐的流行先驱." [While preserving the foundation of the Western region's music style, the group uses Mandarin to write new lyrics, with the hope of becoming popular pioneers in modern Xinjiang's local/native music scene.]
I wish I could post the other songs I got, which are entirely in the Uyghur language and sound decidedly Central Asian (my new favorite sound!), but I can't find any information about them on the web and there don't seem do be any videos on Youku, or maybe I just don't know how to search for them...
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