Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: A Song for Grief in China

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

In China, a man has been playing the piano outdoors, often in places of great sadness—the epicenter of an earthquake, a dam that submerged villages, a street emptied during a COVID lockdown.He plays just one song: "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence," by the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.In the fall of 2022, one of his performance videos goes viral, tapping into years of unexpressed collective grief. In this episode of The Sunday Story, NPR correspondent John Ruwitch asks: who is the piano man, and why has he chosen this path?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. In the fall of 2022, there was a viral video of a man playing the piano in Wuhan, China. The man is at an intersection, his back to traffic in a busy part of town. He faces these tall metal barriers that have been erected to block the entrance to a commercial street. It's an upright piano, black, and he plays just one song.

A song by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. The title track to an old movie called Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. This was a time when China was experiencing this rise in COVID cases. John Ruich is a correspondent who covers Chinese affairs for NPR. So these barriers had really been put up all over Wuhan. Like, they were there to keep people from moving from one neighborhood to the next, or to keep people from even leaving, like, their apartment complex. In the video, the performance is interrupted.

So you see these police come up in the scooter. There's a police van that then goes by, and you hear them talking through the megaphone, basically saying to the guy, Hey, man, stop playing. You can't be playing the piano. There's a pandemic going on. Do you not know that? Like, go home. Get a mask on. He's a risk to public health by being there or something. So the piano-playing guy turns around,

and he starts to explain to the police, Don't worry. the van is coming. I'll get my piano in and then I'll leave. And they tell him to hurry up and cooperate. And he finishes playing a few more bars of the song and then the video ends. There was something about this video. It ended up going viral. It immediately stuck out in my mind as something that was a daring thing for somebody to be

doing in today's China. First of all, he's engaging in a public activity during the pandemic. I mean, at this point in time, activities were fairly limited, right? So for him to be out there playing piano on the street, it was just incongruous with the way that society was reacting to the pandemic at that time. The second thing was, I mean, he was making a statement. He was drawing attention to himself. He was drawing attention to these barriers as a human facing these barriers and conveying some meaning about the situation that he was in, that everybody around him was in, that China was sort of stuck in at that time.

That fall of 2022 was also a pivotal moment in China's zero COVID policy. October 2022 is this time like people were angry, frustrated. Basically, life in China at that point was you had to get a COVID test basically every day to be able to go into the grocery store to be able to get on the subway. So everybody lived in fear of this test coming back positive. About a month after the video was posted, there were protests in cities across China, something that doesn't happen very often. And the government abruptly reversed course, announcing all COVID restrictions would be lifted.

So by the next summer, it really felt like China had moved on from COVID. It was like nothing ever happened. The kiosks where people had to get tested on a daily basis were all dismantled or changed into something else. People were traveling again. Masks were coming off. It was so surreal because the COVID restrictions had become a part of everyday life in China. And now they were gone. It was like they were just erased. It was a kind of deafening silence, too, around the pain and the loss from the past few years. My producer, Aowen Cao, and I talked about this abrupt about-face in policy and that silence. And then we started talking about the piano guy and getting interested in him. So we looked him up, and it turns out he was still playing that song,

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. His name is Peng Haitao. Since his video had gone viral, he'd been performing a lot. Packing the piano into the back of his van, driving to public places, and performing that song. Alwyn and I wanted to know why. So we reached out to him, and he told us that actually he was planning to do his next performance on the Yangtze River in a town near the city of Chongqing. It was going to be his 32nd performance. And we asked if we could join him, and he said, sure, see you there.

Today on The Sunday Story, John Ruich and his producer, Awen Chow, try to understand what is the particular power of a single pianist playing a single song in today's China. That's after the break. Now, Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're back with a Sunday story. NPR correspondent John Rewich takes it from here. So we flew to the city of Chongqing in the center of China and then caught a train for

a couple of hours to this town called Wushan. It's on the Yangtze River. It's a jumping off point for tours of the Three Gorges Dam Reservoir. And I found it really interesting that he had chosen this spot to play the piano because the Three Gorges Dam has this long and controversial history. It's the biggest hydropower project in the world, but it also destroyed a way of life for many people along a section of this famous river. Entire villages were submerged. Of course, the people were all moved out. And actually, there's a term in China for this. They're called Three Gorges Migrants, and there are over a million of them. They were forced out of their hometowns, out of their villages. they were moved to higher ground to create space for this huge project for the country.

And the Yangtze River is not just an important river in China, it is the great river of China, right? It's often described as the wellspring of Chinese culture and civilization. So putting this humongous dam up was a big deal. Peng Haitao timed his performance to mark the 20th anniversary of the filling of the reservoir at the Three Gorges Dam. So we rock up to this town and we meet Peng Haitao for the first time. In my years of reporting in China, I've met a lot of activists. I've met a lot of dissidents. I've met a lot of sort of human rights lawyers.

This guy's not that. He is like a gallery owner type of person. He's mid-30s. He looks pretty hip. He's got tattoos all coming down his neck, onto his arms. And he was wearing Doc Martens, some baggy blue jeans. We didn't know, he didn't know if he was going to go perform because the forecast was for rain, it had drizzled a little bit, but the forecast was also bad for the next morning,

and so we decided to go, he decided, okay, we'll get down to the waterfront, get the piano, tuned up, get it out on the boat, and then make a call once we get it onto the boat. He had a white cargo van, a black, you know, standard upright piano strapped down in the back of it. He had hired a piano tuner to come from somewhere nearby. And this piano tuner was in there, in the back of this truck with the back door open,

tuning the piano, going key by key. Once the piano was tuned, it took about five or six guys to lift this thing out. It was quite a scene, right? Lifting a piano out the back of this cargo van on a sloping embankment going down into the Yangtze River. We went and got on the boat and kind of sat in this sort of covered cargo area of the boat. And there's an uncovered area at the front where the piano was. He had a massive sheet, he had like a giant sheet of plastic that he put over the piano.

But we were kind of nervous because I thought, okay, we've come all this way. He might call it off. But he decided to do it. Let's go. So we cruised out into sort of the middle of the river and down the river a little bit. It was this scene of these green hills kind of sloping down into the water. And because it was rainy and foggy and misty, at times you could see where the

hills ended. At other times you couldn't. They were enshrouded with fog. And it just started to pour. Yeah. The piano was out on the bow of the boat, covered in plastic, rain was hammering it, and it didn't look like it was going to let up. And Peng Haitao just at one point decided, he's like, forget it, I'm going to go out and play.

So he, yeah, just went out there, started getting soaked, kind of wiped some water off of the piano, pulled the plastic off. He just let out these big sort of... He just yelled into the air. Rain be damned, I'm playing the piano on this river here today. So he played the Sakamoto song, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. He played it, I think he got through it maybe four times,

but only once, only the first time, was their full sound. The second time he played, some of the keys started to get sticky and not emanate any musical notes. And then by the third time, most of the keys were dead. The piano just got soaked. It kind of took my breath away, the sound of the clicking of the keys with nothing coming out. piano plays softly It was almost, it felt like it symbolized something, but it was hard to pinpoint what it was. At the time, it's like, that's it. No sound. There's a kind of narrative of the greatness of the Three Gorges Dam.

But there's also been this sort of counter-narrative of people being displaced and homes and hometowns being submerged and the people basically in that area not having any choice about it. So over the past decade or so, under Xi Jinping, there's been this phrase that's become really popular in Chinese media, and it's positive energy, or zheng neng liang. And it permeates state media. You get a lot of feel-good, inspirational stories on state TV, and sprinkled in the news.

And there's banners on the streets. And it all comes down to this sort of almost like a pressure to be positive, to have positive energy and a positive outlook. To be grateful for the country, grateful for your family, optimistic about the direction that the country is going. When it's applied so broadly, there's almost this sort of shadow suggestion that there's no room for negativity or negative stories. So when bad things happen, the expectation is to find the positive angle or just move on. Because if you get hung up then on negativity, you're a less productive member of society. Depression is not talked about widely. Grieving is something that comes and goes quickly. But it's clear there is a lot of unprocessed grief that's built up over

the years in China. It goes somewhere, right? It stays, you know, in the pit of your stomach. It stays in your heart. And I think what's happening with this guy is he's putting some of this to music. Why did he choose to do this? Why is he choosing this path? By the time we get off the boat, it's dusk. And I'm just dying to ask him so many questions about why he did what we just saw him do. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. We're back with The Sunday Story. Before John continues, just a warning that there's a mention of suicide in this part of the story. We get back to the hotel where Peng is staying and sit down to talk to him. And he starts telling us the backstory of his performance. It turns out this sorrow that

he's tapping into, there's a real personal source to it that goes all the way back to his childhood. Peng grew up in Wuhan, where his mom had a clothing business in a busy street market right in the center of the city. And he says he always admired his mother. She left the countryside on her own when she was young and established herself and this clothing business in the big city. But his relationship with his dad was a lot more complicated. To be honest, when my dad was alive, I hated him. During his childhood in Wuhan, his dad was prone to emotional outbursts, and he drank a lot.

He and his mom sort of came to view his dad as just this raging alcoholic who was bad for the family. After getting drunk, he would cry at home. He would scream. He caused a lot of emotional harm to us. But then one day, when Peng was 14 years old, his father disappeared from the house. My mother told me, she said,

I will take you to a place to see your father. But don't be sad, it's nothing serious. She took me to a psychiatric hospital in Wuhan to see my dad. After I went through the iron doors and finally saw him, my childhood was completely shattered. He was not only an alcoholic, but was also a patient with bipolar disorder. Throughout my entire childhood, I was extremely ashamed.

I couldn't cope with the fact that my father was a mental patient. And he grew up faster than he wanted. And as soon as he could get out of Wuhan, he did. He fled. He went to film school. And then he spent the next decade in Beijing making movies. And he managed to kind of escape his past for a while. But then in 2019, he's 29 years old, and his dad has a major stroke.

And so Peng decides to go home. He gets rid of his apartment in Beijing. He moves wholesale back to Wuhan, where he grew up. And he goes to visit his dad almost every day in the intensive care unit. In the hospital, I watched him waste away, gradually losing the ability to move and speak. And he was getting smaller every day, like a rubber ball that was being deflated.

He was watching his dad die in slow motion. So during that time, I was already feeling unstable emotionally. Often at work, I'd suddenly start to cry. And at night, I couldn't sleep. So I started to think that perhaps I've inherited my father's bipolar disorder. That it is in my blood that perhaps what haunted him is now also haunting me. And after I experienced what he had experienced, I realized that this sort of pain and suffering was beyond your control. Once I became the sufferer, I knew his suffering.

And one day, during this sort of long stretch of hospital visits, when he was on the subway, he hears this song. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. And he can't describe the feeling that this song gave him. It just filled him with this sense of sort of comfort and warmth and relief. He'd never heard of Sakamoto before. He actually didn't like classical music all that much. He wasn't into it. But the song struck a chord with him then and there on the subway.

It was exactly what he needed at that moment, at that tough time in his life, and it stuck with him. In early 2020, Peng gets engaged. And he and his fiancee decide to take a quick trip down to Sichuan province to meet her parents. Peng's dad's still hanging on in the hospital, but he's not in great shape. And while they're in Sichuan, the Wuhan lockdown is announced at the start of the pandemic, and they're blocked from going home. The pandemic was raging in his hometown, and people were dying. And Peng just kept thinking about his dad there in the ICU, helpless, vulnerable, nobody to visit him. He was worried about his family.

My biggest feeling was that I was a deserter. I wasn't by their side when they needed me the most. And after weeks of waiting and worrying, Peng finally gets a call. It was my cousin. She told me that my father had passed away. I had been preparing for this moment for a long time. The hospital listed the cause of death as pneumonia. Peng felt he should have been there.

He should not have been out of Wuhan when his dad was sick. He should have been at home. It was another month before the lockdown was lifted and he could finally fly back to Wuhan. And Peng goes to get his father's ashes. Everyone who had lost relatives to COVID-19 at the time went to this big, you know, municipal building. They queued up, they picked up their loved one's ashes,

and that was that. He said he could feel this overwhelming grief at that spot with all those people. But his grief was just spot with all those people. But his grief was just like everybody else in line, it was just a number. Later that year Peng was hit by another personal tragedy. He and his wife were expecting a child, but the baby was stillborn. The doctor told us there wasn't a heartbeat. heartbeats.

After my son was delivered, they brought him out, and I hugged him, and I kissed him, and it was so painful. Then, the doctor took him out of my arms and carried him away. 2020 was a complete disaster for me.

I don't know how I survived it. I lost my father. I lost my son. My father and my son's deaths seemed so meaningless. They hardly made a sound. Peng really shut himself in. He quit his job. For a while, he was completely unproductive.

He was depressed. There was no positive energy to be found. I was on the brink of falling apart then. I thought about taking my own life, jumping off a building or taking pills, anything, just to put an end to it. Because there was too much pain. Why should I face it? How could I possibly face it?

And then he remembered that song that he'd heard on the subway months ago. That song that had moved him at the time. And that's when he decided to buy a keyboard. And this piano and this song totally take over his life. And for several months, he's in this almost read a lick of music. He just watched videos, and he copied the hand motions. He was pouring everything into it. He was totally absorbed by it,

and it helped him avoid thinking about anything else. I wasn't thinking. I just remembered that moment on the subway. I cut off all of my social connections. I didn't see anyone. I didn't talk to anyone. It's clearly not normal. Both my wife and my mother thought there was something wrong with me.

They couldn't understand why I was coping this way, playing the piano non-stop. It's like I found a lifeline. I grabbed the rope and didn't let it go. I climbed up little by little. It just so happened that the lifeline was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. All I wanted was to survive. But then, about a month later, I was better. In the summer of 2022, I dreamt of my dad. I really missed him.

At that point, he had been gone for more than two years, and I felt like I wanted to do something for him, because no one talked about him anymore. My mom didn't talk about him, he didn't have any friends. So I just felt like he was slowly being forgotten. At first, my idea was very simple. It was just to commemorate my dad. And then from there, it grew into a desire to commemorate this city, to commemorate many fathers who were like mine.

Now that he can play this one song, he starts to play his piano in public. And he records himself and puts the videos up online. But then another wave of COVID hits China, and the government clamps down again. It's like the nightmare is starting all over. The authorities in Wuhan begin to block off neighborhoods again. And on October 29th of 2022, frustrated beyond belief with this cycle kicking off again, this interruption of daily life, the fear that goes with it. On that day, Pung decides to wheel his piano out there, and he makes the video in front of those metal barriers blocking off that street.

Pung posts this video up on multiple platforms online, and he says at first he only got a few hundred views. But a month later, something happens happens and the video resurfaces. On November 24th, there's this terrible fire in an apartment building in the western region of Xinjiang. And by the time firemen are able to put it out, 10 people are dead. There was immediate speculation that the people who had died in the fire weren't rescued in time, weren't able to get out of their building because of COVID controls, because of barriers like the metal barriers that Peng was playing in front of. This was a trigger for countless people in China who'd been subjected to these lockdowns

and restrictions for so long. And almost immediately, there were protests that spread nationwide. The protests were quickly dubbed the white paper or A4 revolution because many of the protesters held up sheets of blank printer paper. They were blank and white to represent all the things that they could not say. So after that fire is when somehow somebody saw the video of the guy playing piano in front of this barrier on the streets of Wuhan. That's when it went viral. My friend told me about it.

He said, hey, Peng Haitao, did you know that you've gone viral? He said, it's all over my feed. And I thought, really? And I opened up my phone and I was seeing it literally everywhere. And then as I was going through it, the video was getting taken offline, removed, and I couldn't access it anymore. And I thought that was it. But then people who had seen the video started stitching it.

They started to take screen recordings and they continued to forward it and post it. So it was all over the place. I was so surprised because the day I recorded it and posted it, no one watched it. I really don't know how it suddenly got so many views. People in online comments commiserated, encouraging one another and cheering Peng on. I've just been shut in for 20 days. I haven't been able to leave my home for more than half a month.

I'm crying. Be strong. Sending hugs. This sound pierces through the darkness. Thank you for bringing a touch of warmth to this indifferent world. That's when I realized music can be this powerful. Piano can have this effect on people. You know, in China, there's not really a place for public grief,

especially mass public grief. And so this pressure builds up inside people, inside society, and it wants to find a release. So when the white paper protest started in late 2022, after that fire in Urumqi, it was like an explosion of all that pent-up pressure. The protest actually started off as vigils, with people carrying candles and flowers out onto the streets. And then that gave way to political expression, and this happens in China.

There's a long history of public mourning, funerals, vigils, these types of things becoming political. Because spontaneous expressions of public grief and commemorations of history, they can clash with the official narrative. And that's political. Yes, especially the so-called not triumphant history. The painful or sad history that's avoided here. Just like my mom avoided my dad's situation.

And my dad also avoided his own situation. It's because of this avoidance that they've suffered a lifetime. So I choose not to avoid. I want to face it directly. I don't want to end up like my dad. Peng has really hit on something here. I want to face it directly. I don't want to end up like my dad. Peng has really hit on something here. He's got this way of expressing himself,

this way of tapping into sort of communal grief in a way without tripping the censorship wire and getting himself censored. This performance on the Yangtze River at the Three Gorges Dam was the 32nd one that he'd done in public, and he told us he was planning to do a lot more. Before this performance on the Yangtze, Peng performed in Sichuan province at the epicenter of the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. That quake killed tens of thousands of people,

including thousands of schoolchildren who were buried under the rubble of poorly constructed buildings. Peng said he was performing there to counter amnesia. He didn't want people to forget what had happened. And during that performance, while Peng played, some security guards showed up. And they stand around for a while, kind of looking like they're unsure what to do.

And in the confusion, Peng was actually able to play for 28 minutes before they asked him to leave. So in moments like this, it seems that Peng occupies a gray zone. The authorities don't really know what to make of him. They don't know if he's dangerous or just kind of strange. And while they're scratching their heads, he's safe. He's permitted to carry on doing what he's doing. But this space he's found to perform in, it might eventually close. Maybe I'm lucky. I think it all comes down to the fact that piano music can be an abstract thing.

It's symbolic. It's not text. It's not language. If in this country, even piano music is controlled, then that would be frightening. I can't imagine we'll ever get to that point. And so I started wondering, how many performances does Peng have left before he crosses that line into forbidden territory? I don't want to cause troubles, you know.

If I cause trouble, then how will I continue to play piano in the future? Thankfully, I've not run into any trouble yet. When we come back, John asked Peng this question. Is marking loss in China an inherently political act? Stay with us. We're back with NPR correspondent John Ruich. It's getting late in Wushan.

It's been a long day. We've been talking to Peng in his hotel room for hours. And he's been telling us about some of the hardest moments in his life. But he's clearly glowing about the day's performance. And as we're wrapping up, we're kind of joking about how his piano just got destroyed by the rain. And he says he can replace the keys of the piano if he wants. And this is where Peng really took the conversation to another level. Rain would hurt this piano, I knew that,

but I didn't care anymore. I wasn't afraid anymore. When it rains, we are all afraid of getting wet. We are afraid of getting soaked. But going out into the rain and getting wet, that can also be a beautiful feeling. Of course, what the rain really is, you can think for yourself what that means. Maybe it's the feeling of the era. But the more you try to avoid it and hide from it, the more it will make you uncomfortable.

When you choose to face it, to go out into it, it can make you stronger. The thing I'd been trying to decipher about Peng this whole time was really the why. Was he actually trying to make a political statement? And if so, what was the message? You're asking if this is a political expression? So I kept asking him to give me just a clear explanation of his intentions, but he pushed back. I'm not trying to explain. The best I can tell you is where I went, what I did, right?

I'm taking action. I am doing. I'm not explaining what I'm doing. I don't want to use my explanations to restrict my creation. You will see whatever you carry in your eyes. I'm not making a statement. I'm a mirror. The piano is a mirror. The things I did is a mirror. The things I did is a mirror.

Yeah. His performance is blank. You can express yourself, but do a little softer, be water, like music, to soothe people's hearts. But I think if you're not a person who lives in this environment, it's hard to understand.

Can you understand? At one point, my producer, Awen,en asks If you keep doing this Do you think you'll ever have to leave the country? I've never thought about leaving China A lot of my friends have suggested to me That if I wanted to keep doing this I should go abroad Change my nationality

No Why? Why would I do that? I should go abroad, change my nationality. No. Why? Why would I do that? Aren't I doing this to bring some hope to my countrymen? I love this place. I love the people here. I grew up here.

My mother is here. My family is here. When it comes to expressing myself, shouldn't I be standing here in this country next to them? And I think everything you say, if you leave your land, is useless. And that's when one thing comes into clear focus. Peng Haitao is a patriot.

He never wants to live in exile. And I truly hope he won't have to. Maybe what I'm doing here is I'm just trying to heal myself. But if I'm also comforting others, then that makes me very happy. We often say that there should be positive energy, don't be negative. But actually, sadness is a very important emotion. We have to express it. We don't need to hide ourselves. The first time I told someone about my child's death, I was in a lot of pain.

But I said it once, then I said it twice, I said it three times, I said it four times. Actually every time I share it, it eases my pain a little bit. Including this time. Me talking to you about this. And you give me a chance to talk about it again, to face my pain again. I find that most people in this country can't face the pain,

whether that's a voluntary choice or not. This is my personal experience and it's part of the history of this land. I'm going to go. This episode of The Sunday Story was reported by NPR correspondent John Ruich with help from producer Awen Chow. It was written and produced by Justine Yan, edited by Jenny Schmidt, Mandarin translation by Justine Yan and Vincent Chin. Voiceovers for Pung Haitao by John Yutong Hu. Greta Pittinger was our fact checker. Our audio engineer was Josh Newell. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo,

Abby Wendell, and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. If you or someone you know is in an emotional crisis, and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. If you or someone you know is in an emotional crisis, reach out to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting 988. We always love hearing from you, so feel free to reach out to us at thesundaystoryatnpr.org.

I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back in your feed tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, enjoy the rest of your weekend.