Healing Historical Scars: “My Beloved Hometown”
Unlike both “Blood-Stained Dignity” and “Fill the World with Love”,
the Northwest wind song “My Beloved Hometown” came from a non-official
context. However, the song shares characteristics with those others
written during this transitional period, providing a third perspective
on the ways that 1980s’ songwriters handled the juxtaposition and
negotiation of individual desires and social forces.
Understanding Scar Literature is a way to understand the seemingly
contradictory expressions of Northwest wind songs. Scar Literature is a
style that emerged at the end of the 1970s and has been described as
being largely negative in portraying the sufferings and trauma of
educated people during the Cultural Revolution (Chen, 1996: 160-161). To
a large extent, the genre was tolerated and accepted by the Chinese
Communist Party because its prime concerns are “love” and “faith”;
its practitioners “embraced love as a key to solving social problems”
(Liu, 2003: 24).
Like Scar Literature, Northwest wind songs were strongly impacted by the
established terms of expression of
Socialist Realism, which
encouraged them to adopt a positive stance from which to praise the
much-enhanced material conditions of today as compared with those of
before 1949 or, subsequently, during the Cultural Revolution. Songs like
“My Beloved Hometown” shift to a worried tone when faced with
portraying an underdeveloped reality, which has been read as endowed
with an anti-state political meaning by several Western scholars (for
instance, Brace, 1992: 162). Indeed, the first part of the lyrics
directly describes the hometown as a poor rural place with low straw
huts, bitter well water and a small dry stream (Ex 8). The Northwestern
folk vocal style plus the use of the
timbre
of the Chinese traditional double-reed instrument suonastrengthen the feeling of desolation.