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.