The China Project -- In Print!

This appeared in the Sunday Times Argus/Rutland Herald in mid-August. The student work from the China Project was aired on Vermont Public Radio, click here to listen and may also appear, possibly, on Vermont Public Television. Students will be appearing at First Night/Burlington to read their work, share their music and impressions and show the video.

Notes from China
Concert hall to Great Wall, young Vermont musicians chronicle a journey

Compiled by Geoffrey Gevalt

Earlier this summer the Vermont Youth Orchestra traveled to China for a 15-day performance tour, playing in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Hong Kong and on The Great Wall of China. The orchestra is comprised of Vermont's finest high school musicians who audition annually for placement, attend weekly rehearsals and perform three concerts at Burlington's Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, in addition to other performances throughout the state.

A total of 92 musicians went on the journey -- 88 current members of the orchestra and four alumni. The trip cost $3,500 per student; the VYO offered scholarship assistance and many of the students worked at odd jobs or fund-raisers to pay for part or all of their trip.

To deepen their China experience, 25 members of the orchestra teamed with The Young Writers Project, an independent nonprofit whose mission is to help students write and to find an audience for students' best work. YWP held workshops on writing, digital recording and Chinese culture. The YWP had the students write about themselves, their passion for music and their expectations for China. Shortly before the trip got under way, the blog -- and the students' writing -- was made public.

From China, the musicians posted writing, audio and still photos each day. They wrote of exhaustion and bad food, of profound cultural exchanges and exhilaration, of wonderment and a sense of being overwhelmed by China's enormity. The students recorded each other's observations; they got sound bites from concerts and the streets; they took hundreds of photos. The YWP sent a mentor on the trip, Daniel Houghton, to help film the experience and to provide guidance.

The China Project was made possible by the generosity of the Vermont Business Roundtable, the Vermont Youth Orchestra, Physician's Computer Company, Johnson State College and Advance Music.

To view the multimedia blog, click here.

June 18, Vermont

Zoe Senecal
Senior, Burlington High School

Music is like lying in a field at night looking at the stars and suddenly being able to see each one of them and you don't even have to count because you know they are all there, in your field of view. It's massive, and it's all entering you, and beneath is the earth, and you feel as if you are slipping with it as it tilts in its orbit, like sitting on a spinning top with a mirror on it, reflecting the night. Everyone who plays music must know this sensation. After disorienting you, music takes advantage of your dizziness and breathes emotion into you. If you're playing the Bruch Romance, the emotion is bittersweet nostalgia; if you're playing Tchaikovsky 4, the emotion is fear and defeat; if you're playing the Lalo cello concerto, the emotion is passion. The control music can have over you is startling. No, terrifying.

It will be interesting to find this common sensation in our counterparts in China, to reach what is universal to all musicians and appreciators of music, regardless of skill or nationality. I am hypothesizing, of course, that this common, universal fear or worship of music will, once recognized, break all language and cultural barriers between the VYO and the Chinese youth orchestras we encounter.

June 20, Vermont

Kelsey Calhoun
Senior, Home-schooled, Jericho

The packing list and flight info for the China trip arrived a few weeks ago and immediately produced a wave of questions. How long are we going to be stuck in an airplane flying over to Beijing? How hot is it going to be in China in July? Why exactly do I need to bring toilet paper? Someone has assured me that a full two weeks worth of TP is not necessary, only one week, as the hotel bathrooms will be fully supplied. I confess I have never needed to know what constitutes a week's worth of toilet paper.

June 23, Vermont

Zoe Senecal

It took two Bach cello suites for the kettle to boil for my tea tonight. The clock on the stove says it is 9 a.m. in China. Oh. My. God.

June 25, Beijing

Steve Tatum
Senior, North Country Union High School

The trip here was surreal. It was as if we got into a plane and closed the windows, waved a magic wand and appeared half way across the world 14 hours later. The change of scenery below us was unbelievable. One hour we saw the lakes of northern Canada, the next we were over complete cloud cover. Then, still moving north, we saw the polar icecap from horizon to horizon. Just hours later, we saw our first glimpses of Asia: rivers twisting through green countryside. Finally just before coming into Beijing, we passed through the desert of northern China.

June 26, Beijing

Anna Houston
Senior, Bellows Free Academy, St. Albans

Today, between sweating beneath the morning sun at Tian'anmen Square, following the hordes of capped and logo-festooned tourists at the Forbidden City, and admiring the majesty and tranquility of the Summer Palace (and enjoying the breeze off the lake), I've grudgingly accepted the tourist's life that will follow us through our days here: street vendors; fans, red books (a guide to communist philosophy); "Gucci" bags; Mao watches, and, of course, 2008 Beijing Olympic Games T-shirts.

Anna Houston

Yesterday, we took rides in a rickshaw. The hot, sticky breeze blew the damp bangs from my face as we clattered along the hutongs, or older neighborhoods, of Beijing. Our rickshaw looked as if it would barely support the two of us: The frame was rusted, dented and covered in grime. Raffia mats covered the narrow seats, and we were protected from the "elements" (mainly smog, dust and rain) by a red roof with gold fringe. As we rattled along, the fringe wiggled back and forth, partially obscuring our view. The ride was exhilarating, mainly because it gave us an opportunity to see the real Beijing. People sat out on their front stoops, fanning themselves for relief from the oppressive heat. Old men and young boys squatted around a table, playing a betting game and drinking (beer and soda, respectively). I marveled at the freshness and variety of the produce at the streetside fruit and vegetable stands. Every so often we could glimpse into people's homes; they were sparsely furnished, and the outside walls were scarred and the paint chipped. Small piles of dirt and garbage littered the ground. I caught quick flashes of people going about their daily routines: a woman washing laundry in a plastic bucket, an elderly couple preparing dumplings for the midday meal together.

Rebekah Gordon
Senior, South Burlington High School

I love China, but there is no sky! There has not been one single day during which the smog cleared and some blue broke through. There is so much between me and the sun that I can stare at it! Not to mention that last night it felt like a miracle when I saw the moon.

June 27, Beijing

Emily Xue
Senior, Essex High School

We visited the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing (apparently the Chinese middle-to-high school equivalent of Julliard) and I felt completely, utterly and abjectly inadequate. Although I've always enjoyed many things about Vermont, one thing I've never fully appreciated is how much living in a small state has been kind to my ego. Of course, I have for years marveled at the skill level of my peers at various music recitals and concerts, but I've always felt even the skills of the best were at least attainable.

That definitely was not the case at the conservatory.

After arriving at the conservatory and spending some time wandering around, we were given a thoroughly amazing - and possibly impromptu - concert by five of the school's violinists. All were about 14 and even the least skilled was very, very good. One of the boys, looking very prepubescent and sporting a massive violin hickey (a mark one can get on one's neck from holding a violin, which apparently gets very large when one practices four hours a day as that kid does) was especially, spectacularly, prodigiously amazing. He played with such intensity, but also with a flawless technique that my inner violin geek can only dream about. Looking around the room, I saw a number of us who were similarly awestruck, jaws hanging open.

Mark Fitzgerald
Senior at Rice Memorial High School

We just finished playing our first concert, and I think we played reasonably bad. Jamie Gunther (a graduate of Champlain Valley Union High School) thinks we played well, but I think the jetlag kicked in. I knew we were all really, really tired. It just felt like the first half didn't have much energy. We tried to pull it together in the second half but a couple of people were sick and everyone was so tired. And I didn't feel on the same wave length as the crowd.

Zoe Senecal

It is Wednesday night just before midnight, and we just got back from our first concert. China is so overwhelming, no, not even, just a Chinese street is overwhelming, even a single room in China. We weren't sure how our audience would react to us, or if there would even be an audience, but we had a sizable group that warmed up to the VYO after intermission when we played the Chinese pieces and the Redestki march for an encore. There were many children in the audience. They seemed to think we were amusing. They took pictures of us.

I felt like the music we made in the hall was spoiled a little as we walked out the stage door, glowing, and saw still puddles (a huge monsoon earlier today) and homeless people asleep on the street. A few bucks and a concrete wall separate them from the great hall in which we just played. But the distance seems much greater than that. Four or five neighborhood kids were playing in the puddles. I'd put them at five or six years old. We started playing with them. At first they were shy, but then they would run up the stairs and give Ted Calcagni a high five and then run back to the street, delighted. The guys in the orchestra would strike a body builder pose and the little boys across the street would copy them and laugh and laugh.

With all of the little catastrophes on stage (horrible rental cellos, and a bass with only three strings out of the four), it was so refreshing to just watch these kids laugh at us in the puddles.

But I got this awful feeling that the kids in the street behind the hall could never be the kids sitting in the audience. The clothes they wore made me realize that indirect contact through Ted's high five might be as close as they ever get to a trombone.

This seems to be a recurring theme in China. For every great beauty, there is an incredible wound made by poverty or pollution. Beauty and pain seem to occur simultaneously here: A magnificent new building right across from a slum, for example. It is difficult to view each item in isolation. It is difficult to say China is beautiful, or China is ugly.

June 28, Great Wall

Kelsey Calhoun

On the Great Wall you imagine the thousands of peasants over hundreds of years forced to carry blocks of stone up the steep, winding Chinese mountains; many spent their lives building the wall where the emperors wanted it - up and down the ridge, snaking back and forth, and straight up the next long steep mountainside. And after those peasants gave up their lives to build the wall, the emperors often disposed of their pesky corpses in the wall itself. So you stand there and consider the incredible feat that impossibly winds itself over mountains as if gravity does not exist. Playing on the Great Wall became a somewhat futile attempt at giving something back to the incredibleness of the Chinese and their architectural wonder.

Daniel Ramsey
2007 Graduate, Essex High School

Visiting the Great Wall was probably one of the top five most life-changing experiences I've ever had in the 18 years-ish of life. It made me feel amazingly, amazingly insignificant, not in a bad way but in a good way because it gave me a perspective on things and it helped me realize that there's more to the world than just myself. And it made me feel like everything was going to be OK, a sense of comfort and a sense of belonging and a sense of not needing to worry that humanity itself would go on even after I was gone.

June 29, Shanghai

Joe Senecal
Senior, Burlington High School

When we arrived in Beijing, one of the first things I saw was a KFC, followed by the golden arches of McDonald's. It seems the China we came across the world to see is dying, being replaced piece by piece by a more modern and "improved" Western culture.

Emily Xue

My parents grew up in China. When I was younger, my mother often told me about her home, an old-fashioned, traditional type of Chinese house. It was actually several houses for different families, arranged in a square around a central courtyard where there were chickens and social gatherings and kids playing. She says she had to go out in the hall to get water from the communal pump. They didn't have indoor bathrooms. They didn't have refrigeration, so they had to put food outside to freeze in the winter. They didn't have electricity, which is hard to believe, and my mom says she didn't have a TV until she was in high school and then it was only black-and-white and so tiny you couldn't really see anything.

When I hear these stories, I think my comfortable life with my TV and microwave and new clothes must be so much better. But my mom also talks about the fun she had with her neighbors even though they didn't have running water, and when we went to visit her family several years ago, she took my brother and me to see the house where she grew up. It was locked, so we couldn't get in, and a woman told us it was to be torn down to make space for a new high-rise apartment building. My mom was upset, and I was a little sad, too, because a bit of history - my mother's history, my family's history, my history - was to be gone forever. I wonder, are electricity and steel and economic progress worth the loss of tradition and history and children playing in old courtyards?

Mia Morrison
Senior, home-schooled, Lowell

The other day I was very tired and hot and sticky and realized I had a bathroom emergency! I looked frantically, asking random people for directions to the nearest bathroom but was given very blank looks, or raised eye brows. Finally someone helped; I ran with all my might! When I arrived, my mouth dropped. The toilet was a ceramic hole on the ground with lots and lots of pee and other smells I won't describe. Desperate, I quickly figured out how to use the squat and found relief. Actually, the squat is pretty chill; I mean it's a whole lot more sanitary than sitting in the very spot some random person sat spreading their whatever diseases from person to person. And you can squat anywhere: scary American toilets and, even, Vermont woods.

June 30, Shanghai

Jillian Griffin
2007 graduate, Mount Mansfield High School

Our second concert tonight was a big improvement upon our first. Aside from the concert itself, the European-style grandeur of the Shanghai concert hall was much more reminiscent of the familiar, friendly Flynn stage at home than the very modernized Beijing concert hall, while the Shanghai audience, like the Beijing audience, seemed extremely friendly and happy to listen to our music. And this time, the post-concert dinner was delicious. We sampled seaweed soup, fish (a Shanghai specialty,) and poked our chopsticks at a crab shell complete with eyes and detached claws.

July 1, Shanghai

Anna Houston

Being a Caucasian in a dominantly Asian nation has, naturally, garnered lots of interest. Everywhere our large group goes, we stick out like the loud, obnoxious American tourists we are. Many people are merely curious, and just stare as we walk by, but others request pictures. Twice I have seen a member of our group pose with a cheery Chinese tourist (the first victim was a tall blonde girl and the second, an unsuspecting teenage boy).

July 2, Shanghai

Emily Xue

The Chinese vendors are alarmingly persistent and will follow anybody who even glances in their direction down the length of the street, shouting "Hello, lady, lady, lady - Gucci, Gucci, you buy? You buy?" while waving and occasionally even grabbing the susceptible-looking straggler on the sleeve to further display their goods.

The uniqueness of shopping in China lies in the fact that the savvy customer can bargain and haggle with the vendors to get prices even lower. Many of us (myself included, I admit) have become single-minded and vicious bargaining machines.

The best way to get a good price is to pick a number (something that seems obscenely low, like a 10th of the original price) and keep repeating it until the vendor either gives in or offers an acceptable compromise price. Oh, he will of course act insulted by the low price quoted; he will lament that he'll lose money at that price, or he'll refuse to sell for that low. What I do in such a case is to simply say "I don't want it, then" and walk away. The vendors almost always pursue, pretending to give in and go to lower and lower numbers.

It seems almost perverse that rich American tourists would want to take advantage of poor Chinese street vendors like this, saving the equivalent of mere pennies solely to feel like they've succeeded. But I've bought some of these vendors' wares solely for the sake of bargaining for them. What use do I have for a waving Mao watch (that stopped on the day I purchased it, and didn't keep accurate time anyway), a Chinese and English Red Book, and a pocket-sized "jade" Buddha (so fake you can see the line where the two halves of the mold were joined)?

It is obvious it is the vendors who have been victorious, after all.

Daniel Ramsey

I've been thinking much about the city, the theoretical idea of the city. Coming from Vermont, coming from a very rural place, a very nice place that is not polluted, not populated, coming to Beijing and Shanghai have shattered my ignorance.

We have done a lot of running on our own in the streets. It's been tough, seeing the hopelessness and despair in people's eyes - not just the homeless or the vendors ... there seems a collective despair. You look into their eyes; what are their hopes? What are their dreams? I don't know; I can't really fathom it. And if they really do make it, what do they achieve? What privilege does that give them? They get up in their high-rise building every morning and walk out into the smog-polluted infested streets. That's their daily reality, and I'm having a hard time with that.

It's made me appreciate each and every day in America ... where there's a hope that maybe the next generation can do better.

Zoe Senecal

Dan Ramsey speaks of a collective despair among the people. How can they measure any sort of success when their reality is waking up in a hole in the wall 20 floors up, and spending the rest of the day struggling against crowds, gasping for hot polluted air as they make their way to XYZ through the crowded streets of Beijing or Shanghai? How can they measure happiness when they are up against 20 million others? To even survive would seem a feat.

At first glance, it seems these people are so completely without hope or comfort, that you want to reach out and touch them. I found myself wishing that I could just pat this one man on the shoulder, or offer any sort of human contact to show that it would be OK, and he wouldn't be sitting on these stairs selling Popsicles in 100-degree weather for the rest of his life. But I didn't know if that was a lie or not. And if I had, what would that man have thought? I mean, that is his life. Would he be confused by an outpouring of concern from snobby looking American kids? Of course there is despair in him. But he is a human, so there must be beauty and joy as well. Who the hell are we to say there isn't? Just because we can't stand more than two weeks of squat toilets and hand washing our dirty panties in the slightly discolored water from the sink doesn't mean that we have the right to pity the third of the world's population that does live as we do. To pity them would mean that we consider ourselves better off than they are.

I realize that in 99 percent of the goings on, we have every reason to pity the Popsicle sellers: We have health care; we have oxygenated air; we have healthy tap water; dinner every night; mothers to yell at us; orchestras to play in; a roof over our heads, and as many Popsicles as we could ever want. The other one percent of goings on, however, constitutes the ability to be happy with what they have, to fight every day to find some semblance of promise for the future. Where I just see some cute kids playing in puddles outside the stage door, the Popsicle seller might see a kid who will grow up to be a great political leader who will end that 99 percent of the cause of the collective despair of the Chinese people. When I feel sorry for the kid because he will never hear an orchestra concert, he might be laughing at me because I am wearing all black long sleeves in the 98-degree weather. Silly American girl.

We got so shell shocked just walking from the hotel to the tour bus, and noticing the despair in the eyes of the bottle collector, or the sweaty teenage girl dodging trucks as she crosses the street, we forget that many of us have the same despair in our faces when we walk to school in our hometowns. We're upset about unhappy families, or poor grades, or unrequited love, or the disturbing things we saw on a summer trip to China. Different causes, same distress.

There are people on the bus in Burlington, who face the same hopelessness as the woman selling you the faulty Mao watch. Hell, there are people driving Jaguars through the hill section of Burlington who face the same despair. It is accurate to say that we have all have lost some hope after our visit to China. But it is also fair to say that we will fight just as hard as the Chinese vendor to find some scrap in the world around us that will make us feel, on the inside, like the prayer movement from DBR's Voodoo violin concerto.

This trip made me consider the manner in which I judge the relative success and contentedness of others. It showed me another layer of the human condition, which is the determination to find any scrap that could be interpreted as or dreamed into hope for a better future. This ability often ends up making a better present. Their realities are the same as ours in this sense: In a rickshaw or a Mercedes, find hope, and cling to it. Your only other option in life is to die.

July 4, Hangzhou

Ted Calcagni
2007 graduate, South Burlington High School

I don't feel nervous before a concert, but it is a little nerve-wracking knowing that every time I play, I have the potential of making mistakes and throwing other people off or worrying about other people throwing me off. It's important to try to relax before a concert, and so a lot of people are listening to music or playing cards or checkers or just talking. Everybody has his or her own way of preparing before a concert, but once you get there, to the hall, we focus on giving it our all. We rehearse the parts we messed up the last time and the parts we can do better. It's kind of stressful, especially playing for an audience we don't really understand. In our past couple of concerts we found that a Chinese audience doesn't react the way an American one does. They're more reserved until the end and then they usually show their appreciation. It kind of throws us. We're so used to the really warm audience at the Flynn in Burlington.

July 7, Hong Kong

Anna Houston

The Hong Kong concert was great. It went really well. And it also felt like any other VYO concert, a bit rushed in the rehearsal (we had been "behind" in everything we had done that day, from our lunch to our hotel check-in), but calm, in that we belonged, to each other and to the music.

When we finished the Tchaikovsky, I lost it. It was the combination of exhaustion mixed with the realization that this was the last concert I would ever play with Sydney and Ted and Paul and Salka and Dan and Kate. It wasn't the personal connection so much as the physical presence (and occasionally, amusing antics) of these individuals that I will miss. OK, so maybe it was the friendship as well, but whatever it was caused me to start sobbing, some might say hysterically, as we took our final bow. I cried harder than I have in a while, the kind of tears that make one breathless and hiccupy, and in my case, full of a bittersweet happiness. You see, I was laughing and crying in such a manner that I don't think anybody really knew what to do with me. I blamed it on the intensity of Tchaikovsky.

July 8, Vermont
Zoe Senecal

At Burlington airport. I was so glad that so many were there to welcome us back. It was a real surprise to turn the corner and see several hundred people clapping and cheering and smiling at us. Standing around waiting for the luggage carousel was a familiar scene, so it didn't really register that this was the last time.

I had prepared myself for it. I had made sure not to leave anything out when it came time for goodbyes. China had taught me that communication is important, so I tried hard to let everyone know how wonderful they are before we got back to Vermont. Unfortunately, as I stood around, I realized, "Gosh, I should have hung out with Ted more, or, I wish Sarah could have finished teaching me that card trick." Too much was left unsaid.

Wylie Brown
Senior, Champlain Valley Union High School, Shelburne

My first day home I didn't know what to tell everyone. I woke up early due to jet lag and just rested in my bed staring at the ceiling. I needed to prepare myself for the question everyone would ask, "So how was your trip to China?" Everyone who asks already has an answer that they expect: "Oh, it was amazing, awesome, spectacular," and for the guys 'cool' or 'dank.'" But, really, that wasn't how I felt.

I've been trying to figure out how to answer that question in ways that no one expects and in ways that don't come off the wrong way or sound ungrateful. And, in the end, my answer is in a list I jotted down while still in China, while on the long bus rides from one sight to another. In China I saw:

Poverty accompanied by privilege in the cities.

Rundown houses, poverty in country.

Lots of people (and children) smoking cigarettes.

Beautiful landscape (mountains).

Everyone doing busy, handy work, but some looking bored and tired. (bureaucracy).

Use of bicycles by pedestrians went down with each new city we visited.

People who are extremely open, humble and helpful.

This isn't in-depth, but then our experience wasn't really in-depth given we were part of a large tour group. I think 80 percent of my traveling in China was uncomfortable due to sickness, stress, rock-hard mattresses and travel schedule. Yet I got everything and more that I hoped from my trip to China. I experienced being the only white person walking down a street. I tried new foods and met new people. I immersed myself into a new culture and got so much from it. A lot of stereotypes have been shattered. Gaining knowledge and experiencing a new culture is in no way a comfortable and easy thing, but that's what makes it so much more important and lasting. This trip will forever be a part of my first glimpse into what else there is in the world. I love Vermont, and I missed it. And it was important for me to learn what I loved about it and why I missed it.