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Tales of two women

Young musician playing her own tune

BY EDWARD A. GARGAN | ASIA CORRESPONDENT

April 11, 2004

BEIJING - Wu Zhuoling, pint-sized, frenetic, her short hair dervished by an unruly wind, blasted through the doors at Modern Sky, a recording studio on the city's west side.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," she panted. As usual, she was late.

There was new music to listen to, a Web site to work on, calls to be made. Time was wasting.

Tucked into faded jeans, a white T-shirt and a polychromatic button-up sweater, Wu, a 26-year-old native of Chengdu, the capital of the distant southwest province of Sichuan, counts herself among a generation of well-educated young women who are disenchanted with the promise, or threat, of a career and a stable, married life.

A passion born

"This is a traditional Chinese society," said Wu, her teeth clenching. "My parents chose my university for me. They also chose my major for me - English. I wanted to study physics and archaeology. I was quite resentful."

Wu is the daughter of professional parents. Her mother teaches high school and her father is an engineer. Unlike the daughters of farmers in rural Sichuan, Wu never tasted the grinding poverty of village life, has never come home with her hands caked with soil, has never worried about whether there is enough to eat. From college the future beckoned.

But then music videos began to trickle onto television screens in China, even in distant Sichuan.

"I saw Channel V," Wu said, which shows music videos throughout Asia. "It had a tremendous impact on me. I even dreamed about it. I was watching R.E.M. and the Cranberries. I thought it was so cool."

Wu taught herself guitar in college, scrounging for cassette tapes. "We couldn't get much news about music in Chengdu," she said. "Tapes weren't allowed in China. The customs would confiscate them and smash them. We would rummage through the garbage for broken tapes and recoil them so we could listen to the music. It opened a window to the outside world for me. It opened a window to music."

Politics never interested Wu; Chinese tradition even less.

"I had a band when I was in college," she said. "We were awful."

Starting her band

Still, her parents pushed her and sent her to Beijing in the summer after her junior year to study English intensively so that she could pursue graduate work in the United States. "In Beijing I met a lot of guys in bands," she said. "I went to school, but I hung out with the bands. I decided to stay in China and start a band. There are so many ways to go abroad, but having a band was what I wanted to do."

Her parents, Wu said, could not understand her passion.

"My parents were really depressed," she said. "We had a huge fight. My father drove me from the house. Starting a band is just too unusual in China. They didn't discover the other side of me."

In Beijing, Wu fell in with a group of like-minded musicians in what was known as Rock Village north of the capital. "I lived with my boyfriend, he's a drummer, for six months. Then I moved out somewhere else. I've been in five or six places since," she said.

In 2001, Wu formed her first band in Beijing, calling it Wednesday's Trip, which has put out one CD. It didn't earn anything. What little she makes with the band is from the biweekly gigs at bars and clubs around town.

"I don't know how many bands there are in Beijing," she said, "maybe a thousand. I don't know. We're just fortunate we get to play when we do."

"It's just very hard to earn a living," she continued. "The record industry is terrible in China. Even if you sign with a big company you don't make any money. The record companies aren't making any money."

She should know. Her day job is producing and running the Web site for a tiny production studio that puts out a dozen "underground" CDs a year.

By "underground," Wu said, she means music that the government doesn't approve of.

At the production company, Modern Sky, Wu works with bands she believes have things to say about Chinese society, things many young people feel. They have nothing to do with what the party's cultural bureaucrats approve of. "In China, the government wants to control the kind of music people listen to," she said. "That's why you can't hear our music on the radio. All they play are love songs, music without meaning."

"Simply speaking," she went on, "we don't have hope. Most bands feel that way. But we go on. This is what we want to do. People can go back home to where they're from, get married, live a happy life. But in their hearts they don't feel happy."

In the music world here, unlike much of Chinese society, young women like Wu contend on an equal footing with men. Wu is the leader of her band and at Modern Sky she works side by side with young men with no sense of second-class citizenship. In her world, she said, young women thrive.

Wu sipped hot water from a paper cup. "I'm doing what I want to do. That's what's important."