Huang Ruo (b. 1976)
Book of Mountains and Seas
In China, there is no question: the egg came first. Other cultures may count their chickens, but China places this common fertility symbol at the heart of its most widespread creation myth. Bursting from this primordial egg, the giant Pangu keeps pushing the purer parts of the egg upward to become the heavens and less pure elements downward to become the earth, thus instilling the new cosmos with the Daoist duality of yin and yang.
The power of such legends, as well as their countless variations through the millennia, stem largely from the nature of their literary source, the Shanhai jing, commonly translated as the Book of Mountains and Seas. Though codified in its present form for the imperial library during the early Han Dynasty (202 BCE–9 AD), many of the texts had already circulated for centuries and the stories themselves long before that. Divided into 18 sections, Mountains and Seas describes many landscapes and creatures (both largely mythical) in a series of standardised, highly elliptic vignettes.
What these texts lack in narrative clarity finds compensation in the cumulative power of their imagery, which not only forms a core of Chinese sensibility but often taps into corners of the collective human unconscious. Their brevity and very lack of concrete detail practically invites Chinese readers to embellish the stories in modern trappings, and non-Chinese readers to reframe them through a different cultural lens. In addition to Pangu (who seems part Adam, part Atlas), we meet such characters as a princess who becomes a bird and a reckless figure venturing too close to the sun, neither of whom would feel entirely out of place in European legends.
For the composer Huang Ruo, adapting such poetic stories for the stage was daunting – not in verbal terms, since he had previously worked with operatic texts in Chinese (Dr. Sun Yat-Sen), English (M. Butterfly) and a dialect entirely of his own creation (Paradise Interrupted) – but rather in the musical language. He describes Book of Mountains and Seas as ‘vocal theatre’ with singers surrounded – singing and beating things being the most basic and primal forms of music-making.
Within those vocal forces, though, comes a variety of musical textures: an ensemble of twelve singers, periodically performing as separate male and female choruses and all possible permutations of solo and ensemble combinations. Treading a fine line between ancient ritual and contemporary theatre, singers sometimes perform as specific characters, other times as omniscient commentators.
Given the calculated timelessness in Huang’s musical conception, the four stories of Book of Mountains and Seas still resonate clearly today. Following the introductory The Legend of Pangu, we veer into The Spirit Bird, where a young princess’s spirit embodies a bird after her own body drowns at sea. She then begins a relentless campaign of revenge on the water by dropping twigs and pebbles. ‘In Chinese, we have this expression, “Dripping water can penetrate rock”,’ Huang says. ‘For me, this simple story sends a clear message. Even if you think something is impossible, never underestimate one’s determination, or the power of revenge.’
From there, we encounter The Legend of Ten Suns, picking up the creation story after Pangu’s death. The earth is now guarded by ten suns, each revolving in turn, riding on a large and graceful bird. One day the suns all decide to come out together, and their combined heat dries the rivers and shrivels the crops, imperiling the earth. Their father, the God of Heaven, employs the God of Archery to shoot them down, but after the ninth has fallen he asks that the tenth be spared; so fearful is the remaining sun that he keeps his scheduled revolution faithfully, clearly marking day and night.
From that cautionary tale extolling moderation, we turn to Kua Fu Chasing the Sun, where the giant Kua Fu, trying to discover where the sun goes at night, spends his days chasing it from east to west. Exhausted and overheated, he keeps drinking from one river to the next until they all run dry and he finally dies of thirst. After his death, however, his walking stick falls to the ground and grows into a forest of peach blossoms, a long-held symbol of paradise. ‘For us today, this story is rich in meaning,’ Huang says. ‘First, we see the danger in mistreating the environment by trying to control nature. Nature will always have the last laugh.’
His original conception, however, notably changed during the Covid pandemic lockdown. ‘I was working on the part with the peach trees when the pandemic hit,’ Huang recalls. ‘I’d wanted it loud, bright, with everybody singing and glorifying nature. But once the pandemic hit, I couldn’t write that. It was so different from our experience then.’
After much contemplation, during which he completed his meditative string quartet A Dust in Time, Huang returned to the scene anew. ‘It was a 180- degree turnaround,’ he says. ‘The sun was no longer burning, but quiet and warming. Survivors crawl out of the post-Apocalyptic debris in search of others, remembering to be humble and treasuring life.’
The essential message, though, remains the same. ‘No matter how much destruction occurs, nature will always return,’ Huang maintains. ‘Whether or not humans will be there depends on what we do.’
Ken Smith
This essay was commissioned by the Moss Arts Center, Virginia Tech
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