sounds of China


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Asia » China » Yunnan » Lijiang
November 27th 2013
Published: November 27th 2013
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I am sitting in the corridor outside our room in Lijiang, China’s World Heritage Site, designated for its ancient, eight-hundred year-old city two blocks from this very unancient, very spartan but comfortable ten-dollar a night hotel. The noise of China washes over me.

At first I tried just listing what I was hearing. Because it kept changing, even as I moved my notes around in a circle, recording what I heard, I couldn't make it make sense. Now I am trying again, but this time I will pay attention to types and sources of sound in this country that has created the most wild and busy construction zones on the planet, where even in the most remote villages I see through a train window huge bridges are being built, brick houses with rebar reinforced corners and posts for concrete beams spread like punctuation marks everywhere I have been, and clutters of bricks from old buildings that have been carefully deconstructed litter the pavement everywhere.

Conversations, shouts and yells:

I see nobody, but the voices are everywhere around me as I sit overlooking, and not quite seeing, the street below. Not seeing anything of the workplaces behind me and to my immediate right, over my shoulder. A hawker on his bicycle or tryicle perhaps, screaming his wares. A baby crying loudly. Screaming children at play who must be young because it is a school day. The room-cleaner on the bottom floor who has not stopped working since seven this morning. It is now noon. She shouts to somebody I can’t see. Men’s voices on the street, something about “This thing, here,” shouted from one side of the street to another. Workers next door. Construction workers’ voices punching through the din of work: it is a constant layering, this worker talk, a babble not quite audible, like a crowd leaving a concert or a hockey game except voices leap out. An urgent, loud yell, operatic and cacophonous at the same time, when something heavy gets lifted or moved.

Construction noise:

An entire field of hammering sounds, most of it manual, although a pneumatic drill has just settled down into silence. To my left, workers are loudly hammering something thin and metallic, like a metal sheet. Their hammers are heavy, the noise is close and intrudes through everything else. A circular saw cutting wood. Further in the distance, a grinder's whine.

Traffic noise:

A constant hum from the main road a block away, behind the buildings I look at to my left. Occasional sharp horn noises from the lane below me where our hotel sits. Cars shifting gears. Buses laboring along in a high gear trying to get momentum. A tractor, or a heavy vehicle, shows up, a surprise, pulling its way along the road I can’t see in front of the hotel.

Miscellaneous sounds:’

The fuwuyuan snapping out sheets and pillow cases that she removes from the washing machine that clatters, almost reluctantly, into silence. Footsteps of a squat man who descends the tiled staircase at the end of this corridor. A rooster crows next door. Exhultation. More sheets snapping. More rooster crowing.



More pounding. Hammers on metal next door take the lead, try to dominate, go silent, then raise their game again, but the rooster won’t give up its voice in spite of them. More crowing. All of China--a motorcycle shifting gears, another horn honking, and everything is in motion this sunny day in December. And the low babble of workers' voices slipping along beneath everything.

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