Music in the blood

According to the Zhuang people of southern China there once was a girl from the village of Yizhou named Liu Shanhua who began singing even as an infant. Being the third child in her family, the people of Yizhou nicknamed her Sanjie or 'Third Sister'. When she was older, a local tyrant tried to force Liu Sanjie to marry him. One version of the story claims she fled with her lover. Another, that she sang to the villain literally breaking his heart and killing him.

A different tyrant later hired three scholars to outsing this poor country girl. The scholars arrived by river, their boat choked full with books of song, and all the villagers lined the banks to watch Liu Sanjie wade into the current and defend herself in a battle of improvised singing. She begins:

However much you have read,

If you can glide then I can wing.

A wasp above a turtle's head,

If you stick it out then I will sting.

After several rounds, she effortlessly defeats the scholars but ultimately decides to continue on her way, singing wherever she goes. The songs she imrpovises on her travels are taken up by locals and repeated, like vocal footprints, until all the lands of the Zhuang are saturated with the poetry of Liu Sanjie's singing.

There are roughly 18 million Zhuang today, making Zhuang the second-largest ethnic group in China after the Han. It is said that in the countryside there are Zhuang villages where the people live in song, singing their way through daily conversations or during work, as if life were one extended musical, and that when two lovers meet at first they introduce themselves in song and sing duets until the sun comes up.

I live in southern China now and so far I have not met any Zhuang who were not heartbreakingly beautiful singers.