Quan Ho on call

Traditional performances are hard to come by, but singers of centuries-old quan ho songs are more than happy to sing for fans over their cell phones.

As I spoke with quan ho singer Thanh Kim, whom I was interviewing for my research on the traditional form of antiphonal singing, she interrupted our conversation to take a phone call.

After a few polite words with the caller, Kim began singing into the receiver. It was not as though she was just reciting a few lines to make a point – she went into a full performance, giving her listener, and me, the pleasure of hearing the form sung purely and properly.

She sang Beo dat may troi (Whatever happens, I am still waiting for you), the lonesome croon of a woman singing for her lover who is far away, perhaps on the battlefield.

At the end of the song, Kim thanked the caller and hung up. She smiled.

“My fans often call to request a song,” she said almost shyly.

Kim explained that such impromptu performances were common these days, as quan ho devotees across the country had fewer and fewer opportunities to hear their favorite music live.

Though Kim is not a professional singer, she is well known by quan ho listeners in the northern province of Bac Ninh. She said she receives 4-5 calls requesting songs each day.

“I’m usually very happy to sing for anyone who likes my voice,” Kim said.

“Sometimes I get a call while I am traveling or working, but so long as I am not too busy, I will stop and sing for anyone who calls.”

Roots

Quan ho, also known as quan ho Bac Ninh, was founded in the northern province eight centuries ago. Popularly described as “folk love duets,” the songs originated in age-old village mating rituals still practiced in some Bac Ninh hamlets today.

Some 400-plus quan ho songs, all written hundreds of years ago, are still sung in Bac Ninh Province and neighboring Bac Giang Province. The cappella tunes are sung in pairs as a kind of call and response in which male singers try to woo females into marriage. The first line is always a “challenge” from the ladies, with a “response” then sung by the men.

The art form was inscribed on UNESCO’s representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on September 30 this year, thanks in part to the annual Lim Festival, held from the 12th to the 14th days of the first Lunar Calendar month each year. Though many consider the art dead or dying, devotees of the music gather in the town of Lim, birthplace of the art, every year to celebrate the music at the festival. There, groups of men and women take boats out onto the town’s lakes and sing before large audiences.

Lim performances also take place on stage, on boats cruising along local rivers and in local residents’ homes. At the festival, quan ho features its traditional backdrop - the rolling hills and paddies of the countryside - not the elaborate sets associated with other traditional Vietnamese performances. Visitors to Lim can ask for their favorite songs to be sung and can even perform together with the artists.

The movement

Kim said she often sings more than one song per call, but she is not the only one who does so.

Most singers from the Hoa Dinh Quan Ho Club in Bac Ninh’s Hoa Dinh Village get similar calls and also give spur-of-the moment live performances via phone.

The Hoa Dinh Quan Ho Club was founded in 1995 by amateur singers in Hoa Dinh who wanted to preserve and promote quan ho singing the way their ancestors had done. They know all too well that during and after the war years, the songs were neglected and the art was nearly lost. The club now has nearly 50 members, all of whom are local amateur singers. Some are young school students and others are 80-yearold grandparents.

Well-known professional singers including Thuy Cai, Thuy Huong and Quy Trang, leader of the renowned Bac Ninh Quan Ho Troupe, also said they received regular requests via phone from fans as far and wide as Canada, the US or Germany.

Hoa Dinh Club member Xuan Vinh said the most requested songs were Con duyen (Still charming), Giua toi hom ram (When the moon is full) and Dem qua nho ban (I missed you last night).

Tran Van Quyen, leader of the amateur club, said the singers provide the service free of charge and aim to keep it that way. They often pass phones around at meetings, so that listeners get the full experience of hearing the duets.

“We sing on the phone as a way to express our gratitude to those who love quan ho,” Quyen said. “We’re happy to sing for our fans and require nothing in return.”

He said anyone interested in hearing a quan ho folk song could call him at 095 329 6338 from 8-10 p.m. every evening while the group meets. He asked that callers refrain during the day as most singers were busy. Although Quyen said the artists had no problem performing for free, donations to the club are welcome.

Reported by Phong Lan

What’s in a vase

Piracy, prosperity and a Vietnamese love story present the history of a porcelain vase on display at a Dutch museum.

There is more than a grain of truth in the fictional Manh ghep cuoc doi (Porcelain) television series commissioned by the Zeeuws Museum in the Netherlands.

A young author living in contemporary times accidentally comes into possession of a ceramic vase that dates back to the 16th century. Guided by a mysterious female voice, she is led to learn more about the vase that traveled on a cursed voyage from Asia to Europe.

This narrative, developed as a script by a group of local and international filmmakers, is an attempt to explain the origins of an Asian porcelain vase on display at the Dutch museum.

The television series based on the script is produced with a predominantly Vietnamese cast by the Propeller Group, a Vietnamese-owned creative development and production company, in cooperation with Superflex – a group of artists from Copenhagen that has collaborated with the Propeller Group on several projects.

“It is really to challenge the ideas and notions of an ‘authentic truth,’ said Barbara Dong, a representative from Vortex Company, in charge of PR and marketing for the series.

“History is often seen as truth, but this project plays around with that notion and playfully attempts to challenge it through narrative fiction,” she quoted the Propeller group’s director Tuan Andrew Nguyen as saying.

While several antiques, including the vase, were brought from the museum to Vietnam for the filming in Ho Chi Minh City, the crew asked local artisans to make 50 copies of the vase.

According to the museum, the vase was among Asian porcelain products carried by a Portuguese carrack, San Jago, which was captured by the Dutch in an act of piracy off the St. Helena coast in 1602.

When the ship was later brought to Middelburg in the Netherlands, millions of dollars were earned from selling the porcelain at an auction, marking the start of the city’s prosperity, the museum says on its website.

Some of the props used in the film are part of an installation display together with other artifacts in an exhibition that opened early last month at the Dutch museum.

As part of the exhibition, open untill February 8, the series was also screened at Filmtheater Schuttershof in Middelburg, capital city of Zeeland province on October 16.

The series and the exhibition have received good feedback from Dutch audiences, said Rasmus Nielsen, executive producer and also a member of Superflex.

Nielsen said the combination of the mysterious but true details of Dutch history and a Vietnamese love story had charmed the audience.

“Porcelain” and the display are part of a Zeeuws Museum plan launched this year to explore the significance of local identity in a national and international context.

The museum wants to offer the public a chance to study its collection’s history in creative, interesting ways.

Interested readers can find the series’s trailer at http://www.propellergroup.com/porcelain.

Reported by Cat Khue

Sakura Café, gateway for disabled children

At a bustling corner in Ho Chi Minh City lies a humble coffee shop where mentally-challenged children are pushed to integrate into broader society under the guidance of a Japanese philanthropist.

The five-year-old Hoa Anh Dao (Sakura) Café is the brain child of Chisato Esaki, a Japanese woman who has devoted more than a decade to Vietnam’s underprivileged children.

After graduating from Doshisha University in 1998, the 25-year-old Esaki arrived in Vietnam for the first time to start her four-year Master’s thesis on relief activities for Vietnamese disabled children and their families.

The young graduate soon became a regular visitor to a local charity center where she learnt the language and developed an attachment to local disadvantaged and disabled kids.

After three years in the trenches in Vietnam, Esaki realized that all mentally-impaired people here are unemployed.

It led her to the idea of creating a workplace where disabled children interact with people, learn work skills and help change the public’s misconceptions of the mentally-challenged.

To fund her project, Esaki, who is called Sato by the children, moved back to Japan for a couple of years.

With the support from Japanese and Vietnamese philanthropists, the Sakura Café was opened in April 2004 with 14 staff comprising of children suffering from Down Syndrome and several hearing-impaired kids who work as bartenders.

Different from other local coffee shops which are punctuated with flashy design and trendy music, Sakura Café is an open-spaced café with soft music, simple design and highlighted by a number of pottery pieces made by the cafes staff.

The seemingly simple tasks of training the staff became an entirely different animal, proving to be hard work for both Esaki and the kids.

She said it took her an entire month to teach them how to “Thank you” and “Goodbye” to the customers before the opening of the café.

Esaki also thought up a few different approaches to make the job easier for the children.

Customers to the venue, at 4, Ton Duc Thang Street, District 1, can call over waiters by ringing a small bell on their table.

Also, each table is not numbered but a small ornament in the shape of a type of fruit or animal is placed on each table to help the kids remember where they have to drop off the orders.

Customers don’t tell waiters their order. Instead they fill out what they want from a pre-prepared form.

Working at Sakura Café has helped the kids, who were often seen as awkward, an opportunity to be more open to the outside world.

A grandfather, whose grandson has been working at the café, said the 18-year-old boy often refused to sleep at night through sheer excitement at the prospect of going back to work the next day.

Sakura Café last week moved to a new, more spacious home at 153, Xo Viet Nghe Tinh Street, Binh Thanh District thanks to the support of a local company, The Saigon Times Daily reported.

The café, whose name has been changed into the Hoa Anh Dao Club, maintains its original design, an open-aired venue surrounded by a natural landscape.

The club members currently include nine mentally-challenged children, one hearing-impaired and three volunteers. The children do shift work for no more than five hours a day.

‘A little bit more’ of Air Supply

Rain didn’t stop fans from coming out last weekend to see Air Supply, one of the first western acts to slip through embargoes against Vietnam in the 80s.

When Aussie-UK soft rock duo Air Supply were in their prime, Vietnam had been cut off from the rest of the world by US-imposed sanctions.

In the 1980s, listening to western music in general was rare and youngsters like me valued every chance we got to hear it.

To get western albums, you had to go to the flea market in Ho Chi Minh City. We called it Cho Cu (old market, or second-hand market). The tapes were smuggled from Thailand or brought back by local sailors who had docked at foreign ports. Nearly all copies were illegal bootlegs.

If you lived in the provinces and had no means to visit HCMC, there was no way for you to find cassettes of Air Supply.

Selling the albums was illegal in Vietnam as well. Flea market vendors had to run whenever they saw police.

In those days, the most popular foreign bands were ABBA, Boney M, Modern Talking and of course, Air Supply. Rock fans could also find some albums by AC&DC and the Scorpions. Europe was also a popular band at that time.

I got my first Air Supply album when I was in 11th grade. My friend’s elder brother was a sailor and he brought home the cassette from Singapore.

Our group passed the tape around for weeks from person to person, each anxious to hear it soon and none of us anxious to let it out of our hands. We had no photocopy machines, so we had to rewrite the lyrics by hand. The Air Supply tape was possibly the most valuable thing we owned. We never thought that one day we would enjoy a live Air Supply show in our home city.

But 20 years later, that dream came true.

Nearly 2,000 fans crowded the Hoa Binh Theater last weekend, many of them seeing their favorite band in person for the first time.

Three generations of Vietnamese were: the war generation, the postwar generation and even youngsters born in the 80s – we call them Generation 8X.

Air Supply appeared on a simple stage and in simple dress. Of course, they looked older and less glamorous than the pictures we had seen as kids, but Russell Hitchcock’s voice still soared and Graham Russell’s guitar still charmed...

They thrilled the audience with raw talent, and nothing else.

The performance reached its peak when they played “Goodbye.” They asked their throngs of excited fans to leave their seats and gather near the stage to sing with them.

They played all our old favorites: ”Every Woman in the World,” “Lost in Love,” “Here I Am,” “Making Love Out of Nothing at All”... but there was one song we ‘d never heard before: “Just A Little Bit More.”

With a guitar in his hand, Russell told the audience the story behind the new song.

He said he was deeply moved and touched at the wedding of two 19-year-old friends of his. He said he could see the depth of their love and knew nothing would ever split them apart.

At the wedding, the groom had asked Russell to write a song about the couple. After the marriage, the groom left the country to serve in the military. And he never came back.

After the groom’s death, Russell met the wife and she asked him to sing the song. He said he didn’t want to because he thought it would cause her more pain.

“Just a little bit more,” she said. Hence, the song’s title.

We in Vietnam were also happy to get just a little bit more Air Supply.

Russell said the tune would be on their next album, their 35^th in as many years.

I thought about that: one album every year for 35 years… quite an achievement.

I’m now looking forward to buying their next album, and I know I won’t have to go to the flea market to find it.

Reported by Le Huynh Le

Dustin Nguyen favorite actor at Chinese film fest

Dustin Nguyen on Friday was named as the favorite international actor at the biannual Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival in China on Friday.

Winning the poll of juries and audience at seven theaters in Nanchang capital of Jiangxi province, the Vietnamese American actor was praised for his role as a young man who wants to bring his mother’s ashes back to America to bury her next to his late father’s tomb in Huyen thoai bat tu (Legend is alive) directed by Luu Huynh.

However, no representative from Vietnam’s only entry at the 18^th edition of the festival attended the award ceremony.

Singaporean actor Jack Neo shared the award with Nguyen for his role in Money Not Enough 2 that he directred himself.

The festival also sorted through 25 films from 15 foreign countries, including the US and Japan, for choosing other awards: two favorite actresses, two best directors and two best films.

One of China’s most influential film festivals that opened in 1992 closed Saturday with awards granted to local films.

Source: Tuoi Tre