Jinli Street is part of the Wuhou district, one of about nine districts in Chengdu. It is right next to the Temple of the Marquis Wuhou, (or 武侯祠 – Wǔ hóu cí – Wuhou Shrine, which is what my Chinese friends call it) where we were going the next morning. Jinli Street has been around at least since the Qin Dynasty (221 BC – 206 BC), although it appears in most ways like a modern tourist destination, which is what it became when it was opened to the public in 2004. You can still see a lot of the old art and architecture, ponds, parks, streams, and waterfalls, although it is layered over with shops, restaurants, and food stalls.
I’ve been trying to think about what places in my home it best approximates, but then I realized there really isn’t any one place that fits, and certainly not in DC. In fact, if I start thinking more nationally and internationally I think I can come up with a better description. It’s kind of like a mixture between Jerusalem’s Old City and Broadway Street in Nashville, but with a large dose of Chinese culture and history, and some nature.
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Jinli is a real tourist destination–for Chinese people. I saw some Westerners, but mostly it is a cool place for Chinese people to taste and experience their culture and music mixed with Western culture and music in a way that goes beyond the mundane everyday mixing of English language t-shirts and public media. It’s the one place where I saw Buddhist monk walking around as tourists–cell phones at the ready to capture the exotic.
Jinli has that Nashville thing where every little spot has really good music every night. I saw this guy below at two different places on two different nights. He played original folk music, finger picking and singing in English with no discernible accent. The young woman in the picture from my last post was also playing both nights I was there.
Saturday night I let Li Qin and Rachel go to dinner without me and I went to check out the nightlife later. I wandered around for a while, but I was feeling kind of uncertain, because I didn’t have many yuan, and I knew I’d have to leave the Jinli neighborhood to find a bank that would take my Western check card. None of the bars in Jinli wanted anything to do with my foreign plastic.
I did have enough for a few beers though, so I wandered into this bar, mostly because I saw this guy and heard him singing old-time country music.
They gave me a table right by the stage, and beers were about 20 yuan, so I knew I could just sit there for a while and drink some beer. The singer smiled at me when I walked in, so I felt comfortable chatting with him in-between his songs. He had been in Chengdu for about five years, teaching English. Since I’m so interested in the language, I asked him if he spoke Chinese. “Nope,” he grinned. “I’m not good with language. Can’t speak a word.” I asked him how he got by, and he gave me that big grin again and said, “I’ve got lots of bilingual friends”.
He sang a couple more tunes–mostly George Jones kind of stuff, and I asked him if he knew any Roger Miller. Sure he did, what tune did I like. I asked him to play “King of the Road,” and he did. A few bars in, he saw me singing along, so he called me up to the stage. I jumped up and started singing with him, taking the high harmony on the chorus. Unbelievably, I didn’t think to take pictures or video, which is surprising, considering I’m an inveterate selfie-narcisisst. Maybe I was just enjoying myself a little too much, or maybe it was because I was about 60 yuan-beers in. It’s too bad; it was a pretty nice-sized crowd, and I thought we sounded pretty good.
He only had about one more song after that, and then this guy came on. He did a Chinese opera act, which basically looked like a lot of very dramatic Kung-Fu in an elaborate costume. The coolest thing was that I thought that mask was painted on his face, but at various points in the performance he pulled it off to show his face–so quickly you couldn’t see him doing it–and then just as quickly put it back on.
The final act was this guy below, who did that very Western thing of having all of the instrumentation sampled on his keyboard, with a drum machine, all simulating an entire band. He was actually quite good; it sounded like he was playing all original songs, and thy sounded like American pop music, but he was singing everything in Chinese.
At a certain point, I ran out of yuan and decided to head out. I got considerably lost on my way back to the hotel–it was one of those comical scenes where you keep passing the same place over and over again, realizing you’re going in circles, yet continuing to take the same turns. Eventually I made it back, to rest up and get ready to go to the Wuhou shrine in the morning and then head back home to Chongqing
Darwin's Apostle 