HAS A PLACE IN MODERN WORLD
Old Chinese Music
By BIBSA SHEPABD
HSU WEN-YING was from Formosa. She seemed a cultured, elegant bit of the ancient China that once held the respect and admiration of the world. She was born in Shanghai, the rich and beautiful city at the mouth of the Yangtze, where so many poets, painters, and musicians have lived and worked.
It was a late summer day in Boston when she and I sat down together in her small room and talked of her all-too-brief visit to the United States. On the table beside us rested a rare instrument, a long, seven-stringed, hollow piece of dark wood with rich silk tassles that flowed over the end of the table. She gently plucked its silk strings.
"It has no actual name," she replied in answer to my question. "We call it 'ku ch,in,, which means the old music. It is the most ancient musical instrument of China. People often think it
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it a Chinese older."
lute, but it is much
Wen-ying: had just completed her doctorate in musical composition and confessed that she hoped to go much further in her musical studies. "I learned to love Western music as a teen-aged girl," she said. "My mother played the Chinese flute beautifully."
Wen-ying, like many Asian women, has a fresh, little-girl look about her although she is old enough to be the mother of three, a son in the Army on Formosa, another son in college there, and a daughter in the United States, studying medicine. It seemed the natural thing for her to be wearing the Chinese style of dress so becoming to her. It was evident that she was not trying to become a westerner.
She is a somewhat bewildered refugee who fled to Formosa with her family in 1948, after completing her formal education at the Missionary High School of the Methodist Church
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CHINATOWN NEWS, JULY 3, 1960