Park Song

Professor Gao, now retired, typically rises early on Sunday. For her, weekends are days full of happy anticipation. Her son, now teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, calls to chat, and later in the morning she will go to Jingshan Park and sing.

Located to the north of the Forbidden City, Jingshan Park is one of the first places in Beijing where ordinary citizens gathered for chorus. Professor Gao has joined in for many years, and she and some 20 other members will often begin the Sunday concert with their favorite song, I Love You, China, with two accordions as musical accompaniment.

The passionate melody brings her back to her youth. Gao loved to sing when she was a little girl. She was a member of the student chorus when she was in university in the 1950s, and rehearsals and performing activities were a different kind of fun and game for the physics major.

After retirement, Gao began to sing in the park every Sunday. This brought her much fun and joy, and it is good for her health. Gao says that she is deeply moved by the beautiful melody and lyrics when she is singing, and her mind flies back to the time when she was young, vigorous and energetic. And this makes her feel happy. When singing, one has to raise, mobilize, inhale and exhale breaths, and these movements are actually exercise, increasing the vital capacity of the human lungs, she adds.

If singing highlights Professor Gao s retirement life, it serves as a spiritual pillar to Ge, a victim of traffic accident.

Ge was struck by a fast moving Jeep Cherokee during a commute seven years ago, and the accident paralyzed his legs and bound his life to a wheelchair. Even worse, his head and the nerves of his face were also affected. He had to retire at the age of 45. The accident changed his life and the tragedy inflicted enormous psychological pressure. He remained silent until one day his wife rolled him into grounds of the Temple of Heaven.

Every morning in the park many people do various exercises under century-old cypresses. Some wave red silk ribbons, some practice tai chi boxing, others do aerobics or qigong. Also many gather there singing old songs and traditional opera.

The morning when Ge and his wife entered the park, they saw a large group of seniors and middle aged people singing by a wood. The conductor standing in the center was a man in his fifties. The songs they were singing were those that had accompanied them from youth to maturity.

Since that day, Ge and his wife became members of the chorus. Six years have passed, and the couple have never been absent once for the scheduled chorus, no matter if it was rainy, windy, bitterly cold or blistering hot. Now the couple, who have walked out the small space of home and joined the happy big family in the park, no longer feel isolated.

People in this big family take good care of them. Ge s wheelchair is placed in the middle, so he can clearly see the gestures of the conductor. Though he still may not be exact in tune, and at times can t follow the tempo, he continues to improve. Before I had difficulty talking, Ge says. And I was irritated about it. Now I can speak more clearly. I come here everyday for singing and I feel happy.

Singing seems to have helped open a hopeful window for people like Ge, and a family that was once plunged into difficulty by an accident again has some joy.

Some voluntary choruses have their own lyric writers and composers. Han is a retired editor. Discovering that most of the songs sung in parks were old, popular in the 1950s to 1980s, he began to compose new songs.

In 2005, he wrote and composed an Olympic song and taught it at Jingshan Park. The lyrics called out the Chinese people s dream for the Games, and the tune was well received among park singers.

In the past three years, Han has written and composed more than 100 songs for park choruses. What he has done rewards him with a new life experience and allows him to understand that seniors can still play their roles for the progress of society