Talking to locals in Tuanjiehu Park
I decided to try to find out what local people think of crickets and cicadas. I asked Kelly [Song Nan is her Chinese name] to translate a few basic questions and photocopied sheets of these to hand out in Tuanjiehu Park. I did this for a couple of hours today armed with clipboards, stools and pens. It was quite successful and I am eager to find out what people have written. I was doing this close to the water calligraphers, who were interested in what I was up to. One water calligrapher, one of the teachers, was telling me a lot in Chinese which I could not understand, of course, but then a younger man, Min, who has been studying water calligraphy at the park for 2 years, helped to translate. One of the questions I asked was whether there was a correlation between insect song [or natural sounds in general] and Chinese music. The teacher said there definitely was, and that I should look at poetry from the Tang Dynasty, which illustrates this well.
