Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride from Mao to the Met - Hardcover

Hao Jiang Tian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 047005641X ISBN 13: 9780470056417

Publisher: Trade Paper Press, 2008

Synopsis

Since his 1991 debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Hao Jiang Tian has appeared on the world’s greatest stages, more than 300 times at the Met alone. How he got there is a drama of bittersweet humor, mortal danger, heartbreaking tragedy, and inspiring triumph—more passionate and turbulent than even the grandest opera. In Along the Roaring River, Tian relives his coming of age in China during the chaotic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and his dramatic journey from hard labor in a Beijing factory to international opera stardom.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Since his 1991 debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera, Hao Jiang Tian has appeared on the world's greatest stages, more than 300 times at the Met alone. How he got there, how-ever, is a drama of bittersweet humor, mortal danger, heartbreaking tragedy, and inspiring triumph—more passionate and turbulent than even the grandest opera.

In Along the Roaring River, Tian relives his coming of age in China during one of its most chaotic periods, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Wild and rebellious, nature-loving, emotional, and yearning for beauty, he finds release in underground love songs howled from mountaintops and banned books stolen from boarded-up libraries. Dec-ades after leaving China during the post-MaoAnti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, he returnsto find his homeland vastly different. Inbetween, more by fate than by design, heachieves success in the most Western of art forms—and takes his place among the influential Chinese artists, film directors, and composers of this era, who were all shaped by that terrible time.

Tian was born to stern revolutionary parents who became important musicians in the People's Liberation Army, enjoying the privileges reserved for officials of New China. The boy showed little promise of living up to his parents' expectations. He hated music. He celebrated the end of his forced lessons at the piano—the "big black beast with eighty-eight teeth"—when his unsmiling teacher was sentenced to isolation for counterrevolutionary tendencies. Then, when Tian's own loyal Communist parents were sent to a far-off coal-mining town to be "reeducated," young Tian found himself abandoned and alone in Beijing. Without parental supervision, outside politics, and, at age fifteen, assigned to hard labor—cutting metal in the Beijing Boiler Factory—the young man found himself spiritually free. He even fell in love with the piano-beast, with which he shared his tiny, lonely room. He taught himself accordion and that most decadent of instruments, the guitar. He became a singer by chance, and, after seven years, tricked his way out of the factory and into a musical audition that changed his life. He smuggled watches with gun-wielding gangsters to scrape together enough money to leave China. And then, on his way to Denver to study voice, on his first day in the United States, he went to the Metropolitan Opera and saw the very first opera of his life. Eight years later, he made his debut at the Met alongside Plácido Domingo.

Peppered with charming, frightening, and sobering anecdotes, Along the Roaring River is important and rewarding reading for anyone who loves opera, political history, or a thrilling and powerful true story well told.

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Along the Roaring River

"I was so completely taken with Hao Jiang Tian's memoir that I carried it halfway around world to finish reading it. Tian let me into his world, one filled with astonishing events and candid details. He has a natural storytelling voice in finding the strange and humorous ironies that link past and present. Along the Roaring River is as riveting as a well-told novel."
—Amy Tan

"I have sung eight operas with Tian since his Met debut, and now I understand how the passion and strength in that beautiful voice were created in desperate and dangerous times. Tian has had a life worthy of an opera!"
—Plácido Domingo

"I was deeply moved by Tian's story, how he struggled to survive in the maelstrom of Mao's China and then how he toiled to succeed as an artist in America. . . . It is no surprise that music—like it did for me—took him to a higher place, and it was thrilling to read how music fueled this young man's wild imagination and provided a passion for living."
—Quincy Jones

"Along the Roaring River is a gripping and inspiring account of how an artist transcended the savagery of the Cultural Revolution to take his place on the world's greatest opera stages. This book reads like a suspense novel."
—Allan Miller, filmmaker, From Mao to Mozart and Isaac Stern in China

"Along the Roaring River takes us through an extraordinary life filled with humor, suspense, and an operatic-sized heart. From the deprivations and chaos of China's Cultural Revolution to the excitement and glamour of opera's great stages, Tian's gripping and moving memoir spans many different worlds, discovering in each the common humanity which binds them together. This is a book which makes us want to sing!"
—David Henry Hwang, playwright, Tony Award winner, M. Butterfly

About this edition

• Publisher: Trade Paper Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 047005641X
• ISBN 13: 9780470056417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336