Profile | Musician Ying Ying Liu on growing up during the Cultural Revolution, going West, and connecting young people with nature through her charity LumiVoce
- The daughter of one of China’s most celebrated composers, Ying Ying Liu learned to play piano, read orchestra scores and conduct from a young age
- She founded NGO LumiVoce in 2016, producing music tracks of classical melodies mixed with indigenous sounds and rhythms which she has performed widely
Breaking records I was born in 1963, in Liaoning province, northeast China, the youngest of four children. I was an “accident”. My father’s name is Liu Chi, which means “big fire”. He is one of the most celebrated Chinese composers. He named me Ying Ying, which means “firefly”, so I’m daddy’s little fire.
I had an amazing relationship with my dad. My mother was a choreographer and later became a painter and I grew up surrounded by artists. When I was three years old, the Cultural Revolution happened and my father was seen as a stinky intellectual and taken away, beaten up and put into struggle meetings. My home was looted three times by Red Guards – they smashed our records and tore the pages out of our books.
My father was sent to the countryside for re-education. In hindsight, it was fortunate because if he’d stayed in the city his situation would have been even more bleak. When I was six, me, my mother and two of my siblings were sent to the countryside and my older sister was sent to a different place.
Field work At the beginning, there were times when we had barely anything to eat, but my mum had a green thumb and quickly learned how to grow food on a small plot of land. We raised chickens, ducks, pigs and even had a pet squirrel. I went to school in a simple brick building. There were many intellectuals, including teachers, who were exiled to the countryside, so we actually had proper teachers.
During the harvest and planting time, every single hand had to be in the field to help and school was stopped. I learned how to grow rice, corn, soybean and cotton. I grew up close to the land, close to nature and animals. In the winter, my parents had to get up early to clear the irrigation channels. They walked 20km (12.4 miles) in the dark to arrive at first light and took me with them. I remember sitting on a big pile of coats they’d taken off while they worked, and we walked home together in the dark.
A little utopia After a few very difficult years, things settled down a bit and some of our books and records were returned to us and even our piano. Our family became a musical centre and my parents ran a little music salon. There were many intellectuals and artists living in the villages nearby and my mother would cook and then everyone would sing around the piano and listen to records. It was a little utopia. I grew up listening to music and reading the classics and learned to play the piano. By the age of 14, I’d read all of Shakespeare, in translation.
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The temperature dropped to minus 40 degrees [Celsius/minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit] in winter and the river froze. Initially we lived in an adobe hut and the mud floor got wet when it rained. In winter, the heat from the cooking fire was channelled under the platform that the family slept on to warm it. We put the piano on this elevated brick bed to keep it dry. My mother taught me to play. Later, once or twice a month, I’d hitchhike to see a piano teacher who lived in a village 60km away.
Despite the difficult times, my father never gave up trying to educate me. He taught me how to read orchestra scores and how to conduct. I was quite a solitary teenager. I think I was an introvert as a child. I loved reading and being in my own world and didn’t like performing, but I did from time to time.
From Beijing to Cleveland My parents were among the last intellectuals to move back to the city and we moved to Beijing in 1978 to be rehabilitated. I went to a school that is these days known as Beijing No 25 Middle School. It was a great school, but most of my education was at home. I participated in some chamber music and toured as a pianist within an orchestra.
When I was 19, I started playing cocktail music in the lounges of Western hotels – the Great Wall Hotel and the Lido Hotel. I was playing in the French restaurant of the Great Wall Hotel when I met a couple who were visiting China from New York. At the end of the evening, the man came over and said, “I think you are very talented. Would you like to go to the West to study?” He gave me his card and said if I made it to the US and got accepted into a conservancy, he’d pay my tuition.
I met another friend who was working for IBM and spoke perfect Chinese. He said, “If you want to go to the West, I’ll help you to apply.” I applied to eight schools and was offered scholarships by several – I chose the Cleveland Institute of Music, which is where I did my master’s.
Thrown into the deep end I met a musician in Cleveland. We were both very young and fell in love and got married. He got a one-year position in New Mexico as a cellist and I went with him as a pianist. After the year, we went back. I was at the Eastman School of Music, in Rochester (New York state), and he was in Cleveland and we drove back and forth, but we figured we really weren’t suited even though we liked each other, so we decided to let go.
I started a doctorate at the Eastman School of Music and for a few years went to the summer academy in Salzburg (Austria) and played at festivals, accompanying singers. Two years into my doctorate, my teacher told me about a job opening up teaching at a small college in North Carolina – I flew back from Salzburg to take the job. I had no idea what I was doing and was thrown into the deep end. I taught music appreciation, the piano majors, music history and theory. I learned a lot by teaching and was signed on to teach there for another year.
A proposal on the Great Wall I moved to Colorado to teach at the Fort Lewis College’s music department, where I was an assistant professor of music from 1995 to 2001. There I met my husband, Paul, a lawyer. It’s a small town of 15,000 with a college of 4,000, so it’s mainly a college town. The music department were the entertainers of the town, providing all the culture, and we routinely put on concerts.
Paul saw me and asked a mutual friend to introduce us. Before he became a lawyer, Paul did Chinese studies at Peking University – he’d travelled in China and spoke Mandarin. We were lucky that in a town of 15,000 two people with a common cultural interest met.
It was while I was in Colorado that I lost my father. I was devastated. Paul and I dated for quite a few years before we married – he proposed to me on a trip to Beijing on the Great Wall. In 1999, I took a year’s sabbatical to finish studying to be a doctor of musical arts, a performance-based doctorate. I wanted to come back to China to be closer to my mother, and Paul wanted to combine his Chinese background with his law background, so, in 2003, he accepted a job with Baker McKenzie in Hong Kong, working in China intellectual property.
Into the wild Paul has been a mountaineer since he was young and always enjoyed nature, so my interest in going into the wilderness was influenced by him. When I met him, we spent a lot of time hiking and travelling. We joined a research boat on the coast of Mexico and heard the incredible haunting sounds of whales. I realised they get lonely, too, they need to communicate, too, they are not so different from us.
In Alaska, we entered the Inside Passage on a small boat, a place of incredible beauty, and saw the glaciers melting. In Thailand, I volunteered at an elephant nature park where the elephants were rescued from the mining industry. In my travels I was impressed with the incredible beauty of nature and the destruction. I started thinking, “I’m a musician, what can I do?”
Natural connection In 2016, I created LumiVoce, combining arts and education to support biodiversity. LumiVoce, meaning to illuminate, was chosen to give awareness about the crisis we are facing in biodiversity and to give a voice to the voiceless. We produced three music tracks with wildlife. I recorded classical melodies and then a ranger producer mixed in indigenous ecosystems with the sounds and rhythm.
The first one is Schubert’s Ave Maria mixed with African drums and rhythms. I’ve performed the pieces at events, galas, forums and schools. I talk about music, emotions and nature – how emotional engagement with nature enables us to change. If people have that connection with nature, with wildlife, they will naturally protect it.
We also create and publish wildlife stories for children, and we have an annual competition about wildlife for children – writing, drawing and creating. This year we had over 300 students participating from 19 schools from Hong Kong and China, with 25 local and global artists and seven organisations supporting. The idea of LumiVoce is to use the arts as a vehicle to connect with people’s emotions – we protect what we love.
