“My life in China is great. Beijing is my favorite Chinese city. It is so developed and the people I meet here are nice and hospitable,” said Eric Allen, who is an English editor for New World Press, a Chinese publisher in Beijing publishing various books, including English books introducing China’s culture, history, and social systems.
Life and Music in Beijing
Born in Muncie, Indiana, Eric Allen finished his college education at a law school in Bloomington, Indiana and then worked in several small cities around the U.S. including Norman in Oklahoma, Champaign in Illinois, and Ithaca in New York before finally settling down in New York City, the city of his childhood dreams. There, he stayed in Manhattan, working for a legal publisher and taught legal writing at a local university. Out of a desire to learn new things and experience something exotic, he decided to leave the Big Apple after working there for more than a decade, and travel to other countries.
China was one of the overseas countries he planned to visit. “I knew some Chinese people, and had learned some things about Chinese culture and food while in New York,” Eric said. To get a more in-depth feeling and understanding of China, he visited it four times between 2008 and 2012, and then eventually moved to Beijing in 2012.
“I traveled for a couple of years, and since I enjoyed my time in China, I settled down in Beijing. Now, after living in China for nearly a decade, I am still amazed by everything here, especially the high-speed trains, which are very safe and fast. We don’t have that in the U.S. China is doing great in many areas, especially infrastructure,” Eric described his life in China. Beijing is a charming city for him, with its unique aura of tradition, and is also a somewhat gritty city. The local hutongs seem a little disorganized, but this is exactly what he likes about it, as it makes people feel like home.
Eric is a music fan. Escaping from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan life which allowed him little time to concentrate on music, in Beijing, he is finally able to connect to a more manageable musician network. He composes, writes lyrics, and has also organized his own band, the Eric Allen Woodshed. During his spare time, Eric performs in live houses throughout Beijing, with many shows occurring in the Gulou area, a place in Beijing famed for many ancient cultural sites and distinctive cultural activities. During his past eight years in China, he has worked with many Chinese musicians in putting on wonderful performances.
China has been part of who he is on his way to becoming a mature musician. The Chinese ethnic minority music, such as Uygur, Tibetan, and Inner Mongolian music, are among his favorites.
“I used to listen to Buddhist chants when I lived in New York,” he said. “At that time, I would take part in Buddhist meditation. There are various examples of this subculture in New York, activities that promote eastern spirituality. People see this as a peaceful alternative to their hectic and busy everyday life in NYC.”
In NYC, he used Chinese Buddhist chants to help quiet down his mind, while now, the traditional flavors and diverse upbeat rhymes of the Uygur, Tibetan, and Inner Mongolian music nourish his soul and give him strength in life.
A Song Dedicated to a Chinese War Correspondent
While editing books for New World Press, Eric encountered three biographies about a young Chinese man named Fang Dazeng, Treasuring Fang Dazeng: A War Correspondent’s Stories (2018), Fang Dazeng: Lost and Rediscovered (2019), and Fang Dazeng: Disappearance and Reappearance (2019). The story in these books so impressed him that he wrote a song about it entitled “She Waits.” This song is included on his newly released album.
Fang Dazeng was a Chinese war photographer and correspondent who went missing after documenting the Lugou Bridge Incident, also known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which was an armed encounter in Beijing on July 7, 1937 that triggered the start of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression across China. After his disappearance at age 25, Fang’s mother never gave up hope. She waited for him to return for 32 years, until she passed away in 1969.
Born into a rich family, Fang received a college education in Beijing and could have chosen safer ways to pursue his dreams. Fang’s compassion for his country and its people, his ability to capture people’s feelings in photographs, and his mother’s deep love for him touched Eric so much. One day in October 2019, while staging in a show in a Beijing bar, he began impromptu playing “She Waits,” the music and lyrics just came to him naturally. Eric said he still has the video of that performance.
“Fang’s mother must have known that he probably wouldn’t come back, but she kept waiting. Somebody asked me if this song relates to my life experience. I had not thought about it until they asked me. My mom was the opposite. She left me when I was two years old and never came back. Maybe this is why it caught my attention so much. Fang’s younger sister also waited for his return. While waiting, they preserved and protected the 837 negative films he left behind in Beijing, which could have caused them big danger at that time. They silently overcame many difficulties and went through a lot to protect the negatives. These photographs are now in the National Museum of China in Beijing,” Eric introduced the Fang family’s experience.
In the video of “She Waits,” Fang Dazeng is seemingly floating in the air while telling the story. The song begins with an eerie, misty scene of a young man. The intensity of the music rises as the song progresses. As he was writing the music, Eric tried to make the melody reflect the feeling of the story. During the recording, he plays two guitar parts to add a little extra texture to increase the emotional intensity. True to its title, “She Waits” mixes acute psychological insights with deep mother-son love, and creates a melancholy portrait of a young man’s destiny.
While Fang Dazeng never had the chance to return home, for Eric Allen, homecoming arouses mixed feelings. In the U.S., people and things that were the most important to him are slowly disappearing from his life, with the passing of his dad and the destruction of his sister’s California house in fire, both in the fall of 2018. The house bore many of their precious family memories.
“If you listen to, and read the lyrics of, my new album ‘Eric Allen,’ you’ll see and hear a lot of words related to home and loss. The hometown is always there. It’s in Indiana. But, for a man of my age, what has gone will never come back,” Eric said.
Links:
MV of "She Waits": https://www.bilibili.com/video/av500472757
New album Eric Allen: https://y.qq.com/n/yqq/album/001FATRX1uOGjL.html
