Cantonese Music YANG Cui Xi

The composer for the famous Cantonese music YANG CUI XI is anonymous. No one nowadays knows who has composed it or what the music wants to express. However, from its title, which was a historical person’s name, the history of the music should not be too long. YANG CUI XI was a famous prostitute, actress and singer whose activities were active in the late Qing Dynasty and the early years in the Republic of China. She was perhaps the most famous prostitute in Qing Dynasty. There were references online that said she had once tried to protect the reformers who advocated constitutional Monarchy in Qing Dynasty.

The music has been widely used in Cantonese opera for many years. I know it was used in some operas in the 1950s and the music sheet was once published in the 1930s. From this point of view, it is at least not a piece of contemporary music and has many characteristics of traditional Cantonese music. I am not sure the mood of the music, but I feel it at least not a sad song.

Many years ago when I was a middle school student, I played this music with a bamboo flute in a musical lesson.

Autumn Yearning By The Dresser

The repertoire Autumn Yearning By The Dresser is dated from ancient China. No one knows who or when this piece of music was composed. The earliest known printed music sheet for this repertoire was published in Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty in China’s feudal society. However, it might have been composed even before Qing Dynasty. This repertoire is associated with the story of Wang Zhaojun, a women from Chinese Han Dynasty and married to the head of XiongNu to stop the war between the two countries. This piece of music expresses Zhaojun’s homesick when she was by the dresser in XiongNu on an Autumn day. This melody is generally well-known in the Cantonese speaking area due to it was adopted as the music in the last chapter, Fragnance Sacrifice, in the Cantonese opera Di Nu Hua, which tells a tragedy of a Princess in Ming Dynasty who suffered a lot and later commitede suicide for the collapse of the country. The version of this Xiao solo in the post is from this Cantonese opera, and it was arranged by the musician Wang YueSheng.

This is one of my most favourable pieces of music. At the time when I was studying in Xi’an, I often played it at my casual time. I was attracted to this tune not only because the characteristics of music, but also because of the history and historical stories associated with it. Playing this type of music is as if travelling to the past and talking to people from the ancient time, especially when using an intrument with several thousands years of history such as the Xiao. This is the greatest beauty that I admire. This is also the reason why Xiao is my favourate musical instrument despite I also sometimes play with concert flute and classical guitar. This is also the reason why Xi’an is my favourable city in China.

Solo Xiao for Greensleeves

The Xiao is a Chinese traditional vertical end-blown flute. There is no doubt that it can be used to play varies types of Chinese traditional music. However, its capability is not limited to that, as it can be used for western music as well.

There are some challenges to use Xiao in western or contemporary music. First of all, the pitch range for Xiao is not as wide as that for the concert flute. This leads to the fact that there are some repertoire concert flute can play while Xiao cannot. This does not mean Xiao is inferior to concert flute, as it has its strengths in other aspects. I know professional Xiao players can play about three octaves in a Xiao, but this is not easy to achieve by amateurs.

The second challenge is to play chromatic scale in Xiao. The contemporary Xiao has eight holes, which can easily play the ten out of the twelve notes in an octave of chromatic scale. However, there are still two notes, which require the techniques of covering half holes. In a G key Xiao, these two notes are the D sharp and G sharp.

These days I am practicing a piece o traditional western music, Greensleeves. It is an English folk song with a long history. It has quite a poignant melody, and its rhythm is slow, which fits the Xiao well. The difficulty is the frequently used G sharp note that requires covering half hole (playing in A minor on a G key Xiao). The technique is not that easy to master, as the tone sounds a bit week. It is also hard to play a clear tone, especially if I want to play smoothly.

A Trip to Rolin Farm

 Rolin farm is a strawberry farm located to the north of Brisbane. Every year in the season when strawberries are ripe, it will open to visitors for them to pick their own strawberries from the farm.

A few days ago, my wife told me that the strawberries in the supermarket are very cheap, which indicated that the arrival of peak season. Then yesterday, I made a phone call to the farm to get more information. The staff on the phone told me that it was available on Saturday (today) to pick strawberries on the farm but booking in advance was essential due to Covid. I then made a booking on the phone. As the time slots in the morning had been fully booked, I finally confirmed with them that we (including my mother and my sister), four adults and one toddler, would come to the farm at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Today is a sunny and warm day. The spring of Brisbane seems to have come. Ivan started to sleep at around eleven o’clock, and he became awake about one hour later, though he usually sleeps for a bit more than two hours at noon. Fortunately, he slept for half an hour on the way to the farm. Otherwise, he would be too tired.

We arrived at the farm a few minutes before 3 pm.  Next to the car park was a little cottage. Inside the cottage was a reception counter with a couple of staff, who handled the registrations. The cottage also sold some products such as strawberries, orchids, honey, ice-creams and so on. I entered the cottage and told them I had booked the one-hour time slot starting at 3 pm. The staff at the reception then gave me a few punnets. Each punnet for a person. It was said that the punnet for an adult could contain around 500 grams of strawberries, and cost $8. There was also a small punnet for our kid, which could contain 250 grams.

Outside the cottage were some chairs, tables, a children’s playground and a big strawberry statue. A big strawberry field was located on the other side of the road. We first took some photos with the strawberry statue and then went across the road to the strawberry field. The sky was so blue today with few clouds. The sun shined on the green farm as if the ground was brushed with a level of golden oil. The strawberries, as red as rubies, inlaid within the green leaves. The larger ones were as big as a half palm and usually with irregular shapes, whereas the smaller ones were in heart shape. They emitted a type of fragrance, which was the scent of flesh and ripe strawberries. We tried our best to pick the larger strawberries and only consider smaller ones to fill the holes in the punnets. Before 4 pm, all of our punnets were full.

When the sun began to fall to the west, we left the farm and drove back home. As soon as we arrived home, we cleaned the strawberries and ate them. They were super sweet. There were quite a number of strawberries becoming soft due to the squeezing, but I felt that the softer ones tasted better and sweeter. They were not like the strawberries bought from supermarkets, which were usually a bit sourer, less red and harder. My wife said the strawberries picked from the farm dissolved in the month immediately when biting them. Ivan also had three, which was quite a lot for his little stomach.

 

Playing Classical Guitar

I started playing classical guitar at the age of 29. Now several years have passed and I made little progress. I gave up for quite a long time as it was said that one would required to grow long nails and shape them well to pay with modern techniques. This is very inconvenient in life. However, recently I went through the websites and found that there were people playing well without nails. Then I restarted my journey with it.

I registered in some well-known forums and purchased an online course from Udemy. I found that I made a mistake in right hand fingers. In my practice, I always used the ring finger for the first string, the middle finger for the second string, the index finger for the third string, and the thumb for the three bass strings. But I recently realised that I should alternate my fingers while playing. I started to unlearned the bad habit and practiced by using i-m or m-a alternation.

I find I play too many musical instruments, including concert flute, Dizi, Xiao and classical guitar. I had to made a decision to play just some of them.I think I will just practice concert flute and classical guitar, given the wide range of music these instruments provide. Dizi and Xiao are nice instruments with a Chinese music focus and they had a much longer history. However, the pitch range is quite limited making me hard to play many western style music.

 

The Stories of raising a child

 Many years ago when I was still young, I had longed for a child. However, as I got married late, the waiting time for the wish to come true was much longer than what I could expect in those early years. When I was in my early twenties, I only felt a little jealous for my friends who got married early and had children, whereas my mind had been no rest since I was over thirty years old. Envy rose in my heart when I knew that almost all friends that grew up along with me had become parents. Some of them shared with me the experience of how a child had changed their lives. I was sensitive when a friend in a WeChat group said, “At the time when I cuddled my newborn daughter, I felt the whole world had become different. “

I was so curious to know how the world could be different, that when my son Ivan was born I cuddled him with my hands. At that moment I was very delighted as my wish for many years had come true. That day I had been 35 years old. My wife had some infection during labour, and she stayed in the hospital for a few days with the baby. I drove to the hospital every day in the morning and came home late at night. I had never been that weary in my life before. This was especially true when I was told that the baby’s jaundice was above a certain level and blue light treatment was required. The midwives helped the baby to wear glasses to prevent the eyes from being damaged by the blue lights and put the baby into a box where blue lights were turned on. My heart was heavy when I saw the baby lying in the box and tried all his best to get rid of the glasses. Fortunately, this only lasted for a day and a night. At length, a midwife notified us that my wife and the baby could go home. I sighed and thought the hardest time had been over, but in fact, new challenges had just begun! As soon as we left the building of the hospital, we found that the baby was too small to be able to settle on the car-seat. It was fortunate that there were a few taxies parking on the street. We waved for a taxi driver and then my wife, the baby and my mother took the taxi home and I drove home alone.

 

Ivan had made me no sleep since then. He seemed haven’t developed the concept of the day and the night. He was awake frequently at night, requiring someone to cuddle him, or even to sing to him. Breastfeeding was another challenge, as it took quite a time for the baby to develop the skills to suck milk. Despite weary, it was a very pleasant experience to see the little one grew up day by day. For the first few days at home, there were nurses coming to my home to have injections for my wife, and there were also some visiting home nurses for the baby. The GP (general practitioner) phoned us to have an early checkup for the baby. “He still has jaundice.” The doctor said, “It is better to have a blood test for the bilirubin level.” My heart became heavy, recalling the memory when the baby was at the hospital and had the blue light treatment. We then went to the pathology centre. A nurse cut a small wound on the baby’s heel and squeezed blood to a small tube. Ivan cried terribly, making my heart almost broken.

 

In the following day, we were told that the bilirubin level was within the normal range and no treatment was required. However, the baby’s skin was still yellow. We were suggested to let the baby have another blood test some weeks later, and this time the bilirubin level was still within the normal range. “Maybe it was not jaundice. ” I said to my wife. “If not, why he is that yellow and dark?” My wife said. Then I said some people in our two families were also with dark skins, attempting to conclude that Ivan’s skin was congenitally dark too.

 

We lived in Indooroopilly when the baby was born. The unit that we lived in had a very old and dirty carpet on the floor. As Ivan grew up, sooner or later he would crawl on the ground. In addition, there was no air-conditioning in our bedroom, and the baby would be too hot when the summer came. Considering these, we decided to move back to the house that I purchased in a northern suburb. Then in August when Ivan was over two months old, we moved home to the house. This was an old wooden house built in the 1950s. The house itself was small but the land was over six hundred square meters, which required much gardening work. There was a space that my mother could plant vegetables and melons there. There was a swimming pool at the back of the house, but the machines such as the filter had been broken. Not far away from the house was a primary school where Ivan could go for when he grew up. Next to the school was a big park, where we regularly took Ivan there in the late afternoon.

Ivan grew up day by day. He gained weight quickly. The yellow and dark colour in his skin had gradually eliminated, resulting in very fair skin. His cheek was so smooth that whenever I saw it I would have a desire to kiss it. Raising a child at this stage had its challenge compared to when he was born. He had no longer been satisfied by being cuddled and required someone to cuddle him and walk around. Breastfeeding had no longer been enough to provide all the nutrition he needed, and thus we began to give him some other food. I was impressed by the first time that we gave him rice cereal. He seemed not willing to eat and was hard to swallow. But after some attempts, he began to show signs that he liked what we gave him to eat. From the time he was born, Ivan weed and pooed normally. He pooed every day. However, as long as he started to eat food, he pooed every several days. There was a time that he hadn’t pooed for five days. We worried about that before he made a big poo on the nappy. When we saw the poo, we were as happy as we found some golds on the ground.

Now Ivan has been six months old. He has begun to crawl on the ground. We had a mat with colourful pictures, which we placed on the ground of the living room with some toys for him play. Recently we bought a baby playpen to surround the mat. We called this region the rainbow village, and this was Ivan’s little world. Originally I worried he might not like to be in the playpen as it restricted his space of activity, but my worry was nonsense. He liked to be inside it. We couldn’t use an adult’s psychology to view a child’s interest.

I have never thought the world became different when I cuddle Ivan, who is my little son. However, my life has been dramatically changed because of him.

The Footsteps of A Programmer

 More than ten years ago, when I was still an undergraduate student in Xi’an, I did believe I would have a glorious future, given that I was a high-performed student at a university that was famous for its research and education in electronics and telecommunications. My plan was to find a technical job in telecommunications industries after the course so that I could earn a few years of experience in China and then migrated to Australia via skill immigration. This goal was very realistic at that moment as I did not target high salaries and my concern was merely the experience. I could still remember that, on that afternoon in November of 2007, in Tangcheng Hotel, how I signed the agreement with an HR representative. I expressed my sincere thanks to her. “No,” she said, “you shouldn’t thank me. If you could work hard in future in this job, I will be very satisfied.” I could not understand what she said until it was too late. I worked in Shenzhen for a few weeks and then quit the job. Later I applied to study in Australia. My parents sold an apartment and used the money as my tuition fee. But the budget was very stressed.

I arrived in Australia at the end of the year 2008, just a few days before Christmas. I lived together with my grandmother in a house that was quite close to the train station so that I could catch the train to school.

After waiting for a couple of months, my first semester was started. My course, which focused on software development, has only one compulsory unit, IT Project Management, and all the other units are selective. The level of difficulty for a master coursework degree in Australia was somewhat close to that of an undergraduate degree in China. In fact, we had lectures and tutorials together with undergraduate students. Only the assessments were different. However, it was not too easy for me, as in my undergraduate course I was only taught low-level C and assembly languages that were related to software development. Higher-level things such as Java, C#, Javascript, design patterns, databases, operating systems and web services were all brand new to me.

For the first semester, after very careful consideration, I chose four units, and they were Data Structure and Algorithms, Database Design, Software Development and Internet Protocols and Services. Then I devoted almost all the time available to study. I got up very early in the morning and came home very late at night. I had a part-time job in the shopping centre near my home, and I worked there as a kitchen hand for around ten hours per week. Life was not easy in all aspects. The language was a challenge but not the greatest one. Many days and nights, I was thinking about whether it was worth to spend that much to come to Australia for a degree that was not really more competitive than a normal Master degree in China. I was not sure when I could earn back the tuition fee that I spent. I was not sure whether I could stay in Australia due to the uncertainty of the immigration policy. I still remember how happy I was when I knew I was awarded a Group B scholarship for my performance in the first semester. However, this scholarship, with around $3500, compared to the more than $10000 tuition fee per semester, was still too small.

In the second semester, I chose two coursework units and a research project. One of the units was System Programming, which covered the fundamentals in operating systems. I learned this unit quite well, and some years later, I became a tutor for it. The other coursework unit was Enterprise Software Architecture, which was very important for my current professional development. It taught component software and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Besides these two units, I undertook a research project in a team whose research focus was environmental sensing. The knowledge gained in this project was embedded software development based on Windows CE.

Then the three-month summer holiday came, and many international students went back to their home countries. However, an air-ticket at that time was too expensive for me. I decided to stay in Brisbane, to get more hours in my part-time job. Meanwhile, I also enrolled in a summer course. It was a project unit in the Business Process Management (BPM) group. My supervisor for this project was the lecturer who taught me service-oriented architecture (SOA). At the beginning of the project, he explained to me that what BPM was. “We focus on process-centric services.” He said. The term “Process-centric services” was a terminology in SOA. My task was to implement the process configuration functionality in YAWL, termed C-YAWL. YAWL was an open-source process automation system built on top of JGraph, a Java-based graph library.  I worked very hard and finished the project earlier than the due date. Then I was invited to join a paper to implement an algorithm of process verification and integrated the algorithm into  C-YAWL so that the correctness of a process after configuration could be ensured. When I finished the project, a new semester began. This was the first semester of 2010.

The immigration policy in Australia was said to have a major change in that year. My heart was heavy when I heard the news. It was said that it would be much harder to apply skill immigration and the waiting time was much longer than before. I was not sure what my future would be if I could not stay in Australia. I even began to regret not doing a postgraduate degree in China.

In the past year, some professors and lecturers at QUT told me that they thought I was suitable for a research degree. Then I began to apply for PhD scholarship. Although my first attempt was a failed one, the professor, however, did show some interest in my application. He wrote an email to ask me to come to his office. “I hope you to accept some training in our lab.” he said, “If you could demonstrate that you were able to make contributions to our lab, there were plenty of scholarship opportunities. “

Then in the new semester of 2010, I chose a unit called Advanced Signal Processing Systems, which covered signal processing including image processing. In addition, I undertook a project about object-tracking using the Meanshit algorithm in two PTZ cameras in the lab. From then on, my focus had switched to a subject called computer vision, which was a subdomain in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Besides that, I also enrolled in two more units. One was the compulsory unit IT Project Management. I asked the course coordinator why this was the only compulsory unit. He said, “The university expects that Master degree students were the managers in the society. This is why you have to learn management skills. ” The other one was AI for Computer Games. This unit covered games agent programming.

A few months later, I applied for an early exit from my master course. Then I became a researcher in machine learning for about nine years, with its application first to computer vision, then to process mining, and then to Wi-Fi sensing. I did need to write computer programs, but the focus had never been in software development.

There were many times I thought my Master degree was not only expensive but also useless. It costed more than an apartment in China but did not directly relate to my research and immigration.

However, after returning to Australia from China in the year 2019, I switched my career from a researcher to a software developer and practised what I learned from my master degree every day.

I am not a competent programmer, though I have much experience in coding. The knowledge structure that I learned from my Master degree course is not perfect. First, I didn’t choose any subject about the web application. Fortunately, I learned the techniques from my job. Second, my knowledge in automata and formal languages is still very limited, making me hard to understand techniques such as compiler principles and computational complexity. Fortunately in the age of the internet, I can learn it through some MOOC course. However, when I had a time that was free from coding and debugging, I often thought of the years of research.