Shine Like a Star
Ordinary people who persist in chasing their dreams have been invited to the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala
Yi Qunlin, a 58-year-old construction worker in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, recently received an invitation to join the audience of chunwan, also known as the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, on February 9 in Beijing. Watching the live TV show, which airs on each Chinese New Year Eve on China Central Television (CCTV), has become a tradition for tens of millions of Chinese families, to usher in the Chinese New Year. Since the first edition was broadcast in 1983, the program has developed to include diverse performances such as songs, dancing, cross-talk, acrobatics and traditional Chinese operas.
While most people watch the gala on screen, some guests are invited to watch it in person each year. In addition to artists, outstanding representatives from other sectors of the society including scientists, soldiers and sporting champions as well as other role models from diverse backgrounds are usually invited to attend. A video posted online shows Yi’s excitement when he received the invitation letter from CCTV. “I never imagined that I would have such a glamorous moment,” he said, hands trembling.
A musical dream
Yi was invited to watch the gala in person after a video of him playing piano became popular online. Hailing from a village in Yueyang, Hunan Province, Yi has worked in construction in Shenzhen for nearly 20 years. Last April, when he and his son, who also works in construction, passed by a subway station in Shenzhen, they saw a public piano by the side of a pedestrian street, free for people to play. With the encouragement of his son, the elder Yi played more than 10 pieces of music and was applauded by passers-by.
Yi’s son posted the video of his public performance on short video platform Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. The unusual sight of a migrant worker sitting at the piano wearing his work uniform and yellow hard hat, producing beautiful music with his rough hands, made the video a hit.
Yi has had a deep love for music since he was a teenager. He first saw a piano in his aunt’s home in the county seat near his village when he was 16 and became very interested in it. As his family could afford neither a piano nor piano lessons, he learned to play the instrument by himself, by reading books on piano playing and practicing at his aunt’s home.
He also learned to play other instruments that are more affordable such as the mouth organ, flute and erhu, a two-stringed bowed Chinese musical instrument. nd
In May last year, Yi was invited to play the piano at the concert hall of the Guangming Culture and Art Center in Shenzhen. Yi was one of the thousands of construction workers who built the concert hall between 2017 and 2020. In the presence of more than 100 of his coworkers, Yi played Für Elise by German composer Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827) and Chinese songs including The Butterfly Lovers, or Liang Zhu, which is based on a tragic romance between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai 1,700 years ago.
Last October, Yi finally acquired a piano, an old one in disrepair that he found at a construction site. He spent more than one month repairing the piano and put it in his dormitory room, which is less than 4 square meters. Now he spends two hours playing the piano every day.
In his spare time, Yi also plays the mouth organ or erhu for his coworkers at the construction site, adding some fun to their monotonous day-today lives.
A farmer writer
Also invited to this year’s chunwan is Pei Aimin, a farmer from Shangxin Village, Minqin County, Gansu Province. Pei was invited because she is not only a farmer but also a writer.
Pei developed an interest in reading and writing when she was in primary school. She told Thecover.cn, a media outlet based in Sichuan Province, that as she had little access to books other than Chinese textbooks, she would read the textbooks again and again, and she can still remember the stories in them.
She demonstrated a flair for writing. For a poetry assignment about wheat seedlings, she wrote, “In the morning, the wheat seedlings are dotted with sparkling dewdrops, which will become pearls on the ground with a gentle shake.” Her teacher praised her in front of the class, which gave her confidence and inspired her to develop the habit of writing diaries.
However, at the end of junior middle school, she failed to get a sufficient math score to pass the high school entrance exam. She became a farmer and later got married. After her marriage, she had to, like most of her fellow villagers, focus on farming. However, she did not completely give up her hobby of writing. In order not to appear out of place and be ridiculed by others, Pei could only read and write in private when there were no outsiders around.
The rise of social media platforms presented her with opportunities to publish her diaries online. In 2011, she registered an account named “field-mouse auntie” on Weibo, China’s microblogging platform. She used the name because she likes the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75) and her favorite character is the field-mouse in Thumbelina, a story of a tiny girl who is born from a seed and grows into a beautiful flower. She told CCTV in an interview last September that she feels she is like the fieldmouse in the fairy tales, who is kind and works hard on the farm.
Since then, she has been recording her daily life on Weibo. In 2022, an editor with Central China Normal University Press saw her diaries on Weibo and approached her, asking for her permission to publish her diaries. She happily obliged and in September 2022, the book titled Field-Mouse Auntie’s Diary was published. The book includes around 20,000 Chinese characters of diary and 44 illustrations drawn by Pei herself.
Pei said in the beginning she just wanted to record her life by writing diaries on Weibo. However, as she has amassed more followers on the social media platform, she has a stronger desire to share her thoughts with them so that more people can learn about the unique charm of rural life.
“I feel more motivated to write now as my followers praise me, which makes me very happy,” she said.
“While the pressure of survival has compelled ordinary people like Yi to make a living by doing manual labor, they have not given up their hobbies,” a commentary by The Beijing Times read. “Although these hobbies can’t bring them tangible material benefits, they have enriched their inner world.”