By Kenneth Kowald
It is true: You are, maybe, never too old to learn something more about important things. Like freedom, for example.
In late May a film by Chen Kaige, the director of “Farewell, My Concubine,” opened in New York City. It is called “Together,” and it is about a Chinese father whose son is a violin prodigy. This is not a review of either film; it is about Chen and freedom.
We have symbols of freedom in many places in Queens. One of them is the John Bowne House in Flushing. Bowne was among those in 1657 who signed “The Flushing Remonstrance” about liberty of conscience, addressed to the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant.
The Remonstrance often is called the First Declaration of Independence. (The Bowne House has been closed for awhile, but under an agreement with the Historic House Trust, a non-profit organization that works with the Parks Department, the house will be renovated and completely open to the public — it is hoped — within two years. That is good news.)
I hope to write about Bowne and the Remonstrance at a future date. But this is Chen’s story about independence and, like the story of John Bowne, it is good at any time, not just July 4, to tell that story.
In an article by Joyce Wadler in The New York Times, Chen, 50, who lives in Beijing, said his parents told him he should love Western classical music because in China, under Communist rule, they said, “We don’t have any religion” and “You have to believe in something.” He went on: “I think spiritually, I was saved by classical music.”
Chen denounced his father, also a filmmaker, during the notorious Cultural Revolution. He has spoken about his shame in doing so. During that same time, he saw friends take and burn his own classical music records, but he said he remembers thinking at that time, “They can’t kill the music. … The music is flying around in my mind.”
(Those old enough to remember or those who have read about it know how the Nazis burned books — before they took to killing the people who wrote them — and how the Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere muzzled thought in so many brutal and deadly ways. Communism and Fascism — two sides of the same degraded coin.)
But Chen remembers how another friend came to him and invited him to join other teenagers, in a warehouse, to listen to the forbidden Western classical music. He described it:
“We were sitting there in the dark, listening to the piece of Dvorak — I mean the Czech composer — and it was so amazing everybody cried.”
Did they cry because the music was so beautiful? Did they cry because they were sitting there in fear of detection? Did they cry because that wonderful music — and any piece by Dvorak is wonderful — touched them with its indescribable hope for the human spirit, as does every great work of art? Was it all these things?
I think what they cried for, at least in part, was the very freedom to hear the music.
I thank Chen and Wadler for teaching me, once again, the importance of freedom in our lives. And it reminds me, once again, how indebted I am to courageous people like Bowne and those who joined him in that famous Remonstrance.
And it reminds me, once again, of how indebted I am to my ancestors who braved an ocean and a new language to come to this new world of hope and freedom.
