The Court Musicians Still Played the Song of Parting

I have read many poems about parting, but this one moves me more than most.

That probably has something to do with my years in secondary school. I boarded throughout both middle and high school, and every holiday ended with a return to campus. Life felt fairly constrained then, so going back to school naturally carried a sense of parting. I also had a habit of listening to music in the car, and I discovered early on that the same song could feel completely different on the journey home and on the journey back to school.

For a while in middle school, our car could not connect directly to a phone. Music had to be copied to the car's system in advance, so the playlist rarely changed. “带你去旅行” and “远走高飞” were among the songs that played often then. They were ordinary pop songs, but after accompanying me on so many journeys back to school, they somehow became bound to those feelings of resistance and distress. Even now, hearing them occasionally still makes me uncomfortable.

Later, the car could connect to a phone, and the playlist began changing all the time. In middle school I could still go home once a week; in high school, we had only one break a month. Strangely, by then I cared less about listening to music. Once I had my phone back, what I wanted more was to see what had been happening in the world outside. The school did show programs such as Xinwen Lianbo, but that limited stream of information could never satisfy what I wanted to know. Looking back, the freedom to seek out the information one wants is itself a basic need.

Because of those experiences, I always feel a peculiar resonance when I read the line, “the court musicians still played the song of parting.” Of course, returning to school bears no comparison whatsoever to what Li Yu endured. Still, I can understand something of the feeling: at the very moment someone is leaving, music happens to be playing in their ears, and from then on that music becomes entangled with the parting.

Some songs grow tiresome with repetition; others become bound to a chapter of our lives. When we hear them again years later, the melody is unchanged, but the life we once lived returns with it.