Nong Fengmei and Her Esoteric Poya Song Book

By staff reporter JOY

Nong Fengmei, 50, is a farmer and singer of the Zhuang ethnicity from Poya Village, Funing County, Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, in the frontier province of Yunnan. During a cultural resources survey, local officials discovered in her home a piece of fabric bearing a time-honored script of 81 pictographic characters. They turned out to be Zhuang folk songs. Nong is one of the few able to sing these occult refrains. She is the leading singer at traditional Zhuang festival antiphonal choral performances, and has produced several albums. In 2012 she was named an official inheritor of China’s national intangible cultural heritage.

POYA is a rural community of Zhuang people in Funing County on the eastern tip of Yunnan Province. Ya is the Zhuang name for Buddleja officinalis Maxim, a herb whose extracts locals use to dye rice. Poya hence means a slope festooned with the blooms of this plant.

Singing is part of Zhuang life, and its strains emanate from the region’s stilted homes throughout the day. Poya houses feature turmeric colored adobe walls, dark roof tiles, and bamboo terraces that extend from the second floor.

Love Songs on Home-woven Cloth

Her singing hobby apart, Nong Fengmei’s life is no different from that of other wife farmers in the village. She mainly takes care of her family and attends to crops. She owns the Poya Song Book that has brought her national fame. It consists of a length of home-made cloth one meter long and half a meter wide, painted with 81 icons, about 3.3 centimeters in diameter and painted in cactus extract, symbolizing the moon, rocks, bamboos, maple leaves, various fruits and vegetables, clothes, fish, and farm tools.

Each icon represents a Zhuang love song, and the entire 81 tell of the love affair of a young Zhuang man and woman, from the moment they meet to their oath of lifelong companionship. The icons are objects mentioned in their expression of devotion to each other in the corresponding songs. Relatively abstract and fixed, they serve to remind the singer of the songs’ lyrics. Songs are performed as a musical dialogue between the young man and woman in the dialect spoken in the northern part of the Zhuang community. The length of each song varies from just four to dozens of sentences that mostly consist of five words. Their melodies are local folk tunes.

This song book was not known to the public until 2006, when the Funing County authorities conducted a survey on indigenous culture. When those engaged in the survey asked a Poya villager to sing some folk songs, he forgot the lyrics, and could continue only after consulting a script of unintelligible characters. He told the survey workers it was a copy of the song book owned by fellow villager Nong Fengmei. This precious cultural heritage thus came to the attention of cultural officials.

The song book has been passed down through generations of Nong’s family. “When I learnt singing from my grandma, she would draw these icons to help me remember the songs. As time went by I could recite a whole piece whenever I saw the related painting, and whenever I sang, a picture flashed through my mind,” Nong recalled. The book was later named the Poya Song Book of the Zhuang Ethnic Group in Funing County.

An Unsolved Myth

After the finding of the Poya Song Book was reported, a swarm of scholars came to Nong’s home to study it. They concluded that the 81 picture-like icons, with fixed configurations, pronunciations, and rich connotations, are rudimentary written characters. In addition to the more widely used antique block-shaped Zhuang writing, these ancient pictographic characters present another opportunity for people today to learn about the history of Zhuang culture. They are consequently of inestimable value in research on Zhuang culture and the history of written languages.

Some linguists argue that the Poya Song Book icons transcend the conventional definition and function of written language by encapsulating an entire song, its words and music, into one written symbol. This constitutes further evidence of the richness and diversity of human cultures.

Nong inherited the song book from her grandmother. But nobody knows when such books first came into being. All the materials used to make it were home grown. The ink is the crimson juice of cactus fruits, the pen is a stick cut out of bamboo, and the song sheet is of hand-woven cloth.

Scholars are debating whether or not the icons in the book are, as they appear to be, love song codes, or indicate something more complex and elusive. The jury is still out on that score.

Zhuang Cyclopedia

After three years of deciphering and collating, the Poya Song Book is now confirmed as a collection of 81 separate but inter-related love songs of a total 762 lines. The Ethnic Publishing House published it in 2009 as part of a series on China’s ethnic minority languages.

The songs are aligned in the order of conventional Zhuang antiphonal singing. They start with the first meeting song, proceed to the inquiry song, the courting song, the oath song, and more. In addition to lovers’ chat, the lines also depict many facts and facets of Zhuang life. For instance, one song tells how to distinguish single from married women by their hair styles. Another depicts Zhuang farmers following the growth cycle of maple trees to plant crops – “sowing seed in the first lunar month, when maple trees sprout, and transplanting the seedlings in the paddy field the next month when the maple turns green.”

Liang Tingwang, a professor at Minzu University of China, praises the Poya Song Book for its ingenious figures of speech. For instance, bamboo is a metaphor for slim girls; the affection between lovers is compared with the bond between water and embankment, cattle and grassland; and the reluctance to part from a loved one is as strong as the affinity between two skeins of thread that tightly intertwine to form rope.

Zhao Liming, director of the Committee of Women’s Script (Nüshu) of the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society, holds the view that Poya writing is older than the Dongba script, another pictographic language of the Naxi ethnic group. From the literary perspective, it bears strong similarity to the Book of Songs.

The Zhuang Chorus

Nong can perform the Poya Song Book in four different styles. She is also versed in other folk songs for different occasions, such as working in the field, greeting guests, bidding farewell, engagement, and toasting in-laws. She is the leading voice in the chorus at major Zhuang events, including the Double Third Festival (falling on the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar), the Long-duan Festival (the Zhuang Valentine’s Day), weddings and funerals. She has also participated in performances organized by the township, county and provincial governments, and has produced several albums.

The local government has made endeavors to preserve and promote the Poya Song Book. It has built a learning center in the village and established the Poya Song Book Chorus by recruiting Zhuang Opera players. Nong Fengmei is actively involved in this project, imparting the lore of the book’s songs and writings to many others. At present, two dozen of her fellow villagers can read and sing the songs.

In 2010 the Poya Song Book Chorus won the Award of Excellence at a CCTV singing contest. During the first Chinese Ethnic and Folk Music Week in 2014, the troupe gave four performances at the China Conservatory, the Central Conservatory of Music, Minzu University of China, and Tsinghua University, so igniting a Poya fever among Beijing audiences.

“The Poya Song Book Chorus is an innovative and effective method of preserving this cultural heritage as it has strong audience appeal. It is an inspiration to those who are striving to pass down other aspects of intangible cultural heritage,” said He Yunfeng, art supervisor of the musical week and doctoral student tutor at the Central Conservatory of Music.