The Wandering Sheep in Song.

Last year, when I was walking through the streets of Kashgar in Xinjiang, I took a few photographs.

One shows two ordinary Uyghur men, standing by a stall buying tomatoes.  They could have been anyone from the alleyways of Shanghai—citizens living an everyday life.

Another was taken in the old city of Kashgar, in a place called Gaotai Folk Dwellings.  In that photograph, a craftsman is shaping clay pots, working quietly each day, making dozens of earthen vessels—some for stewing food, some for milk tea.

A third photo is of a woman who had just given birth, her child still so new that someone had drawn a dark line across the baby’s eyebrows in the traditional style.

And the fourth is of an ordinary tailor—an older man, sitting at a sewing machine, maybe one of those old “Bee” brand machines made in Shanghai.

I showed these pictures because I wanted to make a point.

You see, I’m from Xinjiang.  I was born in Hotan.

In the past few years, I often saw people on Weibo—especially friends from Shanghai—posting videos of running into pickpockets from Xinjiang on the streets.  Those pickpockets have, somehow, become a shameful symbol of Xinjiang itself.

People whisper: “Watch out for the Xinjiang thieves.”

Bus stations, train stations, public squares—everywhere that phrase echoes.

And with it came another symbol—qiegao, that sticky glutinous rice dessert that suddenly went viral online and became a meme.

Together, these images—the thieves and the qiegao—built an ugly, distorted picture of my home.

But I wanted to stand here and tell everyone: Xinjiang is not like that.

Xinjiang is like the faces in those four photographs—real, modest, human.

These people are no different from the residents of any lane or alley in Shanghai.

They live by their own labor, build their lives with their own hands.

They are people of dignity.

When I think about how I began walking this road of music, I always go back to 1992.

I’m forty years old now; back then I was nineteen or twenty.

Everyone knows the name Wang Luobin, the great musician of Xinjiang.

I’m sure you’ve sung his songs—“A Place Far Away”, “The Girl from Daban Cheng.”

And from Taiwan, there was Qi Qin, whose songs “Wolf” and “About Winter” were beloved everywhere.

By coincidence, I had the chance to bring Qi Qin to meet Wang Luobin.

It was in Urumqi, where the old maestro lived in a military residential compound.

I went ahead first, to visit him and announce Qi Qin’s arrival.

That afternoon was blazing hot, mid-August.

I knocked on his door.

When he opened it, he was wearing a white T-shirt and big shorts—the T-shirt was torn under the arm, and his gray armpit hair poked through the hole.

He looked at me and said kindly,

“Young man, what brings you here?” I told him, “There’s a famous singer from Taiwan named Qi Qin who wants to visit you. I came ahead to let you know.” The old man said, “Qi Qin?  I don’t think I’ve heard of him.  But I’m happy you came.”

He invited me in. The house was quiet—he lived alone and seemed a little lonely.

He poured me tea and asked if I’d eaten.

I admitted that I was a bit hungry, so he said,

“All right, I’ll make you something.” He went into the kitchen and cooked plain porridge—just rice and water. When he came back out, he chatted with me, asking what I liked, what interested me. I said I liked music. He smiled and said, “Then I’ll sing you something.”

I was incredibly lucky.

He sat down at the piano and sang “A Place Far Away” and “The Girl from Daban Cheng.”

I listened, not really understanding yet what I was witnessing.

To me, back then, Qi Qin was the shining star—while Wang Luobin was just an old man living in the same city.

I didn’t feel the kind of awe I should have felt; I just thought he was a funny, interesting old man.

After he finished singing, he noticed I didn’t look very excited.

He said,

“Then I’ll dance for you!” And he did.  He started performing tap dance right there in his living room. He was seventy-eight years old, but his legs were light and his rhythm sharp.He danced for nearly ten minutes. I was laughing, telling him, “Old sir, stop! The porridge is burning!” He rushed to the kitchen and came back with the pot, the porridge a bit scorched but still fragrant.

We spent the whole afternoon talking.

When it was time to go, I realized I’d lost my bicycle key.

I tried to break the lock with a brick, clumsy and failing.

The old man came down with pliers and a wrench; in one minute, he opened it cleanly.

I remember thinking—what a man: he could sing, dance, and pick a lock!

That evening, I returned with Qi Qin.

When the door opened this time, everything was different.

The same man stood before us, but now dressed in a black suit and tie, his posture formal and upright.

We all went out together to dinner—Qi Qin sat in the front seat, and in the back were Wang Luobin, a writer named Li Hua (who later wrote The Biography of Wang Luobin), and me.

Qi Qin kept turning around, staring at Wang Luobin with the kind of reverence people usually reserve for their idols—or their lovers.

He kept asking,

“When did you write that song?  Where did you find that folk tune?  Do you know, in Taiwan, your songs were in our elementary music textbooks?”

In that car, for the first time, I felt true awe for the old man sitting beside me.

If even my idol worshiped him this way, how great must he truly be?

After dinner, we went to one of the few karaoke bars in Urumqi—packed with people, everyone pressing close just to glimpse Qi Qin.

That night, I thought to myself: I want to make music too.

To write songs that could move people this way.

And from that thought, I stepped onto a path that has never ended—a road I’ve been walking for over twenty years.

Even now, most people still don’t know my name.

But I remember that night clearly.

I tell this story because this year marks the 100th anniversary of Wang Luobin’s birth.

He passed away seventeen years ago, in 1996.

And for me, as a musician from Xinjiang, that meeting became a turning point.

It planted in me the resolve to introduce my homeland to the world through music—to let people hear the spirit of Xinjiang in song.It was around 1997, the year after Wang Luobin passed away.

I was walking through the streets of Urumqi one day when I stopped at a bus station.

On the wall there was a missing-person notice. I’d seen similar ones before, but this one caught my attention: in bold black characters it read,

“Alimjiang, where are you?” Next to it was the photograph of a little Uyghur boy — bright-eyed, beautiful, innocent. The message beneath was written by a father searching for his lost child.

I knew then that this was not a rare story. Every year, thousands of “Alimjiangs” are taken away from Xinjiang — kidnapped, trafficked, scattered across China. It has become an industry, organized, large-scale.

That night I decided I had to write a song.

Later I wrote one titled “Alimjiang, Where Are You?” — exactly the words from that poster.

Whenever I perform that song, I always tell this story first.

I want people to remember where it came from.

I tell them: If someday you meet a child from Xinjiang stealing something on the street, stop him if you must, but don’t hit him — teach him.

Because behind his act there are roots, histories, tragedies you cannot see.

A few years ago, a new Party Secretary named Zhang Chunxian arrived in Xinjiang.

He made a bold promise: to bring home every child from Xinjiang who was wandering the streets across China.

The slogan was loud and bright; the implementation, of course, slow and difficult.

But that song — the one I’d been singing for fifteen years — had already begun to travel on its own.

It changed, even if just a little, how some people looked at the faces of Xinjiang.

Through that song I felt, for the first time, that music could touch society — that it could heal misunderstanding.

It was, perhaps, my first small success in using song to engage with real life.That is why today’s talk is called “The Wandering Sheep in Song.”

After I wrote Alimjiang, Where Are You?, people began calling me a “child drifting through songs.”

But I thought: if I am that, then the sheep is a truer symbol.

Sheep are Xinjiang’s spirit. Everyone knows our roasted lamb and kebabs; our lambs are gentle, soft-voiced — mehmeh, like the wind brushing grass.

Last year I collaborated with a Shanghai lyricist named Zhang Haining.

He wrote the words for a song called “Whose Sheep.”

The lyrics go:

“A cloud in the sky, a sheep on the earth,

The wind passes over the grass,

And in dreams we do not know where we belong.”

I once wrote another piece titled “Don’t Startle the Sheep in the Grass.”

That title came from a Kazakh poem — only eight lines long, yet exquisitely tender:

“Wind, blow softly, so the leaves will not rustle.

Gentle words, speak quietly, do not wake the sheep in the grass.

Crescent moon, slip into the clouds, don’t brighten the night too much.

Words of the heart, whisper them slowly,

So you will not wake the sleeping parents.”

It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of traditional Kazakh poetry I know.

When I speak of Wang Luobin, of Alimjiang, of this Kazakh poem, what I want most is to stand here and proudly introduce my Xinjiang to all of you — my friends gathered in Shanghai today.

Xinjiang is breathtakingly beautiful: in its landscapes, its temperament, its poetry, its food.

It is China’s largest province, and I have traveled through nearly eighty percent of its mountains and rivers.

These days I live mostly in Beijing, but I return often — almost once a month on average.

Last year alone I brought over a hundred artists to Xinjiang, in several groups, some to the south, some to the north.

Xinjiang is vast; you cannot truly know it in ten days or half a month.

You need at least a full month, and all kinds of transport, to traverse even its main regions.

I often tell people: I travel to Yunnan, too. Yunnan’s snow mountains are famous — Meili Snow Mountain, for instance, is extraordinarily beautiful — yet for me, they lack the shock I feel in Xinjiang.

From my home in Urumqi, when I open the window, I see Bogda Peak of the Tianshan range shining year-round.

Driving along the highways of southern and northern Xinjiang, the snow mountains always travel with you — on your left hand or your right.

And the music of Xinjiang, I always say, is music of the soul.

It keeps its distance from commercial pop.

It belongs to the realm of the great folk song.

Thirteen major ethnic groups live there: Uyghur, Han, Kazakh, Hui, Mongol, Tajik, Kirgiz, Russian, Sibe, and others.

Most follow Islam now, yet six or seven centuries ago, the monuments that remain were all Buddhist.

In places like the Pazirik Thousand-Buddha Caves and Kucha, you can still feel that older faith.

Kucha, once home to the great translator Kumarajiva, who rendered the Heart Sutra and Great Compassion Mantra into Chinese.

He himself was a Uyghur, later invited east to the Zhongnan Mountains of Shaanxi to translate scripture.

Xinjiang’s culture is, at its root, hybrid — a bloodline of mingling.

And we always say: children of mixed blood are the most beautiful.

He laughed softly and added: I’m mixed-blood too — and not too bad, right?

That hybrid vigor — this blending of cultures — is what gave birth to Xinjiang’s magnificent folk songs.

And I truly believe: what Xinjiang gives the rest of China is not only oil or natural gas,

but something far more precious — a spiritual resource: music.

From southern Xinjiang, in Kucha, a natural-gas pipeline runs all the way to Shanghai.

Much of the gas that fuels this city comes through that very line.

And yet, beyond the fuel, there’s another invisible current running through — the current of music, of stories, of song.When I speak about these things — the gas pipelines, the songs, the faces of my homeland — what I really mean is this:

for years I’ve been doing what I can, consciously, to serve as a messenger of culture,

trying to bridge the gap between Xinjiang and the rest of China.

Because what we often call “the gap” — between ethnicities, between regions — should not exist at all.

It has grown simply because we know too little about each other.

In the remote parts of southern Xinjiang — the villages of Hetian, the towns near Tashkurgan —

the people I’ve shown you in those photographs, the weaver, the potter, the tailor, the mother with her child —

they will likely never see the night glow of the Huangpu River in Shanghai,

never walk along the Bund and marvel at the buildings’ light.

Most of them will live their whole lives in their valley, working the soil,

unaware of what this modern city looks like after dark.

But the truth is, the distance works both ways.

Many of us here — the friends sitting before me today — may never travel to Hetian, or Yutian, or the far valleys of Tashkurgan.

We may never walk the streets where those people live.

And yet, the essence of their life is no different from ours —

they live by their labor, they feed their families, they rely on their hands.

So my hope is that, through moments like this — through these words mixed with Xinjiang’s songs and rhythms —

you can feel a little closer to them,

and later, when you return home, perhaps open your computer,

type in “Xinjiang,” “folk songs,” “Wang Luobin,” or even my own name,

and learn more about the place I come from — my beautiful, beloved Xinjiang, my home.About ten years ago, I collaborated with a Xinjiang poet named Beiye on a song called The Road Home.

It was based on one of his poems — not even his most famous work, perhaps a second- or third-tier piece —

but I loved it deeply.

The last line reads:

“Allow me to call your homeland my own.”

That single line pierced me.

Because for twenty years of making music, I’ve been a person who makes foreign lands his home.

Shanghai has become one of those homes.

Here, I have relatives and close friends — people who treat me with generosity, who take me out to eat,

who walk with me through these streets and show me the beauty of this city.

Shanghai, to me, is full of warmth.

But if we trace my roots, I am a pure-blooded Uyghur, born in Hetian, Xinjiang.

Three months after I was born, I was adopted by the parents who raised me.

You might notice a slight southern accent when I speak.

That’s because my adoptive parents are from Chun’an, Zhejiang, near the Thousand-Island Lake —

not far from here.

When I was little, they once took me on that long journey from Urumqi to Shanghai to transfer trains.

Back then, it took seventy-two hours on a green train from Xinjiang to Shanghai,

and then another transfer to Quzhou — passing through Jinhua,

and finally another half day on a bus to reach their hometown in Chun’an.

So my life began with that journey —

from west to east, from the desert’s edge to the lakes and hills of Zhejiang.

Perhaps that’s why, even now, I feel equally at home in both directions. Today, standing here in Shanghai, I won’t sing — not tonight.

I just want to speak, to tell you these stories.

But I do hope that when I hold a concert here someday,

you — my friends, my listeners — will come see me live.

Because every song I sing carries a part of that long road:

from the old man making pottery in Kashgar,

to Wang Luobin’s tattered white T-shirt in Urumqi,

to the father calling out for his lost child, Alimjiang,

to the lambs grazing softly under the wind in the grasslands of Ili.

That is my Xinjiang — the land that raised me,

the music that shaped me,

the bridge between cultures I’ve spent my life walking across.

And so I’ll end as simply as I can:

I hope you, too, can love my Xinjiang as I do.

Because in its songs —

there’s a freedom and a tenderness that still wander,

like a sheep carried by the wind,

singing softly as it drifts across the open fields.