“Jinjie, come show us some of your beatboxing,” Wes yelled from the other side of the boat. We were traveling down the third largest river in China, the Pearl River, with Zhixin students through the Win-Win Education cultural exchange program, and it turned out Wes’s new friend Jerry also had done a little beatboxing in his extracurricular music classes at school. I had been in an a cappella group at Duke and knew how to work with a few simple sounds and rhythms, so I thought I would entertain some of the students and parents on the boat with a few of my beats. I started with a light, jazzy rhythm and felt pretty content when a small crowd started to gather and cheer. Jerry, however, was not impressed. When I had finished my set, he waved me off with a flippant flick of the wrist and stepped into the center of the crowd. For the next minute, he proceeded to imitate car engines, closing doors, bass drums and rhythms that I could only dream of learning.
Meeting the students of the Zhixin schools in Guangzhou informed me of the many facets by which shared human experiences are able to transcend differing cultural backgrounds. Beatboxing provided a platform that allowed Jerry and me to communicate in a way that did not depend on words and utterances but through the language of the human soul. It wasn’t just music that provided dialogue for our commonalities. Zhixin students loved animals as much if not more than we do. In fact, their school housed a small area for bunnies, chinchillas, puppies, and hamsters where the students could come during breaks to destress and socialize. Zhixin students were passionate about art, learning, dim sum, and basketball in much of the same ways that we found value in American sports, aesthetics and barbecue. And while there existed various differences in the ways we expressed and manifested these subtleties in our lives, the fact that we were all human beings with the capacity to love and enjoy the same intricacies of life thousands of miles apart was something that touched me deeply.
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