The music of when strangers meet

World premier pipa player Wu Man (right) visits with Zhang Ximin, a member of the Zhang Family Band, in Xi’an in the new documentary The Music of Strangers. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Where edges meet

The Syrian refugee crisis "may not be politically solvable, it may be less economically solvable, but culturally it could have tremendous creative benefit that could revitalize a society, the way that in the US we've been revitalized by every single immigrant that has come in, because when you get immigrant communities you get edges meeting and edges in biology and ecology create new life."

The film also follows Wu Man, the world's premier pipa virtuoso and leading ambassador of Chinese music, to Xi'an, where she found signs of traditional folk music forms still alive but in danger of withering away.

Wu Man, who was born in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing starting as a 13-year-old prodigy and moved to the US in 1990, admits that shuttling between two cultures makes it difficult to belong anywhere.

"In America, everyone thinks you're Chinese. You play a Chinese instrument. You come from China," she said. "But in China they say, 'Oh, you're American. You don't know today's China'."

Yo-Yo Ma's experiment to see what might happen when musicians who are strangers meet has paid off in a way that resonates as deep and broad as the 1712 Davidoff Stradivarius cello he plays.

"We've learned to collaborate through differences and build trust," he said.

The Music of Strangers opens in select theaters in the US on Friday night.

chrisdavis@chinadailyusa.com