主题：【趣闻】九岁黑人成为京剧艺术小天才 -- raindrops

九岁黑人成为京剧艺术小天才

????汤普森不懂普通话，但却用普通话唱京剧，在旧金山吸引到群众蹲在街边倾听。他表演的节目，将在央视春节期间播出――

　　羊城晚报??美国一名9岁黑人男童汤普森是个中国京剧艺术小天才，他的演出将在中央电视台春节贺年节目中播出。他立志长大要成为京剧艺术家。

????汤普森跟其他9岁大的邻家男孩一样，喜爱篮球和漫画，但却拥有一种与众不同的才能：京剧表演。汤普森在奥克兰这个文化沙漠城市长大，但他用普通话唱出京剧，在旧金山吸引到群众蹲在街边倾听。虽然他不懂普通话，但却唱得像母语一样熟练。汤普森迅即成为北加州最受欢迎的京剧表演者。

????去年11月，《华尔街日报》刊登有关汤普森的头版特写报道，导致美国有线新闻网络访问他，路透社现正在制作关于他的纪录片，将在亚洲各地播出。（文慰）

- Janet Somers, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, December 31, 2004

On a recent chilly Saturday afternoon, 9-year-old Tyler Thompson made his way to the front of a large music classroom at Laney College in Oakland, where about 50 kids held an assortment of Chinese instruments. A Reuters news crew followed closely on his heels. Wearing a violet, floor- length silk robe over his fleece jacket, the African American fourth-grader fidgeted a little as the student orchestra played an introduction. Then, occasionally placing a hand on his heart, he sang a mournful ballad -- in Chinese -- about missing a friend during the Mongolian winter snow.

Tyler is a student at Lincoln Elementary School in Oakland's Chinatown, where his teacher, Sherlyn Chew, has been teaching kids to sing and play Chinese music. Tyler, who sometimes also sings gospel and rap music, showed promise and soon graduated to Beijing-style opera, an ancient and dying art form that is difficult even for adult native speakers of Chinese. Under Chew's tutelage, Tyler's performances at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Oakland City Hall and other venues around the Bay Area have stunned audiences and moved them to tears and standing ovations.

In November, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page feature about Tyler that led to interviews on CNN Live and KTVU, Channel 2 in the Bay Area. CBS News wants to film his next performance, and Reuters is making a documentary about him that will air all over Asia.

Beijing TV has recruited him for a talent competition of non-Chinese performers -- mainly adults -- the winner of which will be sent to China and appear on live television. "I think he has a good chance of winning," says Glenn Boggs, a talent scout for the event. Chew is drowning in e-mails asking about future performances.

"I'm overwhelmed, to say the least," says his mother, Vanessa Ladson, who works as an administrator at a EBMUD office near the school. "We haven't let the magnitude of it sink in yet."

Chew teaches about 600 children -- almost all of them Chinese -- at Lincoln, the school she attended as a child. When her advanced students began to graduate, she created special weekend classes for them at Laney College that are open to any child who can sing Chinese songs or play a Chinese instrument with proficiency. (Under the California Education Code, children can enroll free for college credit in community college classes, with parental consent.)

Tyler was in the first grade when Chew noticed what she calls his "angelic voice" and took him under her wing. At first, the 6-year-old was mystified. "I was like, 'What is she singing?' " he recalls. Because he doesn't speak Chinese (he understands only a few words), Chew records tapes for him to practice with. "Every day, I ask him to come and sing it for me, with each syllable perfect," she says.

One day, Tyler and his mother, who had no idea her son was learning to sing in Chinese, were out for a drive when he started singing the Mongolian folk song.

"I said, 'What are you singing? Sing it again, baby!' I think I made him sing it three times," Ladson recalls. "Pretty soon he came home one day and said, 'I can go to Laney College. I can be a college student,' and asked me to sign a piece of paper. I worried about how I would get him there, but he insisted."

Mandarin is a tonal language - each phrase has its own distinctive rise and fall in pitch. Tyler sings in a sophisticated style that includes grace notes (short notes sung before a main note for ornamentation), giving his voice a chantlike quality. William Hu, a San Francisco expert in Chinese opera and drama who has not yet heard Tyler, calls this characteristic the "roll," or the "yin and yang," and says it allows the tones to carry better. He says it normally takes six to eight years to train a performer in Beijing opera, which relies heavily on choreographed movements to convey the plot.

Tyler and his friend Carol Liu sing the lead roles in an opera about a young girl who gets lost and asks a cowherd for directions. In a rehearsal, Chew comes around behind Tyler and moves his arm to the precise angle for extending a flute he pretends to play in the scene. She says to Carol: "When he points there, you look this way. You have to interact."

Carol's mother, Joanna Chen, says she was stunned when she first saw black kids singing in Chinese. (Dominique Ransom is another African American child in the program; she sings and plays the moon guitar, a traditional Chinese stringed instrument resembling a banjo.) "I was shocked. I thought, 'Wow.' Especially Tyler. His voice is very, very beautiful, and he has no accent when he speaks Mandarin."

Last summer, Miriam Jordan, a Wall Street Journal reporter who writes about immigration and social issues, was in San Francisco working on a story when a woman mentioned an African American kid in Oakland who sings Chinese opera.

"A lightbulb went on in my head,'' Jordan said. But without Tyler's name, the search for him was difficult. Even Oakland school officials she called said they had never heard of him. "I told my editor this child was a figment of this woman's imagination. Forget about it.''

Two months later, a friend led her to Oakland East Bay Symphony conductor Michael Morgan, who sometimes works with Chew. "I didn't know Tyler, but I knew she was teaching black kids to sing Chinese opera," says Morgan, who also is black.

Jordan's story ran on Nov. 5; that morning, Ladson started getting calls from the broadcast media.

Tyler says he is enjoying the publicity. When he grows up, he says, he wants to be "the same as I am now -- a Chinese opera singer." Onstage, he gets a "tickly feeling" in his stomach. He likes gospel and Chinese opera equally, but doesn't listen much to Chinese opera. "You can't really get it on the radio," he said.

Chew doesn't use Beijing opera's traditional white makeup on Tyler or any of the other kids; she wants people to see he is African American. "I'm very proud of it," she says. "It's definitely a feat. Why hide that fact?"

Tyler's neighborhood buddies, Walter, Je'lon and Marcus, think what he is doing is weird. "But as long as I'm supporting them in what they wanna do, they support me in what I wanna do," he says.

Chew lost her job at Lincoln last spring when the school voted to fund a computer lab instead of music. But Principal Caroline Yee reinstated her part time this fall through Measure E, which pays for music education in Oakland schools. "These are tough times," says Yee, who adds that she is committed to finding more money for the program.

Meanwhile, Chew works three days a week using the multipurpose stage at the school. Her Purple Silk Music Education Foundation, funded in part by the City of Oakland Cultural Arts Department, provides money for special coaches and Chinese instruments and costumes she gets during shopping trips to China. One day a week, she teaches at an elementary school whose student population is primarily Latino. "I am thinking about teaching Chinese opera to them, too, " she says.

David Lei, a Piedmont resident and San Francisco businessman who runs a foundation that promotes Chinese performing arts, heard Tyler at the Asian Art Museum last year. "I felt quite moved that someone from another culture would pick it up so well," he says. "And the fact that he's a little boy -- even very few Chinese young people could do it.

"Now that the Chinese are intermarrying, how do you keep this culture?" Lei said. "I am interested in how to pass this on to the next generation that will not look like me. I think it's a big revelation for a lot of Chinese - that, geez, we're all gonna be like Tiger Woods! This is the future. I'm passing my future to someone like Tyler."