ShamanEvents

last shaman in China

memory of JinFang Guan:

I remember my first day at school. All other students and I in the classroom understand nothing in Mandarin. We were discussing in our own Oroqen language and were nervous, yet, excited for school. The first word that our teacher told us was something like 同学们大家好(which means hello students in Chinese). But we had no idea what he meant. We stared at each other and the atmosphere was tense. We could see the nerve on our teacher’s face. He was a new teacher that just graduated and probably had no idea before coming that we couldn’t understand him.

The first word we learned was, in fact, 起立. In which he demonstrated the meaning of this word by standing up. We shouted the word while standing up and we followed him by also standing up. He, then, taught us 坐下, which he demonstrated by sitting down. This was how we started our journey of learning Mandarin Chinese. The hardest subject was mathematics by far as our teacher taught us all in Mandarin, which made everything so difficult.

My favorite subject was music when I was very young. This was my inspiration for the music projects that I had been doing. I had a passion in Oroqen song and one thing that I had done is to record these Oroqen song using musical notes.

Our Oroqen song is huge part of our identity as it conveys our ancient wisdom. My favorite song when I was young was a song about the universe that my grand-grandfather sung to me. It kind of goes like this “the moon orbits the earth, the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the universe...” Believe me, Oroqen People have strong knowledge about the universe. We rely on the universe to make decisions about what to hunt, where to live, and what’s the weather going to be like. These aspects are super important to the Oroqen people as we are the group of the forests and we rely on the nature to survive.