The Sonorous Strings of the Erhu

I love erhu music. I associate it with our adoption travels. Cam got excited about erhu before we travelled to adopt Kai, as he plays violin and the instruments are somewhat similar. So when we were in China an erhu was on our shopping list. We picked out what we think is a relatively nice one. I don't know for sure, as I don't know enough about the erhu to accurately judge the instrument, but it's a pretty one. This erhu is Cameron's, but as he isn't really settled in a place with a spot for it, and isn't actively trying to learn to play it, we get to have it in our living room for now.

This morning on my drive to work I was listening to NPR and there was a story I wanted to hear the rest of, so I went to NPR on my computer to hear it. After I listened to the story, I saw in their list that on "All Things Considered" Robert Siegel interviewed the famous erhuist (is that a word?) Ma XiaoHui. She played a duet with Yo-Yo Ma on the film soundtrack to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's a very interesting story you can read, hear and see HERE. There are a couple video clips there I highly recommend, especially the one in which she talks about her instrument.

This is a video I found of her on YouTube:

Return to the Homeland

The other interesting story I read online today is from the New York Times Blog "Relative Choices: Adoption and the American Family". Today's entry was "Return to the Homeland", written by 13 year old Jade Nissl who was adopted from China in 1996 and now lives in Boise Idaho. In here essay she describes her experiences on her third trip back to China. It was a very good article.
This blog series in general has received some pretty harsh criticism within the adoption community, both for the writing of some of the contributors, and also for the way dissenting comments appear to have been censored, but I think there have been a few good pieces to come out of it as well. This one was very interesting for me to read.