A Weekend with the Columbus Park Senior Orchestra
High-pitched arias wail in the wind, carried through the streets of Chinatown. The erhu, (Chinese violin), the ruan, (long-necked lute), and the tambur, (five-stringed lute), emit discordant yet delicate plucking sounds. Every Saturday and Sunday, the 15-member Columbus Park Senior Orchestra of New York Incorporated plays and sings Chinese operas from the 1930s and ‘40s. All their instruments are electric and two microphones are plugged into portable speakers. On this brisk day, the elderly performers are swathed in scarves and winter hats. Passersby sing along, snap pictures, give donations or just listen intently, fending off the chill by hopping from foot to foot.
George Gong, 77-year-old percussionist and singer, founded the group in November 2007 by approaching several elderly Chinese musicians playing solo in the park and surrounding streets, and asking them if they wanted to form an orchestra. Now, just a year after their first official performance (at the Mott Street Community Center), the seniors are a permanent and popular fixture of the park. Although it has rained two Saturdays in a row, the show goes on. Dry underneath the park’s pavilion, Gong stretches out a hand and feels the cold drops: “We come every weekend, twice a weekend. Even when it rains, we come!”
Most of the orchestra members say they’ve been singing all their lives, but not Gong. He says that when he retired two years ago, he yearned to do something he’d never done before, so he began singing the treasured songs of his youth – eloquent ballads about love, happiness, despair. His daughters, he says, chastised him: “‘An old dog cannot learn a new trick!’ they yelled… I practiced everyday, and I proved their theory wrong. ” After his debut performance, he told them proudly: “You just watched an old dog do a new trick!”
But being an old dog has its price, he admits. It took four arduous months for Gong to memorize his first aria. Nowadays, he often sits in the park wearing headphones, listening to the same opera over and over. Turning off his tape deck, he smiles, showing sparse teeth, and reveals the unlikely source of his memorization technique. Decades earlier, Gong confides, a young performer named Barbra Streisand used to work in a Chinese restaurant just around the corner from the park. “Barbra would sing all through her shift in an attempt to memorize her lyrics,” he says, leafing through his Cantonese sheet music. “That’s how you learn songs, that’s how Barbra learned songs!”
A visiting brother and sister who had just returned from a trip to China, Mitch and Alice Robinson, were lured to the park by the music they heard wafting through a fish market on Mott Street. “I heard the gong and vocals and said, ‘Alice, it’s the gongs, we gotta check it out,’” declares Mitch. Alice gazes wide-eyed around the pavilion. “We heard this exact music in China in the Temple of Heaven,” she says. “This place looks exactly like the Temple of Heaven…”
It’s many years since most members of the Columbus Park Senior Orchestra have seen the real Temple of Heaven, if they ever had been in Beijing while living in China. Gong hasn’t returned to China since he emigrated with his parents in 1950. Nonetheless he looks serene beneath a bamboo tree, displaying a “USA” pin on his patched pinstripe suit. “We got a lot of Chinese people here,” he says matter-of-factly. “It makes me feel like it’s my home country, with my countrymen.”
