Children's choir hits the high notes

On the night of Feb 4, the Olympic flag was raised once again at the National Stadium, aka the Bird's Nest, in Beijing.

The stadium fell into silence before a heavenly chorus emerged and began to sing the Olympic Anthem. The choir comprised 44 children－firmness in their eyes, clearness in their voices.

"Plains, mountains, and seas glow with you, like a white-and-purple great temple..." the children sang in Greek.

The lyrics were fitting, as the kids hail from the mountains.

'Cute, clean and shy'

Their journey to the opening ceremony started on Sept 28 last year when Ma Xiaojing and her colleagues from Beijing visited Malan Elementary School in Fuping, a county in neighboring Hebei province.

As a staffer of the Beijing 2022 opening and closing ceremonies team, Ma was tasked with auditioning Olympic Anthem performances.

Zhang Yimou, the director of both the Beijing 2022 and Beijing 2008 opening and closing ceremonies, floated the idea of having some "regular, everyday" children sing the anthem.

The team interviewed dozens of candidates, all of whom fell short of their expectations. Then they saw a video of pupils from Malan Elementary School singing.

On her way to the school, Ma tried to imagine what the children would look like. She was a little uneasy, but also hopeful. Unknown to her, the children were also expecting their guests from Beijing.

"Cute, clean and shy." That was Ma's initial impression of the kids. "You could tell the curiosity of some of them, and that they wanted to talk to you. But they were just too shy and hid behind their teachers," Ma recalled.

The children were dressed plainly, but Ma was impressed by their pure eyes, curiosity and vitality.

"I suddenly understood the chief director's idea. We would like to bring these so-called ordinary children from the mountains to sing on the world's biggest stage," Ma said.

Upon her return to Beijing, the directorial team watched footage of the kids singing. Even though they were sometimes a little off-key, the sound of their voices struck a chord.

"This is it. The heavenly voices of these children are exactly what I have been searching for－the fragrance of the earth," said Zhang.

Mountain song

Back in 2003, Malan village welcomed back a special guest who was born in Fuping, a former revolutionary base of the Communist Party of China during the 1940s, and whose father Deng Tuo used to run the famed Jinchaji Daily newspaper to spread the Party's key policies amid a heavy blockade and attacks from the Japanese.

Deng Xiaolan had returned for Tomb-Sweeping Day to pay tribute to 19 courageous villagers who were killed by the Japanese army after refusing to reveal the whereabouts of Jinchaji Daily staff and printing facilities.

Deng realized that the surrounding mountains that protected his father and his comrades during wartime now stood as a huge barrier between the villagers and the prosperous outside world. People there still lived below the poverty line.

She started to do her bit to help the village where she was raised until she was 3. This brought into being the Malan Band, a predecessor of the Malan Flower Choir.

Music injected life into the sleepy village and gave it a voice, but no one expected that this voice would be heard on the Olympic stage.

"We all know that China has eliminated extreme poverty. Children in mountainous areas are not the same as they used to be," said director Zhang.

"It's great that they stand on the Olympic stage and sing the Olympic Anthem loudly in Greek. It really speaks for itself."

In the four months before the opening ceremony, the 44 children faced a daunting task－learn how to sing a song in Greek, and do so entirely in a capella.

Zhang Hongyu, head of the music conservatory of Baoding University, came up with a tailor-made practice plan for the children. The plan used body language to help the children with music theory, and incorporated games to keep the more mischievous pupils engaged.

Greek-language teacher Qin Yezhen of Beijing Foreign Studies University and his student Lin Jiahao taught the children how to sing Greek and tried their best to translate the lyrics into Chinese in a way that the students could comprehend.

Each day, the Olympic Anthem reverberated across the town, traveling across the mountains and plains, all the way to Beijing.

Then on a winter day in early January 2022, the children boarded a bus to the capital, a five-hour trip.

Whole new world

All the children were in awe when they walked into the giant Bird's Nest stadium.

Born in 2010, Li Zhengze had imagined his trip to Beijing many times. He remembered how he walked into the stadium. "It's different from what I saw in the videos, how could it be so huge?" he said.

Another boy, Liang Youlin, whose mother had tried in vain to calm him down with Chinese calligraphy and art classes, was also left speechless. During the first rehearsal, his voice was trembling.

Traveling without their parents and spending the Lunar New Year holidays away from home for the first time, the trip was a big deal for the children. The COVID-19 countermeasures and the tight practice schedule were also not easy for them to adapt to.

They developed their own ways to tackle their unease at the daunting new world they suddenly found themselves in. "When we were on the stage, we imagined the audience as trees on the mountains, or stars in the sky," one of the kids said.

On Feb 4, the children sang the Olympic Anthem with purity, beauty and innocence. Under the limelight, they brought joy and inspiration to the world, just as chief director Zhang had hoped.