A canal that has flowed for thousands of years, an erhu that has been passed down for three generations, and a silent and stubborn violinist spent half a century looking for a piece of music that never existed.
When Jiang Song was seven years old, he picked up a broken erhu on the river beach. He didn't know why the piano was there, nor what the word "Chiang" engraved on the piano stem meant. He only knew that the moment his fingers touched the strings, the river began to make sounds, the wind began to have melody, and the world where his mother died young and his father was silent became bearable for the first time.
From Liucun to the provincial capital, from boyhood to middle age, he experienced failure in the college entrance examination, his first love marrying far away, a twenty-year confrontation with his father, and his son's escape from the canal. He used a piano to measure every bend of the river, and spent forty years salvaging the songs that were about to sink.
"Canal Ballad" never existed in any sheet of music. It is only in the boatmen's chants, in the cries of the docks, in the sighs of women waiting for their husbands to return, and in the breath of every canal person who has lived, loved, and suffered.
This is a story about sound - how a person hears the world and is heard by the world in his own way.
