The Voice of All Beings

Chen Ya is deaf and mute. He runs the Shengyuanzhai paper effigy shop on Qiyang’s Old Street, making a living by tapping out fishing-drum ballads on an old bamboo tube wrapped with his grandmother’s bone powder. Real estate developer Liu Jianguo and his son bring in bulldozers to forcibly demolish the street so they can seize the land. With a single strike of his tube, Chen Ya shatters the excavator bucket’s hydraulic steel cable, drawing him into a whirlpool of intangible cultural heritage, corporate conspiracy, and acoustic combat. To protect his grandmother’s bone powder and handwritten scores, Chen Ya takes his deaf and mute apprentice Chen Hui from performing at rural funerals in Qiyang to provincial and national competitions. Along the way, they defeat newfangled takes on intangible cultural heritage, including silicone paper effigies, holographic projections, and electronic fishing drums. After mastering the technique of uniting a hundred bones, he takes on Guqin, the sixth-generation bone-instrument inheritor from Mount Kailash in Tibet. Guqin has upheld the ancient Nuo exorcism tradition for two thousand years and sees the voices of all living beings as sound-wave weapons. On the ice fields, three hundred and sixty-five ice skeletons awaken. Chen Ya turns shaved bamboo into a blade and bone powder into a bridge, guiding the slumbering bones back to their ancestral roots. In the end, the thousand-year echo of Dunhuang’s flying apsaras, the ice bones laid to rest at Mount Kailash, and fresh bamboo shoots breaking through the soil on Qiyang’s Old Street all come together in one saying: Our roots lie in Shengyuan, and our voices resound with the fragrance of osmanthus.