Three Hundred and Sixty Rings

The day Grandpa had a stroke, Pan Xiaoman was in a rehearsal studio in Shenzhen, running through the formation one last time. She was the granddaughter of the Pan family's twelfth-generation drum master, yet she danced the trendiest routines in the city and hadn't returned to the Yao mountains even once all year. By the time she rushed home, the eighty-two-year-old Drum King, Ninth Grandpa, could no longer speak, but he could still tap with his right hand on the quilt. Tap, tap, tap. Every Yao person in the room understood: it was the opening section of the Long Drum Dance, "Beginning the Hall."

There were seventy-two Long Drum routines. The only person in the entire village who knew them all was Grandpa. And Grandpa was forgetting them, day by day.

She quit her job and stayed. The village elders blocked the doorway. "The long drum is a 'male' drum. If a woman touches it, it'll fall silent." She smashed a drum in front of the entire village, and once stood all night outside the ancestral hall. She tracked down the former drum leader, who now drove freight trucks, persuaded the village schoolteacher to bring Long Drum exercises back to recess, and set out with half of a torn black-and-white photograph, searching the Yao mountains where Hunan, Guangxi, and Guangdong meet for a pair of ancestral drums separated sixty years ago.

From Shenzhen to Weizhukou, from Jianghua to Fuchuan and then Liannan, she took three hundred and sixty days.

Three hundred and sixty days, three hundred and sixty turns. Legend says that a girl who dances three hundred and sixty circles can fly to heaven and reunite with her beloved. She didn't fly to heaven. She simply played for the world to see a drum that her predecessors had never dared let a woman touch.

Skills may die, but people don't, as long as someone is still willing to hang a drum around their waist.