Love Songs and Cicadas

For the Dong people songs are an inseparable part of life

By Charles Parker

We walk on the mountain slopes

And listen to the cicadas chirping

In early May five cicadas chirp to their hearts content

Come summer in June, the cicada's song is even more joyful

By September the cicadas are dead

Before they die, however, they are still chirping away their final joyful song...

In early autumn, the homeland of the Dong people reverberates with the love songs of cicadas. Spending most of their existence as solitary larvae underground, cicadas, winged insects about the size of a man's thumb, emerge from the earth to mate only toward the end of their lives. Above ground and in the company of their brethren for the first time, the cicadas sing themselves into a delirium. Literally on their deathbeds, they shout out their love calls. Their adult lives are but momentary, and this shared awareness of life's brevity gives them license to sing until the very end. Can the course of love be compared to the lifespan of a cicada? If there were a cicada oral history of stories and legends passed down by song, how would it define love?

It seems likely that the Dong might know. The majority of the Dong people reside in villages situated in the vast terrain of river valleys, flat dykes, and low-lying mountains between the Yangzi and Pearl River delta. Lying along the Hunan-Guizhou-Guangxi borders (including parts of southwest Hubei), the region's rugged and inhospitable terrain and its relative isolation from its administrative seat of government throughout the centuries have allowed the Dong people to retain a greater independence and cultural identity. Their ancestral songs, called galao, are one of the most distinctive aspects of Dong culture.