Guo Yue and his wife Clare Farrow took part in the 2009 Children's Bookshow. Geraldine Brennan went to meet them.

Guo Yue was born in 1958, the year of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. The youngest of six children, he grew up in a musicians’ hutong (courtyard) in old Beijing because his father was a violinist in the state Central Dancing and Singing Ensemble. His father died when he was six and Mao’s Cultural Revolution began when he was eight. Soon afterwards his mother was sent for ‘re-education’ at a labour camp in the countryside. She returned when he was 15, her health ruined. Yue was cared for by his older sisters until they were also sent to the countryside, and at one point lived alone with his older brother. At 17 he joined the Red Army’s music ensemble as a bamboo flute player. At 23, he was offered a scholarship in London at the Guildhood School of Music, studying with flautist James Galway.

Clare and Yue met in 1994, married soon after and live in London with their two children, a 13-year-old son called Bei Sheng (North Sound), and a daughter Lan Tien (Blue Sky).

I asked him if the character in his book A Little Leap Forward was based on him. 'Yes,' he answered,  'I am in the book and so are my friends. When I was born, in the year of the Great Leap Forward, parents were expected to give babies revolutionary names, like the characters in Little Leap Forward called Red Red and Little Iron. I was one of a lot of Leap Forwards in my class. If you called out ‘Yue’, half the children would turn round. The character Blue in the story has a less revolutionary name and her family get into trouble for keeping things from the past. The more traditional, poetic Chinese names were out of favour, like my mother’s name Su Lin, which means Calmness of the Forest.

I asked Yue how music had entered his lef. He explained, 'We were expected to live in the big musicians’ compound because my father was a violinist, but my father managed to get us moved to the woodwind players’ hutong (courtyard). We probably had more freedom than the children in the bigger compounds because there was nobody watching when we came in and went out. I grew up surrounded by music, between the Drum Tower, the Bell Tower and the river. I started playing the bamboo flute at seven because it was the only instrument my family could afford to buy. My father had died when I was six and we had very little money, but my mother wanted me to learn an instrument. I also learned the Chinese violin and the zheng (like a small harp) but the bamboo flute was like a chopstick for me, my comfort instrument that was always there.

The bamboo flute is the most universally loved instrument in China. It’s so cheap to buy that it’s easy to own one and try it, but to get the right tone you need good technique. It’s so simple: two pieces of bamboo that screw together with a tiny piece of paper that vibrates to create a warm, direct and powerful sound. I learned from the woodwind musicians in our courtyard who were from the countryside and self-taught rather than conservatoire-trained. They were passionate about their music. Growing up surrounded by music made me feel very comfortable and spiritual. Playing music was a way to escape what was going on outside our courtyard. We always had music lessons and instrument tuition in primary and middle schools, although the schools were closed for part of the time during the Cultural Revolution. It was a priority for the authorities that we should learn Chinese music. They thought Western music was bourgeois.

I was not good at academic subjects but I could always get top marks in music at school: for singing, instruments and music theory. When my primary school re-opened, I was chosen to be one of a music and dance group that did public performances in support of the revolution. Two of my sisters and my brother also performed in public and one of my sisters was in the top touring ensemble in the country. I learned to play the silver flute at 14. My middle school had one but nobody had played it for a long time. By that point the authorities wanted us to play Chinese music on Western instruments. The silver flute looked like a machine gun to me, made out of metal with 18 keys when my bamboo flute only had six holes. It was a Rolls-Royce next to a Lada. Recordings of European music were banned so I had never heard a silver flute being played. From that point I leaned towards the West, because I wanted to find out where this instrument had come from and what it could do.

I wondered whether Yue had always wanted to be a musician. But he explained that acting was his frst ambition. ' I auditioned for the People’s Arts Theatre when I was 16. I almost got in, but they rejected me because I had a tiny red mark, a burst blood vessel, on my eyeball. Instead I got into the army ensemble at 17 so I didn’t finish school. I was happy because I had a job, I could play music, I could travel and I could save money to give to my mother. When I was 23 I was offered a scholarship to study with James Galway at the Guildhall School of Music and performed with him in a cultural exchange. It opened doors for me.

Yue was very young when the Cultural revolution started. The first thing I remember is there was lot of singing of revolutionary songs and organised dancing in the streets, which I enjoyed. I didn’t understand what was happening at first. The school was closed for a while and I liked that at first but life became much harder for us. My mother was educated and had been a teacher, so the authorities did not approve of her. In the Cultural Revolution my family had to burn their photographs all through the night, and my mother was taken away to be re-educated at a labour camp in the countryside. She came back when I was 15 but she had been beaten and psychologically tortured, her health was ruined and she had several strokes. Eventually she was paralysed and she wasn’t able to speak to us.

In the past when my mother had wanted to show me old photographs of her family, I was too young and I didn’t want to listen to her stories. Later when I wanted to hear the stories about her family she wasn’t able to tell me. Now I have no trace of my mother’s family, not one photograph.'

Clare and Yue spent several years working on their first book, Music, Food and Love, published in 2006. This ‘memoir with recipes’ focused on the importance of music and food as ways to maintain family bonds during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. They then wanted to tell the young Yue’s story in a children’s picturebook, but a found that a longer text grew out of Yue’s recollections of his early life in the hutong and alleys.

Clare describes how they wrote Little Leap Forward together: 'Yue would lie on the bed with his eyes shut and tell me his childhood memories, recalling all the sounds and smells and of course what it felt like. He had blocked these memories for a long time and was reliving them with a child’s perspective. He told me how when he saw the Red Guard burning books in the streets, he would wonder why they were wasting all that paper when the family could have used it for their stove. He would also remember household objects, such as the family’s chest with lots of tiny drawers, and I would try to visualise them.

Not only did the world close in during the Cultural Revolution, but the people lost a lot of the colour in their lives. Colourful and patterned clothes from the past were banned and everyone had to wear blue jackets and trousers, white vests and black shoes. So the colours in nature, of vegetables, birds and insects, became so important.

 In the book, Helen Cann’s illustrations make these spots of colour stand out. She has introduced textile patterns to the riverbanks, the hills and the dragonflies’ wings. Little Leap Forward was published in 2008 by Barefoot Books. Almost immediately, the visual theatre company Horse + Bamboo, based in Lancashire, started work to adapt it as a touring show for families in partnership with Barefoot and the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. The production, which toured nationally for eight weeks in summer 2009, incorporated animation, masks, puppetry and shadows with music, including recordings of Yue on bamboo flute. For more details, see www.horseandbamboo.org/llf