(originally written December 25, 2023)
When I lived on Jinmen Island, Taiwan, in 2012, my American friend Samuel had a party to dedicate his new apartment. At the dedication, the local Taiwanese pastor, also named Samuel, gave my friend Samuel and his wife Jarita a Chinese hymnbook. He said, "Americans gave us their hymns a long time ago. Do you sing Chinese hymns in America?" My friend said no. "Then bring this hymnbook with you when you go back to America, and introduce our songs to your American church, as a fair exchange."
Later that year I came to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and started studying the Rawang language. At the Rawang church, I asked the pastor why they sing hymns translated from English, rather than using Rawang traditional music. Pastor Yosep said he felt the hymns were "glorious." I was sad about this, because I thought Rawang people were losing their culture, but I didn't know the full story yet.
Aminta Arrington, in her book Songs of the Lisu Hills, tells how English and American missionaries and Lisu believers worked together to translate hymns into Lisu in the 1920s, but that their process of translation was really more like inculturation -- they adapted the lyrics to the Lisu culture, and sometimes the end result was even more vivid and poetic than the original English!
I started to see the same thing in some of the Rawang songs -- for example, the song "When I See the Blood" in English starts with Jesus on the cross and alludes to the Passover story with the words "I will pass over you", but the Rawang version starts with the Passover story in Egypt, and makes the connection explicit, maybe because the original Rawang audience didn't yet have the Old Testament translated, and so they might have been learning about Passover for the first time when they learned the song.
Another example is the song "Jewels", where the Rawang version uses adverbs like "brim brim shor" to illustrate how God's people will twinkle and shine like stars, and says explicitly that "like Jesus' body shines, we will shine", highlighting the connection between Jesus' resurrection body and ours, whereas the English version is just a little more boring to my ears, "they will shine in their beauty, bright gems for his crown."
The 2011 Rawang version of "Jewels", in an improvement on the 1950 version, says that those who love the Lord are honorable and valuable like jade, a common precious stone in northern Myanmar, which the Rawang audience would have seen regularly and maybe even participated in mining. The song was thus connected closely to objects in their daily life, which probably explains why the Rawang church in Chiang Mai sang "Jewels" often, whereas I had never heard it in America, and according to my Facebook friends, American Sunday schools for children used to sing it, but don't anymore -- the English version is written to say that little children are the jewels, but the Rawang version says it about all believers.
Some Rawang hymns were created just for the Rawang people, rather than being translated from English. Two of these, which were used in the 1950 primer, but didn't make it into modern hymnbooks, are "Of Old We Rawang", and "Men of the Household", which tell the story of conversion from spirit-worship to worship of God, and the need to study hard in learning to read his Word, at a time when Rawang literacy was just becoming available.
In the 1968 primer, the song "From Every Land Created" mentions surrounding ethnic groups, saying that God loves all people from north and south, east and west, Jinghpaw, Burmese, Shan, Lisu, and all others, and that if they repent, they will have eternal life.
Another song from this book, "In the Beginning", starts with the creation of the world, tells how early humans got mixed up with evil spirits, how believers have now been rescued from the hand of evil spirits by Jesus, and how they now are to trust in Jesus and follow God's path. According to the chorus, this path includes not drinking alcohol, not chewing betelnut, repenting, not sacrificing to spirits, and worshiping Jesus. Some of these rules are from the Bible, and others like the prohibitions on alcohol and betelnut were new rules that Rawang and Lisu Christians considered important boundary markers for their newly believing community.
To recap, Rawang hymns were sometimes translated from English, sometimes translated from Lisu, and sometimes created first in Rawang. The ones that were translated were often adapted to Rawang culture, and as we have seen above, were sometimes even more beautiful than the original English songs.
It is true that musical styles and tunes have been borrowed from other cultures, but the words are an authentic expression of Rawang language and culture for their time.
In July 2023 at the Rawang American conference in Omaha, one of the first songs we sang was "Shvri:ngie". I immediately recognized the tune -- it was a song first released in 1996 in Taiwan, called "一切歌頌讚美" or "Praise The Lord". As it so happens, after coming back to the U.S. from our first year in Taiwan in 2008, my sister and I did teach this song to our home church, and they loved it just as much as the Rawang, with its catchy chorus, "Praise the Lord, Halleluya".
And so our story has come full circle. From Taiwan to America, to Thailand, to Myanmar, and back to America again, music crosses cultures in many directions, and really does make the world go round.
For more song translations and reflections, see the following posts:
Rawang songs:
- "Rawang Land" (about missing one's homeland) and "The Greatest Love Story" (Christmas)
- The Path of Love (romantic)
Mandarin worship songs:
