When Music Is Answered With Poetry

I've been posting music online for a long time. Long enough to recognize the usual shapes of response.

In the U.S., comments tend to sound familiar:
Great tone.
Nice playing.
Thanks for the lesson.
Occasionally a technical question is asked. Sometimes people joke. Often, various emojis get left.

I value all of it. I don't say that lightly.

Over the past year, as I've been sharing music on a Chinese platform (小红书), I've noticed something different.

People don't just respond.

They reflect.

One listener wrote that my playing was "as gentle as a lover, and my singing as calm as moonlight." Another said they listened on their walk home from work and felt their mood settle almost immediately.

One person wrote at length about how a song reminded them of sitting on their father's shoulders as a child — their father like a mountain — and how, slowly, they grew into becoming someone else's mountain, until they understood that adulthood sometimes means walking alone and facing everything yourself. (That reflection hit me right in the feelings.)

Those sorts of comments aren't just feedback.

They represent memory, responsibility, and tenderness — and they're offered without apology.

I sat with that for a while.

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Two Ways of Listening

I don't think this difference comes down to taste or temperament.

It has more to do with what people are taught to do when they're moved.

American responses often translate feeling into evaluation. Approval stands in for articulation. This was good becomes the container for everything the listener felt but didn't quite name.

In the Chinese comments, the feeling isn't summarized — it's rendered. Moonlight instead of calm. Mountains instead of strength. Even just the feeling of walking home has depth that I just can't put into words.

One way asks whether something worked. The other answers the question: What did this touch?

Neither is wrong. They do, however, lead to very different kinds of speech.

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Permission Matters

I don't believe American (or Western) listeners feel less.

I think they're simply less often invited to linger.

In much of Western online culture, emotional language is expected to be concise, efficient, or lightly buffered. Earnestness can feel exposed. Tenderness often needs a reason.

What I see in these Chinese responses is a comfort with indirect expression. Feeling is allowed to arrive through metaphor and analogy rather than explanation. The language gives people a way to say things that might otherwise remain unspoken.

A comment about music becomes a reflection on memory, emotional weight, solitude, or care.

That kind of response doesn't emerge from enthusiasm alone. It requires a culture that knows how to hold it.

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The Role I Didn't Know I Was Playing

There's another factor I didn't anticipate.

In the U.S., I'm usually received as a teacher or an expert. Those roles shape the exchange. People thank you. They ask questions. They keep a certain distance.

On the Chinese platform, listeners seem to place me in a different category — something closer to an elder musician, or simply a calm presence passing through their day.

That shift changes the conversation.

Instead of asking how something was played, people tell me where it took them.

I didn't set out to occupy that role. It emerged because the environment allowed it — and because people felt free to answer sound with story.

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What This Changed for Me

Reading these responses hasn't made me want different praise.

No, what it did was change how I listen.

I've found myself paying more attention to what my playing expresses rather than what it demonstrates. I'm trying to be more aware of silence, pacing, and restraint. I'm finding myself more interested in whether it gives the listener space to feel something unspoken.

I'm thinking less about whether a performance lands cleanly, and more about whether it allows someone to remember something they may have hidden in their memory.

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A Quiet Gratitude

I don't expect American audiences to suddenly start responding to music in metaphor. Cultures don't shift on command.

I'm grateful, though, that these listeners have shown me what art can sound like when people are allowed to respond without compressing the experience into approval.

Moonlight.
Mountains.
Walking home.

Those images have stayed with me.

They've changed how I hear.