December 2005 Stories

Strelow’s Green Man Is Canary in Coal Mine

The Greening of Ben Brown, Michael Strelow’s debut novel, was born in a bar in Eugene 25 years ago. That’s the night the Willamette English professor first heard about the man who worked for Pennsylvania Light, took a high-voltage hit and turned green.

Strelow is a man with a fertile imagination, and when subsequent research led him to accounts of women who take on a greenish tinge during pregnancy, he decided he had the makings of a story. But perhaps even Strelow wasn’t prepared for the emails he received from Pennsylvanians who asked, “Did you know this guy?” They did, and even related how kids in town used to throw rocks at his house. It was called “rocking the green man.”

Of course, Strelow didn’t stop with a light tinge. The fictional Ben Brown is the shade of an alligator under water or a dark frog. Novelists are granted leeway where the imagination is concerned, and when the storytelling is so off-the-wall funny.

After his accident, the Green Man moves into a town peopled with quirky, oddball characters, a Black Angus restaurant sign whose “G” burned out years ago, and teens whose biggest thrill is making out between the gravestones of two murdered lovers.

The mythical East Leven is shaped by a bend in Oregon’s Willamette River, and the waters have shaped the townspeople as well; their identity is bound up with the river. But in Strelow’s tale, there’s a tension between how people define themselves and how they support themselves. In East Leven, the Horchow Chemical Company pays the salaries, keeps merchants afloat, funds local charities and—as the Green Man discovers—leaks toxins into the river. And that’s the rub.

“I really wanted to pose larger ecological questions, but I wanted them to come out of the narrative,” Strelow says. “Otherwise, it’s the same old litany.” He tried to keep the questions fresh by imbedding them in a zany cast of characters led by an unpretentious eco-hero, one who is so sensitive to pollutants that exposure makes him sick.

“I wanted to ask, ‘What are the compromises we make to live here in this world? What’s the price of having clean water, the true cost of living and spending energy? What’s the cost of treading on this earth?’”

Strelow’s book also poses questions about community. “If there’s a Superfund site, who really pays? Who are communities for, and how do we live together? What’s the nature of the color of one’s skin?”

The book is Strelow’s first novel. “I started writing 25 years ago, but teaching took so much time that I went to poetry, which takes shorter chunks of time.” He also published some academic books along the way. But the muse—or the Green Man—kept calling, or perhaps the questions just seemed more urgent. Three years ago Strelow picked it up again.

“I locked myself up in a room with no people,” he says. “Even the dog couldn’t stay.” There, Strelow dredged up memories from his childhood in Wisconsin, where he played in the settling ponds of the world’s largest stream shovel maker. He pulled in the hardware store from Independence, Ore., and painted Salem’s downtown in hilarious detail, down to the clock tower that’s been broken for who knows how long. Strelow combined accounts of factories up and down the Willamette that have used the river as their trash can, and the uneasy truce between economic progress and environmental disaster in each town.

Strelow’s undergraduate science background allowed him to write about chemicals as a kind of poetry. “I’m always going to be a science guy,” he says. He wrote and rewrote the novel 30 times, deleting unnecessary characters, resetting scenes and looking for clunky sentences. “I have a Golden Retriever,” he says. “I keep running my hand through her fur to get all the burrs out. Editing is like that. You’re looking for a smooth surface.” Strelow got lost in the process. “Writing annihilates time like nothing else,” he says.

When Ben Brown took his bolt, he was “swinging by the threads of his heartbeat.” That phrase could describe Strelow’s writing. It swings by the threads of his heart, telling a perennial human story that always has the same complex twist. The Willamette professor tells it with refreshing humor and wisdom.

“There’s nothing like writing,” Strelow says. The same can be said for reading. “When you’ve read a good book,” he says, “it just feels good holding it.”

The Greening of Ben Brown was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. The book jacket was designed by Willamette graduate Adam McIsaac. Strelow chairs Willamette’s American Studies Program and teaches English. He is working on a second novel, The Moby Dick Murders.

Jade Snow: Dancing with Spirit

When Jade Snow ’08 began dancing hula at age five, it was all fun and games. She never dreamed it would bring her a second family, an understanding of Hawaiian history and a sense of spiritual fulfillment.

“I started hula dancing recreationally at five because my mom thought it would be more fun than ballet,” says the sophomore English major. “Dancing was a hidden talent for me and I picked up hula very quickly.”

So quickly, in fact, that she found herself performing hula for tourists at local malls and other attractions. “My kumu [teacher] stuck to doing hapa-haole [pronounced hapa ha lay], a modern type of hula. The style is upbeat; the costumes are flashy. It uses songs and moves you see in Hollywood movies. If you come to a Hawaiian luau, this is the kind of hula you see.”

By age 12, after years of dancing hapa-haole, she was burned out and wanted to quit. “It got so repetitive that I didn’t feel like I was going anywhere with my hula.”

Her mother didn’t want her talented daughter to quit dancing. She suggested they look for another halau or hula school. If they didn’t find one she liked, her mother said, Snow was welcome to quit hula dancing forever.

“I walked into this intermediate dance school and they were doing dance moves I’d never seen before,” she says, her eyes shining at the memory. “The student dancers were serious, focused and very intense. I immediately knew that this was where I needed to be if I was going to grow as a dancer.”

The school Snow chose taught kahiko, an ancient and demanding form of hula that requires the dancers to dance and chant. Instead of songs or string instruments like guitars, this hula form relies on ancient percussion instruments like ’ili’ili (stones), kala’au (sticks) and ’uli’uli (gourd rattle). Unlike the swaying, rhythmic movements of modern or ’auana hula, kahiko hula movements are strong and powerful. It is also steeped in ancient Hawaiian history and tradition.

“Hula is filled with stories, myths and Hawaiian gods. Hula dancing is a way to retell those stories and keep the traditions alive. Kahiko hula stays as close to the ancient ways as possible. Many kahiko kumus dye their own materials from natural berries for costumes. The chants they use are hundreds of years old. Studying the chants and the history and then interpreting the dance as close to the original intention as possible demands a lot from the kumu and from the dancer.”

Preparation for performing kahiko hula is both physically and mentally rigorous. “A month before, you go on kapu to cleanse yourself. For instance, you don’t eat any sugar. You eat as close to the ancient diet as possible — lots of fish, taro, sweet potato — because you are trying to tap into the ancient culture. The day before dancing, you go into the ocean at night to let go of all your inhibitions so that when you step onto the stage, you’re entirely confident.”

Snow thrived under the tutelage of her kahiko teachers. She was only in seventh grade when she danced in her first competition. She has since competed in a half dozen competitions, including the Merrie Monarch, the largest hula competition in the world held annually in Hilo, Hawaii. At 15, she began dancing professionally in a private luau show.

All the grueling work has given Snow a strong kinship with her teachers and her fellow dancers. Her kumus have become second mothers; the other dancers, her hula sisters. “It has given me a second family. I’m grateful to my kumus and feel very close to them.”

Hula has also deeply bonded Snow to her island homeland. Born in Maui to a Filipino mother and Caucasian father, Snow knows more about Hawaiian history and culture than many Native Hawaiians. “Hula has connected me to Hawaii and Hawaiian culture. Most people don’t know much about the rich Hawaiian history and its monarchy, but it’s really important to me. During my middle and high school years, on May Day we would celebrate Hawaiian culture and living in the islands. I was always asked to dance a hula solo, which I was always honored to do.”

It has also made her interested in other cultures, something she’s exploring at Willamette University. “I enjoy learning about different cultures, their dances and their traditions. I also love sharing my Hawaiian culture with people here on the mainland by performing at the annual Willamette luau.”

Perhaps most importantly, hula has awakened Snow’s spirit. “Hula has given me faith in a higher power. When I dance, I connect to something else; something powerful. I bring everything I have to the dance and it becomes a spiritual experience.”

The series of four images of Jade Snow dancing the ’auana (or modern form of hula) at the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel are copyright © 2004 by Mitchell Silver and used with permission.

Going Green: Willamette Student Wins Audubon Award

Lindsey Young ’06 is the first student to receive Salem Audubon’s Green Award. The honor will become an annual award recognizing extraordinary educational efforts on preserving the environment. One student, one teacher and one business will be selected each year.

Young, a senior in biology at Willamette University, was chosen for her efforts to educate Salem area school children about birds. “I designed an exhibit of birds and their habitat and placed it in the science hallway at Waldo Middle School,” she explains. “Some of the birds were from the Americas; others were colorful or interesting birds from other parts of the world. The exhibit allowed me to help the entire school become familiar with different birds.”

The exhibit attracted plenty of attention because it utilized real stuffed birds or “skins” as they’re called. Each bird was numbered and a key gave the birds’ names and other information. “The children got really excited by the bird skins. They all wanted to know if the birds were real.”

The second part of Young’s ornithology education project involved teaching 70 children about avian taxonomy, the way birds are named and classified. “I was able to teach the children how the most common orders of birds are named and classified,” she says.

She also taught about classifying birds according to beak and feet characteristics and how to identify the birds’ habitat and diet based on those characteristics. “The children really understood concepts like how the sharp, curved beak and talons of a Red Tail Hawk tells us it is a carnivore who tears its prey. Or how the osprey’s long legs and talons enable it to grab fish from the water.”

To ensure the lesson was interesting and interactive, Young borrowed 20 nest packages from the local Audubon chapter that contained samples of bird feet, wings and nests. “The nest packages gave the students something to handle and stimulated a lot of questions.”

Young, who is a member of Willamette University’s rowing team, says she has always loved the outdoors. She felt frustrated, however, when she’d go bird watching with friends. “All the people I hang out with love bird watching. But I had difficulty identifying species because I couldn’t use binoculars that well and had difficulty seeing the markings quickly enough.”

Willamette University Professor David Craig’s ornithology class changed all that. “I’m able to notice a lot more detail in birds now than I was before. I was also able to answer the children’s questions about bird names and bird behavior. I have really fallen in love with birds. They are a wonderful indicator species that can tell us many things about our environment.”

Along with the award, Young received her own pair of binoculars from Salem Audubon, which she will put to good use. “Willamette University and Professor Craig’s class have given me a greater appreciation of the environment and nature and made me more aware of my surroundings,” says Young, who will graduate this spring. She plans to teach English in Japan for a year as part of the JET program. Then she will enroll in Willamette’s Master’s in Teaching program. “My goal was to get children to start noticing nature all around them, even here in the city.”

Lucas Hernandez: Filming in Faith

“My faith in God guides my life.” – Eric Jorge, “Tres Jorges: Faith, Obedience and Immigration”

Lucas Hernandez ’05 just wanted to make a documentary film. He didn’t realize it would renew his faith in God.

“Documentary filmmaking is one of my passions,” says the recent Willamette University rhetoric and media studies graduate. “My parents told me about a man named Jorge who had given up everything to come from Mexico to build a church in America. I thought it would make an interesting story because it’s usually Americans going to Mexico to build the churches.”

Although Hernandez had always believed in God, he didn’t intend to make a faith-based film. Raised non-denominational Christian, he graduated from Santiam Christian High School in Corvallis. However, like many young people, by the time he came to Willamette University, his faith had faded.

“In Mexico, Jorge was upper middle class,” explains Hernandez, who is visiting on leave from the Air Force Reserves in Florida. “He was doing well and had his own security company. But in order to follow his faith, he and his family came here to live in abject poverty. I thought that was amazing and wanted to tell his story.”

To fund his film, “Los Tres Jorges: Faith, Obedience and Immigration,” Hernandez applied for and won a $3,000 Carson Undergraduate Research Grant. These grants are designed to encourage original research and study outside the classroom.

Hernandez interviewed and filmed three generations: Jorge, his father, Don Jorge, and Jorge’s son, Eric Jorge. He shot 12 hours of video to make his 27-minute film. The interviews told an inspiring story of faith and sacrifice. “Jorge’s wife got cancer and he prayed to God to heal her. He told God, ‘If you do this, I will do whatever you ask.’ His wife was healed. Then Jorge’s pastor asked him if he’d come to America to help establish this church. He told God, ‘I’ll do this if everything I own is sold within one week.” It was all sold in three days. And so he came.”

“Wherever He wants me to go, I will go. If God is with me, I lack nothing.” – Jorge

One of the biggest barriers Hernandez faced during the filming was language. Although he’d spoken Spanish as a child, he had all but forgotten the language. Neither Jorge nor Don Jorge spoke English. In order to interview them, Hernandez had to resurrect his native tongue. “I was not only trying to re-learn Spanish, I was trying to learn interview techniques and to use those in Spanish. It was really hard.”

“When I came here and couldn’t speak English, it was the worst year of my life. It was like I had something in my mouth I couldn’t get out. But God gave me the strength to keep going.” – Eric Jorge

Sometimes Hernandez couldn’t understand what his interview subjects were saying. “When they’d answer my questions, I didn’t know what a lot of the responses meant until I got back home and my father helped me translate them.”

To make his film accessible to English-speaking audiences, he created English subtitles. “I had to transcribe the interviews in Spanish and translate them into English. Then I had to try to understand the meaning of what they were saying and translate it into English subtitles. It was frustrating. There were times I literally cried in front of my computer.”

“During the first year [that Jorge was gone], communication with my son was hard. He didn’t tell us how difficult things were for him.” – Don Jorge

Hernandez also struggled with the video editing process, something he’d never done before. He had to learn a complex new software program and he ended up creating seven different versions of the film before he was satisfied with the results. “If you talk to someone for 10 minutes, you have to spend an hour editing it. I spent months editing and trying to get the film down to 27 minutes. I had no idea how much time it would take.”

One of the great joys of his project was traveling to Salamanca, Mexico, with his parents to interview Don Jorge. “We lived for about 20 days in Mexico with Don Jorge and his wife Lilia. It was awesome. There was a little bakery down the street from his house and every day we’d go there and buy fresh sweet bread. Lilia would make us the most amazing chilies and salsas. Don Jorge and I hung out and talked a lot. My own grandfather is dead and Don Jorge felt like my grandfather. Even though I didn’t always understand everything he said, I could feel the love he has for me. It was the family I never had.”

“The first few years after Jorge left, it weighed heavily on me. We had been very united so when they left, I suffered a lot. But now I see they are doing well.” – Lilia Jorge

Hernandez says he’s been surprised by the response “Tres Jorges” has received. “This film has an effect on people who see it. It doesn’t matter what faith you are, even if you just believe in the human spirit, this is a story of human triumph. People who see the film learn from it.”

Perhaps most important is the fact that Hernandez, who will soon be attending military graduate school in Washington, D.C., has been inspired by the Jorges’ strong faith. “This project increased my own faith. It showed me I can face challenges I thought I couldn’t. I learned that the limits I put on myself are just in my mind and that I can overcome them through faith. Now I worry less and I have a lot more peace.”

Katherine Ervine: A Walk into History

Katherine Ervine ’05 is in love with history. She’s determined to make everyone else fall in love with it too, especially the history of her hometown of Everett, Washington.

Ervine, a senior history major at Willamette, was fascinated by history classes at Everett High School. She couldn’t understand why other students weren’t as enthralled. “I remember in high school history courses a lot of students were falling asleep on the desks,” she says. “I wondered why they couldn’t make history interesting for everyone.”

A trip around the United Kingdom, in connection with her study abroad experience during her junior year, sparked an idea about how to make history come alive. “I did a lot of Rick Steves’ self-guided walking tours around the U.K. It was fascinating. I realized if they could make European history that interesting, I could do the same thing with local history.”

To finance her project, she applied for and won a Carson Undergraduate Research Grant, a $3,000 stipend designed to encourage independent research and study outside the classroom. Then she set out to develop a historical walking tour of downtown Everett.

“I didn’t know a lot about Everett’s history because we’d had only a very brief overview on Oregon and Washington history in high school. The first thing I did was read some local historian’s work, which gave me a foundation.”

Then she arranged to meet with the city’s two historians. “The historians were a great resource. They work out of the Everett Public Library in the Northwest Room, which is dedicated to local history. One of the historians, Dave Dilgard, took me on a personal walking tour of the downtown. That gave me a good feel for the project.”

She discovered that the old town and what is now Everett are quite different. “Everett used to be a mill town. There were more than 20 mills right in town, many on the waterfront. Now the waterfront is full of yacht clubs, new condos and fine dining restaurants.”

Threads of the city’s historic mill past are still evident in the fabric of life in Everett. “There are class distinctions in Everett today that come from our city’s past. I never really understood that before.”

Those divisions are obvious in neighborhoods where old mill owner mansions reside alongside modest mill worker homes. “Everett isn’t like most towns in that there aren’t “good” and “bad” neighborhoods. You’ll see fine mansions next to little boxy houses. That’s because the mills were spread out along the river and the sound. The mill owners lived near their mills in the same block as their workers.”

Ervine also discovered her hometown’s colorful past — the National Guard Armory is haunted; the former post office has peep holes in the men’s bathroom; there was a murder in one of the city’s hotels that reads like a soap opera. “I love all the juicy stories,” Evrvine says, her voice rising with excitement. “I felt like I was on a treasure hunt and found all these historical gems.”

To create her walking tour, she spent hours researching downtown history, interviewing people connected with historic buildings and walking different routes. “There is so much history in Everett. I was constantly having to narrowing down the number of sites, which was really challenging. In some cases, I tried to work the historic information into other sites. Often, I just had to let some pieces of history go.”

After five long months, Everett produced a detailed walking map and descriptions of the sites along the route. The final edition of the tour includes 20 different historic buildings or sites and takes about an hour to complete. The map and tour guide are available to print out at the Everett Public Library.

The Carson project also changed Ervine. It forced her to ask probing questions, talk with strangers and go into places she normally wouldn’t venture.

“The experience made me more outgoing,” says Ervine, who is planning to teach English in Japan for a year before going onto law school or graduate school. “Most people are really willing to talk. They just light up; they want to share. I think this will make me more willing to talk to people and to explore.

Loftus Brings Women into the Historical Record

“History is all about telling stories,” Japanese historian Ron Loftus says. “It’s a collection of individual experiences. The trouble is, we don’t live long enough to read 100 million life stories.” That’s why Loftus decided to dip into just a few—deeply.

His Telling Lives: Women’s Self-Writing in Modern Japan is based on the autobiographies of five 20th century Japanese women. They come from a variety of circumstances and socio-economic backgrounds.

“Until the last 30 years, women were totally absent in history texts,” Loftus says. “Feminist scholars dug up letters, diaries, poems and private autobiographies to find women and bring their voice back into the historical record.”

The 1980s theory was that women’s autobiographies would read differently than men’s, Loftus says. It was thought that male autobiographies would be more egocentric and outer-directed, with the stories told in a linear progression, while women’s stories would be less chronologically presented and more focused on domestic details and inner emotional states. Matters of the heart, it went without saying, would be less compelling.

Loftus didn’t buy it. He went again and again to the library and discovered a tremendous outpouring from women. The language was rich, he says, and he discovered that the stories were not inner-directed recollections, but were outer-directed. Few women recounted details about their love lives or emotional existence, he says. Instead, they wrote about their public activities in a linear, chronological fashion. “I found this to be true in women’s autobiographies in the West and elsewhere in the world,” Loftus says.

“When I started, I was a little worried that people would say, ‘What’s a man doing writing this?’” But Loftus plunged ahead, discovering for himself the stories of five remarkable Japanese women.

“I wanted the women and their experiences to speak for themselves,” he says. “These are names few people know. I sat here on summer days translating from Japanese to English, following their lives. This was a labor of love.”

His book chronicles the lives of five women, including a blacksmith’s daughter, Oku Mumeo, who grew up amidst the clash of old and new cultures. Her traditional father surprised her by advising her not to marry, as it “will only involve a lot of hard work.” The comfortably settled and educated Mumeo decided to join the masses and take up work in a spinning mill, where she found nightmarish conditions. Women were treated as slaves and housed in unsanitary conditions. Mumeo became a passionate activist for health care for working women, and while the government wanted more people to fight its wars—in other words, more births—she pushed for more choice.

Takai Toshio entered the textile mills at age 11, and though she was hobbled by a crooked leg, lack of education and small stature, she became a labor organizer. Her activities earned her a jail sentence, but she continued to advocate for women in the workforce with resilience, and results.

College educated, Nishi Kiyoko came from comfortable circumstances financially, but not psychologically. Her mother, trapped by the Japanese patriarchal system, drowned herself in a lake as a way out. Kiyoko’s “phantom mother” was the internal text that ran through her career as a liberal journalist. In her 80s, she wrote her memoirs, worrying all the while that calling it an autobiography “might sound impudent. It’s not that I have lived my life in such a remarkable way, but that the time period through which I have lived has been a full and tumultuous one. And, by coincidence, there were a few times when I stood up as an individual against this swirling tide.”

Sata Ineko began her career as a parlor maid, but quickly became frustrated and exhausted by her work routine. “I wanted my own time,” she said. “I wanted to read books.” The woman whose mother told her, above all else, to “be a good wife,” became an active proletarian writer for the Marxist party.

Fukunaga Misao joined the illegal, underground Communist Party, which got her thrown into jail. She eventually became disillusioned with the pre-war Japanese Communist Party, as she felt it was dominated by men who felt superior to women, but she continued to advocate for gender equality and women’s issues.

The five women in Telling Lives were in their late 70s or 80s before they wrote their stories.

Through Loftus’s book, female students from the Tokyo International University of America have become acquainted with mentors they might never have known. One student said, “I never knew women like this existed.” The students have expressed admiration, empathy and the desire to be like the women portrayed in Telling Lives.

Loftus was born in Washington, D.C., where his father was an international economist, and spent his formative years in India, Paris, Bologna and Bangkok. He serves as chair of the Department of Japanese and Chinese at Willamette.

Hekun Wu: Playing a New Song

Hekun Wu has conducted Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” for over a decade, but when the new Salem Chamber Orchestra director lifted his baton to signal his first performance at Willamette University, the piece sounded a little more, well, pastoral.

“Every time I open that score there’s so much to discover,” the new associate professor of music says, “but this time I heard something new.” The symphony, which was chosen to celebrate Oregon’s beauty, portrays a rainstorm and the peace found in nature, and somehow seems more at home on an Oregon stage than in the concert halls of New York City, Paris or Shanghai.

“If Beethoven had visited this part of the world he would have composed a few more
pastoral symphonies,” Wu says.

Wu’s own journey to Willamette’s Music Department began in an unlikely place. He came of age in China during the Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao had closed every university and music conservatory in the country, and sent the country’s brightest young people off to the countryside to work the rice fields. Mao’s wife, a connoisseur of the arts, persuaded Mao to allow her to open four “Experimental Schools,” which served Mao’s political agenda while introducing a handful of young people to Chinese opera and carefully selected Western symphonic music.

At age 12, in a country covering almost ten million square kilometers, possessing few musical abilities, Wu was somehow admitted. He didn’t take his good fortune lightly. After his introduction to piano and the cello, he threw himself into his studies with the energy of a mature musician. “Life was simple,” he says. “We didn’t have much distraction, and so we just studied.”

After Mao’s downfall in 1976, universities slowly reopened their doors. Competition was fierce for the newly re-established Shanghai Music Conservatory, but Wu’s talent ensured his admission. After graduation, the Chinese Ministry of Culture selected the young conservatory graduate to participate in an artist exchange program in Paris, formerly viewed as the epicenter of Western bourgeois decadence. In the 1980s Wu entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he immersed himself in all that had once been forbidden—art museums and exhibitions, the opera, even French literature. “I was in my early 20s,” he says, “a time when one absorbs knowledge and an understanding of life. That period made a huge impact on me as an artist and as a person.”

At the conservatory, Wu met one of the greatest cellists of the century, Maurice Gendron. The 62-year-old cellist recognized Wu’s talent and invested his considerable energies in the young musician. His teacher told him that the training at the conservatory would not be sufficient, so Wu was invited to the master’s home for weekly lessons. In the beginning, Wu used his French dictionary to participate in animated discussions over lunch, which was carefully prepared by “the Madame.”

“It’s not enough to just look at the notes on the printed page,” Gendron told his student. “You must look through the piece to see the vast world of the composer, to look into the spirit of poetry and painting and art.” When Wu saw Picasso’s “Pigeons” painting on Gendron’s wall, he naively asked if it was real. “Everything is real here,” his teacher replied. (The painting was a gift from the artist.) “Some people saw Gendron as difficult—a tough teacher with rare compliments to his pupils—but to this day, I still feel his inspiration,” Wu says.

It’s apparent that Wu draws inspiration from somewhere. He plays cello as if the instrument is an extension of himself and conducts with a spirit and energy that transcends the score. “For me, it’s a moment where you are taken by Beethoven—if you are lucky enough—although it doesn’t happen often. If one is sincere, there is a connection that enables us to reach Beethoven, regardless of our race or nationality. The great music, art and literature are the properties of the world.

“When you conduct or play a work like Beethoven or Mozart, it’s not a matter of interpretation, but rather a way of living,” Wu says. “How can I dare to interpret Beethoven? A masterpiece itself speaks. It is a soul searching and it is always a work in progress.”

For Wu, soul searching and years of diligence led to worldwide acclaim. He has energized orchestras with his conducting and electrified audiences in Europe, China and the United States with his cello performances. He taught at a number of schools before coming to Willamette, where he replaced Salem Chamber Orchestra Founder and Music Director Laureate Bruce McIntosh. The 45-member orchestra is sponsored, in part, by Willamette University, and is composed of faculty artists, students and community musicians—both professional and volunteer.

The new music director opened his first season by conducting the orchestra and playing a Tchaikovsky cello solo simultaneously. The feat earned him a thumbs-up in the local Statesman Journal “Winners” column: “How hard is that? Picture driving a racecar and doing your taxes at the same time.”

Was he nervous? “Sure, sure, of course. I describe it as the fear of God. I’m not just nervous about making mistakes. It’s not show-off time. Every gesture, everything is a matter of serving the music.” Wu’s world-famous cello teacher was so nervous he suffered stage fright, particularly in his later years, even though some of his recordings—recorded in one take—are thought to be the best in existence.

Wu is happy to be ensconced at Willamette, where music is taught within the context of a broad liberal arts education. “Music is a science as well,” he said. “To be a complete artist you have to have a scientist’s mind, a philosopher’s way of thinking, the imagination of a poet, and the stoicism of a Buddhist monk.”

His goals for the Salem Chamber Orchestra are ambitious, as were his predecessor’s. He realizes he’s fighting an uphill battle, as the classical audience has declined. Young people have been drawn away by computer games, sports and pop culture, and nurturing their interest will take more than concerts—it will take dedicated educational outreach. The conductor still believes, though, that music is not created for musicians, but for people, “for every citizen in a civilized society.”

Wu comes to Willamette with his wife, Elise Yun, who is an accomplished artist in her own right. A pianist, she is a visiting assistant professor this year. Yun has performed extensively, including a duo recital at Carnegie Recital Hall. Prior to coming to Willamette, she led master classes in the United States and Asia, and taught at Wellesley College, New York University and as a teaching fellow at The Juilliard School. She and Wu have recorded and performed worldwide as a duo.

As for Oregon, Wu believes that it’s ideal for an artist to situate in beautiful surroundings. “For every creative work, we need fresh air and beauty to supplement the imagination, to develop creativity. Nature affects our everyday life. When I see the Columbia River Gorge, I realize how insignificant we are as human beings.

“Just like this ‘Pastoral Symphony,’” Wu says, “I now understand it differently. When we played it that night, I believe we came close to what I have been searching for.”