The quest for the Mysterious Operatic Angel Voice at Five in the Morning

It began the morning after we got back from our vacation. Starting around VeryDark:30, I heard it outside our window - what sounded like a boy soprano singing three very clear notes. It sounded like the first three notes of the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (for those of you who remember that movie), and was so strange and oddly beautiful I had to shake Jane awake a little bit to make sure that she had heard it too and that I wasn’t dreaming. Yes, I even took a video of it. If you turn the volume way up, you can just hear it at about ten seconds to go:



This continued for almost a week. Every morning, there’d be the same sounds: roosters crowing, construction machinery, and this hallucinatory singing echoing from afar. Finally, at 5:30 or so one Saturday morning, I resolved to track down the source, so I dragged myself out of bed and headed out the university gate into the “village” of Hongguang.

A parenthetical note: Remind me to explain our village sometime! I put the word in quotes because while parts of the world outside our gate resemble what we’d think of as a village, (four or five blocks square, dusty side roads, outdoor market with live chickens for sale) other parts most decidedly don’t (main street lined with 30-40 clothing stores, several 20 story apartment buildings and high speed train station under construction, etc.).

Anyway, being out at five thirty in the morning was a surreal experience. Things seem to be much more mystical than they usually are at that hour, and that effect was compounded by the fact that it was the day of New Year’s Eve, which meant that almost nobody was around. I made a brand new discovery that many of the small stores in the area have small clear plexiglass signs that blink red or green in the dark! I had rare insights into the nature of humanity which I promptly forgot because I didn’t write them down! But alas, no singing sound.

Until I headed back up the stairway, that is. Then I heard it, clear as a bell. Well, clear as a chicken, I should say. I walked around the back of our building, and while I couldn’t pinpoint the actual apartment that it was coming from, the voice definitely had the ring of poultry to it. The echoing from afar bit? More likely, echoing from the buildings across the alley from us. It still sounded otherworldly, though, and not like any other chicken or rooster that I’d ever heard. Maybe a peacock? Naah.

The next day was Chinese New Years, and we slept in because the fireworks (and resulting adrenaline) kept us awake until three in the morning. The morning after that, not surprisingly - no chickens. They’d all, presumably, ended up as a dish on the New Year’s table. Jane and I exchanged a mutual sigh, and we didn’t mention it to our recently vegetarian kids.

Then, two mornings later - the angelic chicken voice returned! Three notes, as clear as anything. Sometimes two. A week later, and I’m still hearing the notes as I write this blog post. Did someone buy a new chicken? Was the chicken just laying low over New Year’s? Are we listening to the voice of a ghost chicken from the other side? Did a family take as much wonder in the voice of this chicken as we did and decide to raise this bird as a family pet? Or was it even a chicken after all?

There are some things about living in a culture that, try as you may, you never ever will know. Maybe, some day soon, I will go around to different apartments, start knocking on doors, and become known as that crazy foreigner who asks about chickens. Maybe I will finally see this angel chicken. I can picture her now, comfortably asleep on a red velvet pillow with gold embroidery. Every morning she walks to the window opened for her by her owner, and sings her perfect angel chicken song five times before being stroked and fed two handfuls of the the finest grain money can buy. Or maybe some things are destined to always remain a mystery. Sleep well, angel chicken. Your secret is safe with all of us.