Blog

When Loyalty Finds No Voice: The Struggle to Be Understood

Chu Ci · Jiu Zhang · Xi Song (惜诵)

When Loyalty Becomes a Form of Solitude

“What happens when a person remains faithful to their convictions, yet finds that neither silence nor speaking out can make their voice heard? Can words travel beyond their own time and reach those who may finally be willing to listen?”

In Ju Song (Ode to the Orange Tree), Qu Yuan explores the determination to remain true to one’s principles. In She Jiang (Crossing the River), he portrays a journey undertaken without abandoning one’s convictions. Xi Song (惜诵), another poem from Jiu Zhang (Nine Chapters) in the Chu Ci, confronts a different dilemma: what happens when personal integrity comes into conflict with the political and social order?

Throughout Xi Song, the poetic speaker attempts to explain his intentions and defend himself against accusations. Yet his words cannot reach the ruler whose understanding he seeks. Remaining silent brings no recognition, while speaking out produces no response. The tragedy is therefore not simply that a loyal minister has been misunderstood. It is the discovery that, within the world he inhabits, his words no longer seem to have anyone willing to hear them.

More than 2,300 years later, the poem raises a question that extends beyond the political circumstances of ancient Chu. When an era cannot understand an individual’s voice, can writing cross the boundaries of time and allow future generations to listen again?

I. Loyalty Under Suspicion | When Sincerity Cannot Reach the King

“Loyalty does not necessarily earn trust, and truth does not always prevail over collective opinion. When someone loses the opportunity to be heard, where can they turn to establish their innocence?”

1. Calling Heaven as Witness | An Appeal Beyond Human Justice

Xi Song begins with an impassioned declaration. The speaker, distressed by misunderstanding and accusations, seeks to express the emotions he has been unable to communicate. Yet instead of addressing his grievances solely to the human world, he turns towards heaven and calls upon a higher authority to witness his sincerity.

The poem invokes the Five Emperors, the Six Spirits, mountains and rivers, and the legendary figure Gaoyao, associated with the administration of justice in ancient Chinese tradition. Together, these figures form an imagined court of judgment extending beyond the political institutions of the human world. Heaven, the natural landscape, and ancient ideals of justice become witnesses in a dispute that earthly authority has failed to resolve.

This extraordinary scene is more than an expression of religious imagination. It reveals the distance between political power and moral judgment. The speaker can appeal to heaven precisely because he cannot secure a fair hearing among those who possess authority over his life.

When human justice loses its fairness, the poet must borrow a courtroom from heaven. Yet the very need to summon heaven as a witness suggests that, in the human world, he has nowhere left to appeal.

2. When Many Voices Become Power | The Pressure of Collective Opinion

Another central conflict in Xi Song emerges from the power of collective speech. The poem describes how repeated accusations can become so influential that they overwhelm an individual’s attempts to explain the truth. The classical image of many voices being capable of melting metal conveys the destructive force of words when they accumulate into a seemingly unquestionable judgment.

This does not mean that the majority must always be wrong. Rather, the poem exposes the danger of treating repetition as evidence. When the same accusation circulates often enough, people may begin to accept it without examining whether it is justified. What appears to be a shared conclusion may be the product of social pressure rather than independent understanding.

The speaker also compares himself to an unwanted growth on the body, expressing the painful experience of becoming an outsider within a group to which he once hoped to contribute. His refusal to conform through flattery or convenient agreement separates him from those who have learned to accommodate the expectations of power.

Here, Xi Song moves beyond personal disappointment and reveals a structural problem in human relationships. A community may develop a common position not because everyone has independently examined the facts, but because its members have learned which opinions are safest to express. Collective agreement can become an instrument of exclusion.

When the voices of many people form a consensus, that consensus does not necessarily arise from truth. Sometimes it emerges because everyone has learned how to please those in authority.

3. Neither Silence nor Protest | When Communication Has No Path

Perhaps the most moving passage in Xi Song describes the speaker’s impossible choice between remaining silent and crying out. If he withdraws into silence, no one understands him. If he raises his voice, no one listens. Two apparently opposite responses lead to the same result: his intentions remain unheard.

Silence might seem a way to avoid confrontation, yet it can be interpreted as acceptance of an accusation. Speaking out might offer an opportunity to clarify the truth, yet it can also be interpreted as defiance or resentment. The speaker is trapped in a situation where neither course of action can restore meaningful communication.

The poem’s expression of wishing to declare one’s aspirations but finding no path is especially significant. The problem is not simply the absence of permission to speak. It is the breakdown of the relationship between expression and understanding. Political authority has closed the channel through which an individual’s words might otherwise reach their intended listener.

There is a particular loneliness in having something important to say while knowing that no available form of expression can make it understood. The deepest isolation is not having nothing to say, but having words for which no path of communication remains.

Yet the poem does not end in silence. Fearing that his true intentions will remain unrecognized, the speaker chooses to set them down once more in writing. What cannot be established through immediate political appeal becomes a written testimony that others may encounter in another time.

When spoken words lose the opportunity to be heard, writing becomes another form of self-witness. The refusal of one era to listen does not determine how later generations will understand.

II. Giving Xi Song a New Voice | AI Music Across 2,300 Years

“When words cannot reach the people of their own time, poetry entrusts them to the passing centuries. More than 2,300 years later, a new musical interpretation allows those written words to become audible once again.”

In the summer of 2025, I began transforming classical texts from the Chu Ci into musical works with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Xi Song, one of the poems in Jiu Zhang, became part of this experiment in bringing ancient literature into contemporary listening experiences.

The recording follows the classical text, moving from the opening expressions of distress and self-defense towards the speaker’s increasingly difficult struggle between withdrawal and continued engagement. The poem’s emotional development is gradual, and the musical interpretation attempts to carry that progression through a continuous performance.

Creating the recording required repeated generations and comparisons. I eventually selected the eleventh version as the final work. The recording lasts approximately seven minutes, with only a few words left unpronounced. Its melody develops progressively, and a more intense, higher vocal passage in the middle gives the poem’s internal conflict a stronger audible expression.

This is not an attempt to reconstruct the music of ancient Chu. It is a contemporary experiment in which the original literary text provides the foundation while AI-generated music offers another way of experiencing its emotional and intellectual movement. As with my other Chu Ci recordings, the process involved listening carefully, evaluating pronunciation, and selecting the version that best preserved the continuity of the poem.

The original purpose of Xi Song was to declare the speaker’s intentions. More than two thousand years later, those words have been set to music again. Yet the person who hears them today is no longer the ruler to whom the original appeal was directed.

Video: Chu Ci · Jiu Zhang · Xi Song — 7:05

Video note: This musical interpretation follows the classical text of Xi Song. Because of limitations in AI generation and subsequent subtitle editing, some subtitles do not align precisely with the singing. Readers are encouraged to consult the complete original Chinese text and pinyin provided in the Chinese section of this article.

Epilogue | When No One Understands, Writing Still Bears Witness

“A person cannot decide who will listen or control how others will judge them. Yet they can still leave behind their own words and allow time to become the final witness.”

The deepest sorrow of Xi Song may not be misunderstanding or exclusion alone. It is the experience of having to defend, again and again, convictions that have remained unchanged. The speaker appeals to heaven, confronts the pressure of collective opinion, and attempts to explain his intentions, yet he cannot determine whether the ruler will believe him.

There is, however, one choice that remains within his control. He cannot command the judgment of others, but he can decide how to express himself. When political appeals fail, writing becomes a final means of preserving his own account of what he believed and why he acted as he did.

More than 2,300 years ago, Qu Yuan left his thoughts in poetry. More than 2,300 years later, we are still reading those words. This is the path that writing has opened beyond the apparent absence of any path in the speaker’s own time.

The poem did not necessarily change the judgment of those who first encountered it. Its survival, however, made another encounter possible. A voice that could not reach its intended audience has continued to travel through literature, interpretation, and now digital music.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet powers of cultural memory: it cannot undo the circumstances in which a voice was rejected, but it can prevent that rejection from becoming the final word.

Across Civilizations

King Kaolie, Huang Xie, and Lady Lingyin | If No One Listens, Would You Still Speak?

The final notes of Xi Song faded away. King Kaolie of Chu remained silent for a moment before turning towards Huang Xie, Lord Chunshen. “There is something I do not understand. Qu Yuan said so much, yet when he remained silent, no one understood him, and when he cried out, no one listened. If speaking and remaining silent made no difference, why did he continue writing?”

Huang Xie gently put down his bamboo slips. “Your Majesty, perhaps that is precisely why he had to write. There was no longer a path for his words to reach the people of his own time. But by writing them down for those who would come later, that path had not yet been completely closed.”

King Kaolie turned towards me. “Lady Lingyin, you have transformed Xi Song into music and allowed it to be sung again. Do you think Qu Yuan’s words have finally been heard?”

I considered the question before answering. “Your Majesty, I would not presume to answer on Qu Yuan’s behalf. But today, there are people willing to listen, and there are voices willing to sing his words. At the very least, the path he opened through writing has not yet reached its end.”

The king remained silent for a long time before sighing. “I think I understand now. Qu Yuan was not simply waiting for an answer. He did not want his words to disappear without a trace.”

A ruler may be remembered without being someone on whom one can always depend. Words may be spoken without any certainty that they will be heard. Yet a voice that one era refuses to hear may find willing listeners in another.

Qu Yuan did not live to receive the understanding he sought from his ruler. But more than two thousand years later, there are still people reading his words.

The recording had ended. Huang Xie quietly gathered his bamboo slips, and King Kaolie asked no further questions.

Last year, I gave Qu Yuan’s written words a voice. This year, through those same words, I began to hear my own.

Outside the window, the river continued to flow.

Historical and literary note: The conversations in “Across Civilizations” are fictional literary dialogues featuring King Kaolie of Chu, Huang Xie (Lord Chunshen), and Lady Lingyin. They are imaginative reflections based on Chu Ci · Jiu Zhang · Xi Song and the author’s personal AI music project. They are not accounts of actual historical conversations.