Junnan Sun (photo by Annemarie Wichman)
"Tough, very tough," would be a gently way to describe Junnan Sun’s journey to the international stages. Be warned: This piece could move you to tears.
Today Junnan Sun is a sought-after musician who had recently made a clean sweep at ATKV-Muziq with his virtuoso clarinet playing. Fresh from a master’s degree at the Royal College of Music in London, Sun is presently the first clarinettist of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Yet, music never was part of his parents’ dream for him.
To understand the ardent journey Junnan Sun has had to walk towards his award-winning performance at ATKV-Muziq in Cape Town on 1 August 2015, we need to turn the clock back to the start of 2003 and we need to hop all the way to China.
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In 2003 Junnan was a teenaged boy, desperately working to get the best possible marks at school. Junnan was bright and his marks were excellent. Like so many Chinese boys, Junnan was an only child and the apple of his parents’ eye.
Diligence, desperately long hours and incredible pressure is part of the Chinese work ethic, and Junnan was a shining example of a boy who did what was expected of him.
A few short years earlier, when he was ten, Junnan had learned to play the clarinet. Now, as a young teenager, the school work simply got too much.
Extra-mural activities do not form part of the Chinese school ethic. The pressure on the top students to perform is too big. Junnan did not mind. He worked extremely hard; the way his parents wanted him too. They saw a future for the boy – after school he would go to university and become a vet, the career his father had chosen for him.
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And then, everything changed; absolutely everything.
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In 1998 South Africa had severed ties with Taiwan (the Republic of China) and signed a diplomatic agreement with People’s Republic of China.
The People’s Republic then had to set up a South African embassy from scratch.
In 2003, when Junnan was thirteen years old, his father got posted to the Chinese embassy in South Africa. After hours of soul searching, he decided to bring Junnan with him to South Africa.
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What happened next, could well have been taken from a novel by Charles Dickens. Yet, it was for real.
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At the age of thirteen, in the middle of the academic year, Junnan Sun arrived at Pretoria Boys High.
Why his parents did not choose the International School, where most of the diplomats’ kids would go to, is uncertain. As a journalist one would concede that the “international” part is somewhat misleading, as the school has strong American ties. Yet, there are other reasons as well: Pretoria Boys’ High is close to the Chinese Embassy it is known as a very good school.
Indeed, Boys High is an excellent school, but even the most ardent, English-speaking old-boy would admit that the initiation practices at the school had never been easy. Their induction of new boys hankered back to the old English system and a first-year boy had to earn himself a place in that society.
When a new boy came from a tradition where his father and uncles had been telling him about the things they had faced during induction, the boy could prepare himself for it. Besides, he would know: This too will come to pass.
Junnan had never engaged with the British system of induction, which South Africa had so greedily copied and preserved.
Junnan spoke no English. None. Not even a little.
Junnan had never known that public humiliation might well be a way of welcoming someone.
Junnan has never seen in a system where aggression would earn you a place of respect.
Junnan Sun (photo by Annemarie Wichman)
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Pause for a moment, reader. Put yourself in his shoes.
Junnan Sun was one the very best students in China. Now he had to study in a language he had never encountered before and he faced a system that seemed severely hostile.
He did understand a single word his teachers spoke.
He did not understand the language of any of boys in his class.
He simply could not understand why someone would suddenly want to throw him in a dustbin.
He simply did not understand.
Period.
Those first few months found Junnan in a bewildering system with people he did not understand at all. At school he found the boys hostile and he did not understand why. After school he spent every available moment with an English-Mandarin dictionary, trying to get his head around words like photosynthesis.
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Junnan was unhappy, to put it mildly, but so were his parents. They too could not understand why he was unhappy, nor could they understand why their star child suddenly came home with tests in which he had only achieved 14%.
Somewhere during this time of turmoil, Junnan picked up his clarinet again. With that, a new world suddenly opened up.
In the music department of Pretoria Boys High he encountered acceptance and respect from Lizette Smith, who would remain his clarinet teacher until the end of his Honours degree, and from Dr Niel van der Watt, the head of the music department.
To this day, Junnan gets emotional when he talks about what Smith and Van der Watt.
Not only did they share music with him, a language which he could understand, but for the first time since he had arrived at the school, he encountered people who were courteous and nurturing.
“I still perform Niel van der Watt’s pieces,” says Junnan during our interview, “and I tell audiences it is because they are good, but also because of what he had done for me.”
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With the same vigour and zeal Junnan had shown to his other work, the young boy now drank in the world of music. His teachers would have been overjoyed; which other teenager would get excited about reading of Beethoven conducting the fifth while being totally deaf?
Junnan worked hard. In 2006, Lizette Smith suggested that he ought to enter the ABSA National Youth Competition. Both the boy and his parents were amazed: in China only child protégées would ever dream of entering competitions.
His parents allowed him to enter, mostly because they had wanted him to see just how unreachable his dream of playing music at a higher level would be.
The young man sailed through to the final, despite encountering many more culture shocks. “I did not know how to bow!” Junnan laughs during our interview. He jumps up to demonstrate how he had flung his body forward and kept his arms stiff, at an angle behind his back.
“I also did not know that one should play your flashiest piece in the final,” recalls Junnan. “In Chinese culture one does not show off.”
“And you used to stutter back then,” says Ilse Schürman quietly.
Schürman is a consultant to the music and entertainment industry. It is through her intervention that I was able interview Junnan.
That very first competition was where Schürman met the young man. Over the years she had kept a close eye on him.
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If his parents had hoped that Junnan’s musical dreams would end after playing his first competition, they could not be more wrong.
Their son did not fail: he walked off with the prize for the best performance on a woodwind instrument.
By now Junnan had not only found peace in music, he had also proved himself and slowly but surely English became easier to understand.
“It took three years,” Junnan recalls, “but I remember that day when the one teacher told a lame joke and I laughed. Of course the other boys told me not to laugh at lame jokes, but I had understood the English and the humour.”
Soon, despite the hardships, his five years of high school had passed. At first he was amazed to see the “monster guys” from the first rugby team crying on their final day; he could not wait to get out. Yet, when Niel van der Watt walked in, Junnan too burst into tears. He so wanted to thank Van der Watt for what he had done, “but I could not. My English simply was not good enough to say what I had wanted to say.”
Junnan now faced another challenge. His parents’ five year contract at the embassy was up and they were going back to the People’s Republic. The young man had to make a tough choice: Stay in South Africa, all on his own, or go back to China?
At this point, we, as readers, need to understand a little bit more. Junnan had lost five years of schooling. Yes, he did obtain a South African matric, but the maths Chinese school leavers do, are the equivalent of third-year university maths in South Africa. Junnan would have faced untold hardships had he gone back and so, despite the challenges, the young man stayed in South Africa and enrolled at the University of Pretoria for a BMus.
It was not easy. Despite being good at music, Junnan faced new challenges. His only culture, other than that of his Chinese upbringing, was that of Pretoria Boys High. He had never encountered another culture in South Africa. Suddenly university was laid back and adults did not appreciate being addressed as “Ma’am” and “Sir”.
“I had to forget everything I had learned at Boys’ High and learn another new culture,” Junnan explains with a wry smile during our interview.
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University posed challenges, but Junnan’s career had already taken off.
Since that first, awkward competition, Junnan Sun had been the recipient of numerous awards, highlights of which include: In 2008 he won the Lubner Solo Music Competition, the Unisa South African Music Scholarship Competition in 2009, the Phillip Moore Music Competition in 2010 and in 2011 Junnan was named the overall winner of four South African music competitions, namely the Unisa Overseas Music Scholarship Competition.
Also in 2011 Junnan obtained a BMusHons from the University of Pretoria under the tutelage of Lizette Smith.
He continued his studies at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London where he studied with Michael Collins, Richard Hosford and Janet Hilton, obtaining a Masters of Performance (specialising in orchestral studies) with distinction. Junnans’s studies in the UK were made possible by the Wilkins-Mackerras Scholarship from the RCM, and the PJ Lemmer Scholarship from Unisa.
He continued winning competitions and accolades. He was the overall winner of the RCM Concerto Competition in 2013, he received the RCM Rising Star award in 2013, the RCM Clarinet Prize which recognises the top clarinettist of the RCM in 2014, the RCM Savage Club Prize for the best performance of a concerto in 2014, the first prize in the clarinet category at the Stockholm International Music Competition in 2014 and the Outstanding Young Artist Award, awarded to him by the Provincial Government of Jiangsu Province, China, also in 2014.
As an orchestral musician Junnan has worked with foremost conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Roger Norrington, Wolfram Christ and Gerard Korsten. He has performed solo and chamber music recitals in concert venues abroad – such as the Berlin Konzerthaus (Germany), the Royal Albert Hall (UK), the Royal Festival Hall (UK), Cadogen Hall (UK), the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall (UK), and St Paul’s Cathedral (UK) – as well as in prominent concert venues in South Africa, including the Endler Hall in Stellenbosch, the Durban City Hall, the Linder Auditorium and the Unisa Enoch Sontonga Hall. Junnan has appeared as soloist with the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, the RCM Philharmonic Orchestra, and the South African National Youth Orchestra.
He has received master classes from prominent clarinettists, including Andrew Marriner (London Philharmonic), Anthony McGill (New York Philharmonic), Robert Pickup (Zurich Opera House), Mate Bekavac (international soloist), Einar Johannesson (Iceland Symphony), and Robert Plane (BBC Welsh Symphony).
It does not stop.
On 1 August 2015 Junnan Sun lifted the ATKV-Muziq trophy. With that he also pocketed R50 000. In the same competition he had also won best Woodwind player, and for which he received R10 000 and he won the prize for the best rendition of a classical piece during the final round, which he got it for his interpretation of Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet in A majeur KV622 - III Rondo.
Junnan is very complimentary of the ATKV and the way the Muziq competition is run. He finds it sad that so many of the competitions he had won, did not last. “That is why the ATKV’s competition is so important. Every year I would go online to see who had won and I would listen to that person and decide what I would still need to learn to get better, so that I too could win.”
Junnan Sun (photo by Annemarie Wichman)
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Today Junnan Sun is reaping the awards of the many years of extremely hard work he had put in. He is the first clarinettist of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra and he is dating a South African girl, the violinist Mia Björkman. They are serious and she is actively learning Manderin. Junnan has picked up some Afrikaans, enough to describe his free-spirited love as “a bit woes at times”. He laughs when he says that.
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Our time together has run out and on this high note we shake hands.
Junnan is a tall man, much taller than me. Today there is a quiet confidence he carries with him.
As he leaves with Ilse Schürman, I cannot help but feel a pang of anguish on behalf of the frightened thirteen year old who had been thrown into a rather unwelcoming part of our South African culture; yet I also cannot help to think how this hardship had created a wonderful musician who is now gracing our stages with his technique and passion.
Quietly, as I wave them good bye, I also salute his two teachers, Lizette Smith and Niel van der Watt, who had had the compassion to nurture a hard-working boy into a world-class virtuoso.
Text: Izak de Vries
Photographs: Annemarie Wichman
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