For Guo Wenjing, it was a choice between war and music. Music won hands down. Just 10 years old when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, the boy who went on to become one of China's most successful composers loved to watch the fighting - with guns and tanks - between rival Red Guard factions in his home town of Chongqing, in southwest China.
'My parents were afraid I'd get killed, so they bought me a violin,' Guo says. 'And after I got that violin I didn't go out again. It was so much more interesting than the war on the streets. Our neighbour, a gynaecologist, knew how to read music and taught me. I learned in an afternoon. That's how I began to study music.'
Guo, 51, is one of a handful of contemporary classical music composers from the mainland, an elite coterie that includes Tan Dun, Chen Yi and Zhou Long. Of the four, he's the only one who chose to stay home (the others live in the US).
It doesn't seem to have hurt the prolific composer's career. His fourth opera, Poet Li Bai (he has written a number of other chamber operas) recently had its premiere in the US to rave reviews. The lavish production will have its premiere on the mainland next month as part of the Beijing Music Festival.
Guo has also written concertos for erhu and bamboo flute, as well as western orchestras, and a great deal of music based on folk melodies. Informing all his art is a mixture of urban savvy, gleaned from his Chongqing childhood, and the lyrical, earthy music of the Sichuanese countryside. Mostly, farmers sang about sex, he says.
'Even if it was the Cultural Revolution, 'the mountains were high and the emperor far away',' Guo says, quoting a well-known Chinese saying.