He is out there nearly every day, maybe 10-12 hours a day, at the top of the stairs leading down to the Johnston Road exit from the Wan Chai metro station.

Sitting on a box only a few inches high, his two-string instrument in front of him, sawing away.

He has to be 70 years old and I’m thinking more likely 80. Wizened, his face a mass of wrinkles.

And he plays. And plays. Usually something slow and mournful.

By his feet, he spreads a small bit of cloth, for donations.

I would give him some change. Except for this:

It might encourage him.

I will be blunt. I do not get traditional Chinese music. I just don’t.

I’m sure we can find a billion Chinese who would be eager to talk up that good old time Chinese music. Tell me how wrong I am. How I have to give it a chance.

I still wouldn’t like it. If I listened to it long enough, I might go mad.

The Little Old Music Man appears to play an erhu, a very old, very traditional instrument that is, in a word, hideous.

Imagine the worst violinist in the world. A tone-deaf child raking at the strings. You begin to grasp how awful it is.

Or imagine what the sound of an alley cat singing might sound like. Vaguely musical screeching.

That is the erhu.

It has a fingernails-on-chalkboard “quality” to it. I would rather listen to speed metal for an hour. I would, yes, rather listen to hip-hop.

I have issues with classical Chinese music. Consider this sentence from the wikipedia entry on the Music of China: “Chinese vocal music has traditionally been sung in a thin, non-resonant voice or in falsetto and is usually solo rather than choral. All traditional Chinese music is melodic rather than harmonic.”

Ack!!! Any of that is appealing, how? Once you have encountered harmony and vibrato and other basic musical concepts long ago accepted in the West … how can you get into this?

The Chinese also tend to use a five-note scale. Which makes for what sounds to the Western ear like music played in a relentless, an eternal, minor key. Which brings to mind “whiny and plaintive” much more than “sad.”

It’s horrible. It is awful. It may be the one major area of Chinese culture I just cannot admire — and can’t imagine I ever would.

So, I see the little man. Sitting on his box. Scraping away on his erhu. One of the few buskers I have seen in Hong Kong, where buskers clearly are discouraged. And I am interested in the concept of the little old man trying to make a few HK dollars at what he is doing.

But if it were some Bach of Brahms played on a guitar or a harmonic or, yes, even an accordion … If he were playing music on an instrument that doesn’t produce a sound like a small animal being tortured … I would drop a few coins at his feet every day.

As it turns out, I appreciate the times when I climb out of the MTR — and he’s not there contributing to Hong Kong’s already significant noise pollution.