"We should be making more use of his knowledge here. He's a great musician," says [Jim Hiscott], who wrote a concerto that Wang performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra at the 2006 New Music Festival. Hiscott also produced a short CBC Radio documentary on the flutist a few years ago.

Wang, who recently received a $6,000 grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for "future development" of his chromatic bamboo flute techniques, was inspired to create Camel Train in the Desert while working on a farm that bordered on the ever-encroaching Gobi.

"I was very sad and I couldn't see my future. I was very depressed. Then one day, I heard a very sad song, like somebody was talking about something," says Wang a night-shift worker at Shoppers Drug Mart for the past 10 years.