Teresa Teng’s 70th birthday, what is being commemorated by Chinese people all over the world？

China news agency, Beijing, May 7: Question: What are Chinese people around the world commemorating the 70th anniversary of Teresa Teng’s birth?

-Interview with Bai Huiyuan, lecturer of Beijing Normal University College of Literature and invited researcher of China Museum of Modern Literature.

China News Service reporter Yang Chengchen

On May 8th, the 28th anniversary of Teresa Teng’s death, Teresa Teng fans from all over the world went to her final resting place-Yunyuan, Jinbaoshan, New Taipei City, Taiwan Province.

In the past 30 years, Chinese people all over the world, including Chinese, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, have regularly commemorated Teresa Teng every year. It seems that this legendary singer has never gone far. This year is also the 70th anniversary of Teresa Teng’s birth. Some images that were not common in the past were discovered and posted on social platforms, showing the other side under the familiar face, and her memory became clearer. What cultural symbols does Teresa Teng bear that span the popular era? What are people commemorating constantly? Bai Huiyuan, a lecturer at the College of Literature of Beijing Normal University and a invited researcher at the China Museum of Modern Literature, recently accepted an exclusive interview with the "East-West Question" of China News Service.

The interview record is summarized as follows:

China News Service reporter: Apart from being an important indicator in the history of Chinese pop culture, what does Teresa Teng mean to Chinese people all over the world, including those on both sides of the strait, Hong Kong, Macao and Chinese?

Bai Huiyuan:The most important thing for Teresa Teng is for Chinese people all over the world to hear about China. In the era of globalization, Chinese culture has transcended national boundaries. Teresa Teng phenomenon helps us to find a kind of generality within Chinese culture and realize cross-regional empathy.

I think that Teresa Teng is one of the important indicators in the history of Chinese pop music in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But Teresa Teng is special, because she is mainly a cover singer, and many songs have become widely circulated representative works after her interpretation.

Teresa Teng’s singing can be heard by Chinese people all over the world, based on four characteristics. The first is classicality. Teresa Teng studied Huangmei tune. In 1982, she released an album "Light Love" based on China’s classical poems. Our familiar "Alone in the West Building" came from it, and she tried to transform China’s classical culture into a contemporary one very early. Secondly, it is folk. She has covered China folk songs such as Fengyang Flower Drum, Evening Breeze and Flowers, and Looking at the Spring Breeze, showing the human and geographical features of different regions in China through singing. The third is urbanity. Some of her works are covers reflecting Shanghai’s contemporary music in 1930s and 1940s, such as singing girl and Four Seasons Song. There is an intertextuality and inheritance relationship between her singing style and Shanghai female singers such as Zhou Xuan. The fourth is Asian. Sweet Honey, which is familiar to the audience, was originally an Indonesian folk song, such as Goodbye My Love and I only care about you, which originated from Japanese pop music.

In addition, the most important thing is China. Teresa Teng grew up in a family village. Her father is from Hebei and her mother is from Shandong. She has always emphasized her identity with the motherland and the nation.

China News Service reporter: In 1970s and 1980s, how did Teresa Teng’s music radiate Hongkong and Southeast Asian society?

Bai Huiyuan:Teresa Teng first grew up in Taiwan Province, and her music spread to Hongkong. Later, she went to Japan, which itself showed a kind of mobility in the era of globalization. Within Chinese culture, Teresa Teng’s performance can arouse the collective memory of the cross-regional audience, just like the repeated singing of "Moon" in her songs, which is rich in emotion and powerful in summoning. Of course, when spread in different regions, Teresa Teng has a slightly different meaning to people, which embodies people’s different imaginations.

For the mainland, Teresa Teng is a symbol of the times of reform and opening up. Her soft voice entered the "emotional structure" of that generation of young people. The Hong Kong film "Sweet Honey" and "A Thousand Words" are named after Teresa Teng songs, linking the changes of the times and calling the people of Hong Kong to identify with the nation and the country, as well as with Chinese culture. In Taiwan Province, the typical films "The Story of a Small Town" and "The Native Villager" made by the famous director Li Hsing all invite Teresa Teng to sing the theme song, and all emphasize the Chinese cultural tradition. More than that, Teresa Teng developed in Japan, and her songs also left memories of the times in later Japanese films, such as Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly and Hirokazu Koreeda’s Deeper than the Sea. It can be seen that Teresa Teng belongs not only to China, but also to all of Asia.

China News Service reporter: In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, why did the mainland become so popular with Teresa Teng’s songs? What does she mean to young people in mainland China at that time?

Bai Huiyuan:At that time, many people said that Teresa Teng’s singing was "decadent", which was related to her singing style. She is a kind of vocal singing, which brings the voice of speech to singing and daily life to music. Different from the grand narrative and serious expression of singing in the traditional sense, she especially loves singing love, which echoes the new enlightenment discourse in the early 1980 s and also plays the role of ideological emancipation. In the context of the times, this phenomenon is not isolated. In the literary world, it is manifested in Liu Xinwu’s The Position of Love, Zhang Jie’s Love Can’t be Forgotten, and Zhang Xian’s The Corner Forgotten by Love. In the 1990s, there were many imitators of this kind of singing, such as Yang Yuying in mainland China. In 1995, Faye Wong released a cover album to pay tribute to his idol Teresa Teng, which was called The Sound of Philippine Decadence.

It is unavoidable that when Teresa Teng became popular in mainland China, many young people "eavesdropped" on her music. The "decadent voice" wafted from the other side of the Taiwan Strait, which, to some extent, predicted the cross-strait transition from confrontation to communication in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and constituted a common emotional memory that crossed political boundaries. These songs became the private memories of that generation at that time. In this sense, Teresa Teng was closely associated with many people’s lives.

The content of her songs has nothing to do with real politics. It is precisely this style that can promote cross-strait cultural exchanges to achieve a "soft landing" in the current context and play an aesthetic effect of spring breeze and rain. The shaping of common cultural memory between young people on both sides of the strait is something that many cultural institutions and media have been trying to do. Recently, Hunan Satellite TV’s program "Treasure Island Season" also searched for the common musical memory of young people on both sides of the strait through the street visits that often appear in Taiwan Province variety shows. On the other hand, the successors of "Teresa Teng Singing Method" began to try to sing the community imagination "softly", from Li Guyi’s Hometown Love and Su Xiaoming’s Night in a Naval Port to Yang Yuying’s Ten Sending the Red Army and Faye Wong’s My People，My Country. This sound image expanded our understanding space of the "main theme".

In a word, Teresa Teng is a beginning, but it is certainly not the end.

China News Service reporter: Actually, many young people have not yet been born in the days when Teresa Teng’s stars were popular. But it does not prevent today’s "post-00" people from nostalgia. Why is this?

Bai Huiyuan:From the perspective of singing, Teresa Teng’s voice has brought a good feeling of "healing system" to the post-00 generation. Her gentle, soothing, relaxed and gentle singing has effectively cured the speed anxiety of modern life. Whenever and wherever Teresa Teng’s song rings, it will trigger a strong emotional effect and quickly integrate the network fragments into a kind of empathy.

In addition to singing, Teresa Teng’s humorous and witty on-the-spot answering also gained a high popularity in the short video platform. In these almost talk show language scenes, Teresa Teng shows the confidence, hearty, friendly and independent of modern women. For example, in the famous short video "Teresa Teng speaks Shandong dialect", her fluent Shandong dialect won the "post-00" barrage carnival. I think, behind this "flow of answers", it is Teresa Teng’s real hometown complex and identity.

In the post-00′ s evaluation of Teresa Teng, the most common word is "elegance". This is a phenomenon that I have paid close attention to in recent years: the post-00 generation increasingly likes to explore a kind of "original elegance" from the interior of China classical culture, including the documentary about the Forbidden City and China cultural relics, as well as the dance "Only this is green". Young people have found a kind of identity here. They grew up in the era of "the rise of China", and they can feel China’s cultural self-confidence from "elegance" with China’s classical temperament.

In such a dimension, they once again discovered Teresa Teng’s "elegance", which is a subtle collision between the younger generation pursuing fashion and Teresa Teng. (End)

Interviewee profile:

Bai Huiyuan, a scholar of cultural studies, a lecturer at the College of Literature of Beijing Normal University, a special researcher at the China Museum of Modern Literature, and a doctor of literature in Peking University. His research interests are contemporary literature, movies and popular culture in China. He is the author of "Heroic Change: the Monkey King and Modern China’s Self-transcendence", and won the Outstanding Works Award of the 5th Woodpecker Cup in China Literature and Art Criticism. He has published more than 30 papers in journals such as Literature and Art Research, Literature and Art Theory and Criticism, Film Art, etc. Some papers have been reproduced in full by Xinhua Digest and Copies of People’s Congress.