In Memoriam:Teresa, the Voice of Free China

When I learned of Teresa Teng's untimely death during her holiday in Thailand, it awakened old memories of my own travels in that same land not so many years ago. By coincidence, that was where I first happened to hear her spellbinding voice. One day halfway through 1987 I found myself wandering the noisy streets and bustling back alleys of Bangkok's "Chinatown," an unusual Chinatown where almost nobody under the age of fifty can speak a word of Chinese in any dialect. As I picked my way delicately through crates of groceries, tables and chairs of noodle stalls, stray dogs and motorcycles weaving through the crowds, I caught the faint strains of a love song drifting towards me above the commotion. It was a lady's voice singing in Mandarin and, blending with the sensual atmosphere of downtown Bangkok, it was enough to stir up the whirlpool of man's desires.

Sifting through the noise of those chaotic, congested back streets, I was determined to track down that lilting, magical voice to its source. It turned out to be emanating from the speakers of a pirate-tape stall, and the actual tape playing was a collection of "Golden Melodies" by Teresa Teng, better known throughout the Chinese world under her real name Deng Lijun. Indeed, almost all the Chinese tapes on sale in Bangkok were by the same singer. I bought quite a few of them, and became completely hooked on them.

Before I could fully appreciate these songs, I was hampered by the language barrier: I simply couldn't catch the words! This was terribly frustrating as I'm convinced that the lyrics are just as important to a song as its tune. Eventually I found most of her songs on CD, I copied out the Chinese lyrics printed inside the flap, got out my dictionary and translated over a dozen of her songs into English, word for word. I have included a translation of my favorite, "Goodbye My Love." [See box--ed.]

I feel that the main reason we find ourselves unable to relate to foreign songs is the mystery surrounding what is actually being sung; while music may indeed be a "Universal Language," when there are words together with the music, it would help if they made some sense to us!

I soon discovered that many of Teresa's hit songs, recorded with Chinese lyrics, were in fact the Chinese versions of the same melodies which she had originally sung in Japanese. I compared the two versions of each and every song which she recorded in both languages.

The Chinese lyrics in some cases followed the overall gist of her original Japanese hits, but in other cases fitted entirely new poetry to the existing melodies. The Chinese version of "Kuko" (Airport), for example, makes no mention of a jet plane waiting on the runway ready for takeoff, whereas the Chinese lyrics of "Dong Zhi Lian Qing" (Love in Wintertime) correspond almost exactly to the words of "Yuki Gesho" (A Blanket of Snow). In general I found the Chinese lyrics far richer in meaning than the Japanese, mainly because the Chinese language, being monosyllabic, can fit many more words into a given line of song. I certainly found the closing lines of "Good-bye My Love" to be far more potent in the Chinese than in the rather feeble Japanese version.

The fact that Teresa Teng's death went by without even a mention in any of the major British newspapers, TV or radio channels just goes to prove what a vast abyss of ignorance there lies in our awareness of the musical scene outside the English-speaking world. Not only do British and American singers dominate the global pop-music industry, they have also managed to exclude all other languages from the domestic mass market. It is virtually impossible for a song in any language other than English to compete for air-space on the mainstream music channels, either here in Britain or in the USA. So-called "ethnic" music is restricted to "ethnic minorities." For example CD's and videos from the Indian subcontinent are confined to the sales outlets of the Indo-Pakistani community here in Britain, while CD's of current Hong Kong hits are almost impossible to find anywhere outside Gerrard Street in London's West End.

It would be unthinkable if the death of, say, Edith Piaf had been treated with the same indifference in all places on earth where people happen not to know French. Indeed, Piaf was probably the last French singer to reach a wide audience beyond the francophone world while singing in her native tongue! The international success of the Swedish group Abba, who were contemporary with Teresa Teng, just goes to prove to what extent the English language has become the exclusive medium of the global pop-music industry over the last thirty years, a phenomenon matched equally by its unrivaled position as the language of science and technology.

I make these comparisons because, to song-lovers in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan, Teresa Teng really was Piaf and Abba rolled into one. Her songs even managed to break through the "Bamboo Curtain" and, although officially banned in mainland China, they began to be pirated and could increasingly be heard in public places during the 1980s. People used to say to me, "Here in China we have two Dengs: Deng Xiaoping by day, and Deng Lijun by night." It was even rumored that the Chinese leader himself was rather fond of her songs.

It's ironic that her songs are quite unknown here in the West, not through any kind of censorship, but simply on account of the language barrier! While youngsters in Hong Kong and Taiwan can gyrate, bump and grind to the disco beats of Michael Jackson and Tina Turner, will there be any prospect of some Mandarin or Cantonese ballad ever reaching the ears and hearts of the laowai masses on distant shores? Now that movies from Taiwan and from China are being played to wider audiences than ever before here in Europe as well as in the States, couldn't the same be true of songs? And if some of these songs can kindle even a flicker of emotion in the mighty Deng Xiaoping, they would surely overwhelm lesser mortals like the rest of us, whatever our background.