Back to basics
At first in Beijing, everything seemed to go very smoothly, and the success of Yippie Glossary put his mind at ease about the possibility of setting down roots in the PRC. But fate plays tricks on people, and after only three programs he was put out to pasture because he comes from Taiwan. As a result, he turned instead to "the grind," as show biz people in the mainland commonly refer to their demanding personal appearance schedules.
"I do an average of six or seven shows per month. Mainland China is huge, and with a return air flight it takes three days to go to one place, so in a month at most you can do ten shows even if you're killing yourself. Like right now it is only early November, but there are more than 20 places that want to grab my Christmas holiday," he says. He gets NT$200,000 for each gig, which is three or four times the amount that he was getting during the peak of his housing-development-show career in Taiwan.
It is deep in autumn in Beijing, and there are only remnants of a pale sun despite the fact that it is not long after the lunch hour. Huang An has just returned from an intensive performing schedule in Wujiang and Taiyuan. The exhaustion shows in his puffed up eyes, yet a glow of childlike exuberance remains irrepressible. He can't help but show his pride that he is so much in demand.
It is certainly true that Huang An has built up an impressive network of contacts in mainland China. Brain Chang says that in the last couple of years the PRC Ministry of Culture has been especially stingy about allowing performers from Taiwan or Hong Kong to do concerts, and there are few indeed who can do intensive touring. But thanks to the political and business network Huang has built up in his few years there, he remains very much in the game. Add to that the fact that he is the only entertainer from Taiwan to break into the area of program hosting at CCTV, and the result is that whenever colleagues from Taiwan come to the PRC to develop their careers, their first stop is always to "have a chat" with Huang An. Even figures like Alan Tam and Eric Tsang, already established in Hong Kong, come to sit at the foot of the master when they arrive in Beijing.
Despite all that, Huang An feels that the most important thing he has gotten out of his touring has been direct contact with his legions of fans, enabling him to bring back some of the simpler feelings with which he started out his career as a singer. Recently, when he was in Taiyuan, he had a particularly moving experience with a woman who called in to a radio talk show he was on.
This mom could recite every line of Huang's lyrics, and tell him stories of her life at the time when each of his songs was popular. From her childhood and her first job, to falling in love, getting married, and becoming a mother, as she spoke on and on both singer and fan were in tears. In this way, through the magic of song, the heart of a young singer, full of hope and ambition, living in a public housing project in Taipei all those years ago, was able to share in the life of a girl thousands of miles away. As a result of this, Huang decided to again begin writing songs.