"You made the right choice coming to talk to me today," says Wen Hsia (also spelled Weng Shia) with a little pride. But that pride should come as no surprise. Born into a wealthy family as Wang Juei-ho, Wen also had the good fortune to study music in Japan as a boy. He grew into a popular Taiwanese singer and even starred in 11 movies during a career that coincided with the golden age of Taiwanese-language music.

Beloved of Heaven

Wen's family was Christian and he hummed along with his parents in the church choir from an early age. At the time he finished primary school, there were still no music schools in Taiwan, so his parents, who ran a textiles company and were very supportive of his interest in music, sent him to Tokyo to study, giving no thought to the cost. They also hired well-known piano, voice and composition teachers to tutor him. With his teachers, Wen studied what were then thought of as the most elevated forms of music-Italian opera and English-language popular music.

Following Taiwan's return to Chinese rule, Wen entered the Tainan Commercial High School and formed a group called the Hawaiian Band that played international hits and Hawaiian music. On holidays, the Hawaiian Band would climb into several small boats and cruise the canals of Tainan. They cut quite a romantic figure playing music on the water, and acquired a following among the local girls.

In those pre-boom days, Taiwan's radio stations offered only limited programming-largely international hits from before the war and Taiwanese songs. Against this background, the Hawaiian Band was gradually making a name for itself. The Broadcasting Corporation of China invited the band to perform on the air once a week, and sent the recordings of these performances to Chiayi, Taichung and Taipei for rebroadcast.

While doing the radio broadcasts, Wang Juei-ho took a stage name to hide the fact that he was still a student. His family called its company Wen Hua Textiles, and Wen had been known as "Little Wenhua" from childhood. In those days, he was also fascinated by Hawaiian music. Conveniently, in Japanese, the characters for hua in wen hua and for hsia in hsia-wei-yi (Hawaii) are pronounced the same way. Wang Juei-ho therefore took Wen Hsia as his stage name. Wen laughs as he recalls: "In those days, no Taiwanese were surnamed Wen. People thought I was a foreigner."

During his second year of high school, Wen wrote the music to his first song and asked Hsu Ping-ting, then the head of the No. 7 Credit Cooperative, who was not only a well-regarded poet but also a neighbor, to pen the lyrics. When Wen saw Hsu's lyrics to his song, he was flabbergasted. "These weren't song lyrics; they were poetry. They were absolutely beautiful." The song, "Girl on the Waves," remains one of Wen's trademark compositions and is much beloved even today.

Next, Wen Hsia recruited four cute long-haired girls as back-up singers, calling them Wen Hsiang, Wen Feng, Wen Chui and Wen Ying. He named his new group Wen Hsia and His Sisters, and they began touring in every corner of Taiwan.

The mysterious Melancholy Man

Although Taiwanese recognized that there had been a "change of dynasty" with Taiwan's return to Chinese rule, and in spite of the Nationalist government's ban on the broadcast of Japanese songs on the radio, many Taiwanese still yearned to hear Japanese songs. To meet this need, and to save themselves some money, record companies began putting Taiwanese lyrics to Japanese melodies, churning out "hybrid" or "translated" songs by the bucketful.

Two figures dominated the "translated" song business. The first was Yeh Chun-ling, who penned the lyrics to such hits as "Memories of an Old Love," "Formosan Mambo" and "The One I'm Missing." The second was the mysterious Melancholy Man, who was responsible for many hugely popular "translated" classics, including "Hometown in Twilight," "Mama, You Take Care Too" and "Lovely Girl." Many Taiwanese living abroad used to sing "Hometown in Twilight" to themselves when feeling homesick, some even believing it was a "purely" Taiwanese song.

Over the years, many people tried without success to work out the identity of the Melancholy Man who had written more than 300 "hybrid" songs. But Wen only revealed his identity in recent years to resolve copyright issues. He jokes, "The Melancholy Man is gone. Now he exists only as a name to which royalties are disbursed."

The ever-romantic Wen is a handsome and refined figure who likes to watch the rivers flow with a pen and paper in hand. The melancholic expression he wore in his prime and the poet in his heart prompted him to choose Melancholy Man as his pen name.

Responding to the view that "hybrid" songs choked off the production of purely Taiwanese songs and were unpatriotic, Wen says, "My motivation for writing 'translated' songs was a love of my country. In those days, people still had the Japanese melodies in their heads. By putting Taiwanese words to those melodies, I gave people something other than Japanese songs to sing." Wen believes that the Taiwanese of the day, few of whom could speak any Chinese at all, were really Japanese in their hearts and needed time to adapt to a Chinese-language environment. Wen's works provided a link.

Wen Hsia and His Sisters

When people began turning to television for their entertainment, the government limited to two the number of Taiwanese songs that could be played on TV in one day. Singers looking for exposure found other means to get their music out. As a result, Taiwanese-language movies starring singers came into fashion. When the movies were released, the singer-stars would tour Taiwan, taking the stage to perform with screenings of their films. As far as the movie studios were concerned, Wen was a natural-he was already a pop star and handsome. Wen ultimately starred in 11 films.

When Taiwanese music fell on hard times, Wen made 11 tours of the island in his white convertible sports car with his four "sisters" in back. Tooling around in the car with his "sisters," the girls holding guitars and dressed in short red skirts, the five of them looked like the height of cool. Wen remembers, "Yu Tin once told me that he made up his mind to become a musician after seeing my convertible."

When his popularity was at its peak, Wen recalls putting on eighteen 30-minute performances a day at movie theaters in Taipei. He was on the go from 10:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and meals were taken in the luxurious confines of his convertible.

What moved Wen most about those days were the performances in the country. He never expected many people to turn up, but once the sun set, farmers with their pants rolled up would pour in from all over the countryside, a dozen to a truck. Wen Hsia says feelingly, "They couldn't see me on the TV, so they were all the more determined to come to the live shows."

After 11 years of touring and interacting directly with his fans, Wen Hsia became "the King of Formosan Song" to many. Wen says, "I've recorded 1,200 songs in my life so far. That must be some kind of record."

Wen has remained on top in spite of the changing times and fleeting fashions of pop music. Ever the perfectionist, Wen says, "I still do my voice exercises every day, and my voice has only gotten better over the years, never worse."

From the radio and film performances of the 50s and 60s to the rise of the KTVs in the 70s and 80s to today's reemergence of Taiwanese-language programming into primetime slots on TV, Wen's songs have always been requested and played. For example, the recently popular Taiwanese-language soap opera, Taiwan A-cheng, which ran for two hundred episodes, used Wen's "Hometown in Twilight" as its theme song.

"I'm putting out a new album, but I'm not going to promote it myself. Think about it-how many pop stars have performed my songs?" Wen, whose new album will come out in July, believes that his songs will be popular forever.

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The happy and contented couple, Wen Hsia and Wen Hsiang, still inspire envy. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

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Having recorded more than 1,200 songs over the course of his life, Wen Hsia truly deserves to be known as the "King of Formosan Music." (courtesy of Wen Hsia)

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Wen Hsiang (second from left), one of the cute "sisters" in Wen Hsia's group, eventually became his wife. (courtesy of Wen Hsia)