Last September the Taiwanese Youth Goodwill Mission went on tour to New Zealand and Australia. At the start of their performances, troupe leader Lai Hsiou-feng would begin to dance passionately to music. At first, the crowds, which were full of immigrants from Taiwan, were lackadaisical, but they would perk up once they heard the lyrics. "It's in Taiwanese!" they would say. "It's in Taiwanese!" Indeed, the hard-rocking music was not Western pop, but rather "Youthful to the Max" and some other dozen songs by the little-known Taiwanese singer Huang Hui-hung. The performances excited the audiences, and even brought tears to many people's eyes. "So you can dance hard to Taiwanese songs at international venues, after all," they would say. Curious members of the audience would ask, "Who is Huang Hui-hung, anyway?"

When people first see Huang Hui-hung, they are often taken aback. His "Latin lover" look (this reporter saw him in a bright orange, turquoise and yellow shirt matched with a colorful tie) is hard to square with his background as a bureaucrat, or, for that matter, with his epic-like creations.

But after you get to know him, you realize that his appearance really shouldn't surprise you. Huang has never been true to a pigeonhole nor allowed the environment to cramp his style. Even when he was working nine to five, he retained a childlike innocence and enthusiasm in his heart. He then turned the love in his heart for Taiwan into one song after another.

A youth by the sea

Nine years ago, when Huang was head of the international culture office at the Ministry of Education, he woke up from a nap to think: "Even if I became Minister of Education, so what? A year after I retired, nobody would even remember!" After that epiphany, Huang dusted off the guitar he had played in his youth and started at night to transform himself into a Taiwanese songwriter, writing wild and passionately positive songs about Taiwan.

Many people have wondered how it is that someone who had never studied music would come to write songs. It's all due to the karmic chain of cause and effect.

Huang was born in Peikang, Yunlin County, where his family had a small general store. Not far from their house was a movie theater that hosted performances of all kinds. Whether the featured show was hand puppets, Taiwanese opera, dance, or striptease, Huang was loyal member of the audience. The seven-syllable rhyming of Taiwanese opera and the spoken rhyming parts of hand puppet songs both left their mark. "Before I left home, 30% of my fate, like anyone else's, was predetermined. I'm a boastful warrior turtle. . . ." The performances he saw of the Yihsia Song and Dance Troupe left their impression too. And the rhythms of a thousand Mandarin, Taiwanese and English songs all lingered in memory.

When Huang was in high school he was fascinated by music. He cut his hair in a rebellious style and slung a guitar over his shoulder. He loved the Beatles and Elvis Presley, and he would grab his garden hose like a microphone and shout: "Come on, come on!" This would startle his grandfather, who would implore him not to "wake the dead without good cause." This was the stuff of Huang's rich childhood. It molded a character that was passionate, intuitive, and fearless.

Early in his freshman year in the foreign languages department of Chunghsing University, he and his best buddies from high school organized a dance, but only two or three girls showed up. Without hemming or hawing, Huang said, "I'm going out to see if I can find any girls out there," and he left on his bicycle. When he caught sight of two girls, he approached them and said, "We're throwing a dance, and there aren't enough girls. Would you like to help out?"

One of the two was rather tall, and she charmingly accepted without any reticence. She was very much to Huang's liking, so he started to court her. When she graduated from high school after Huang's sophomore year of college, they became engaged. The story is a perfect example of Huang's open and forthright character. In light of Huang's unabashedly wild youth, it's not hard to understand how he could write, "Shake it! Shake it! Shake it!"

"Brimming with passion, wild at heart, show some daring! It's liberation, not degradation. The house is packed; the bodies are prime. Feel the joy in the crowd! Dig the music in the mayhem! Shake it! Shake it! Shake it!" At a striptease show, the pulse of the crowd quickens as the dancers move their bodies, first facing one way and then turning to face the other. . . . Huang released "Shake it! Shake it! Shake it!"-the "highest" of Taiwanese songs, as he puts it-when Ricki Martin was on tour in Taiwan. The song describes the carnal passions among drifters at the bottom of society.

Latin-lover bureaucrat

After graduating from university, he passed the higher-level civil service exam and entered the ranks of government. By happy coincidence, his first appointment involved supervising shows by foreign performing artists, including some strippers. In his 12-year career in government, Huang saw some 2,000 shows by foreign performers, and outside of his work he also typically saw about three movies a week. Down to the present he still cries in movie theaters. His work and interests have also taken him to some 58 nations around the world.

With his strong local roots and his international perspective gained from traveling, Huang has created songs quite unlike the old-style Taiwanese pop, which is soaked in hard liquor and hard times. Nor is his music characterized by the screeching inflections of hard rockers like Lim Giong or Wu Bai.

After Huang went to Spain, he wrote the flamenco-inspired "Sevilla," as he wistfully recalled his memories of that small Spanish city. And he wrote "The Sun that Never Sleeps" when he was in Norway during the summer and he looked out his window to see the sun in the sky at 2:00 a.m.

Huang's songs range "from the tragic, angst-ridden, hard-drinking and down-and-out, to the passionate, romantic, happy and international," says music producer Chen Cheng, who describes Huang's work as a revolution bringing Taiwanese songs back to the pioneering spirit of Taiwan's seafaring settlers. Huang, who brims with confidence about his work, remarks, "My songs are sure to spark a 'third wave' in Taiwanese pop."

Taiwanese pop, forward march

For Huang, Spain's golden light, Norway's midnight sun, the plots of moving films, and the captivating scent of roses are all source for his endless creativity. And the seamier side of recent life in Taiwan, as well as the despoilment of its beautiful mountainsides, has prompted him to write such works as "In Praise of Taiwan" and "God Bless Taiwan: a Suite." These can also be combined into one long harmonic work, requiring a four-section orchestra of 80 members.

The year before last, dancer Tsai Jui-yueh's dance studio and museum was destroyed by fire. Huang, a passionate lover of music and dance, resolved to help this venerable senior performing artist. So without any thought of the difficulty, he just went right ahead and spent his own money to hire singers and songwriters, and independently produced a CD, donating 500 copies for a fundraiser to rebuild the museum. During that event, ROC Dancing Association chairwoman Lai Shiu-feng danced flamenco-style to music from Sevilla. She later adapted this into a dance-musical called "Youthful Dreams by the Sea," which will be performed later this year at Novel Hall.

During the elections last year, several candidates took a liking to Huang's works and wanted to use them as the theme songs for their election campaigns. It was an excellent opportunity for a songwriter to make some money, but as long as Huang and the politician got along, he let them use the songs for free. That's just the way Huang is.

Having used up his savings to produce four Taiwanese CDs, Huang has not had an easy go of it. Nevertheless, he is full of confidence. "There are nearly 80 million speakers of southern Fujianese [the same dialect as Taiwanese] around the world. If the product is good, there is definitely potential for Taiwanese music." He has written more than 90 songs all told, but he has refused to sell the rights to any of his works. He has set his sights on taking Taiwanese singing onto the global stage.

In fact, his music has already made impressive advances. Apart from being taken to Central America by the ROC president, his works have also been performed in the US and mainland China by the North American Elite Youth Orchestra, as well as at a recording industry festival in Cannes, France, where they were well received.

When Hsu Po-yun, an arts promoter, heard Huang's work, he said, "If Huang Hui-hung doesn't hit the big time, then God has no ears!" Huang is wild, but not out of control; sensitive, but not melancholy. A self-styled champion of Taiwanese music, whose work shoots straight from the heart, Huang Hui-hung is something special. As to whether he is going to usher in a third wave of Taiwanese popular songs, we're just going to have to wait and see.

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Huang Hui-hung has visited 58 foreign countries and watched more than 2000 shows by international performing arts groups. His Taiwanese songs transcend melancholy to be full of the daring and romance of Taiwan's seafaring first settlers.

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From the patriotic tribute "God Bless Taiwan" to the flamenco-inspired "Shake It! Shake It! Shake It!" Huang's work reflects a Taiwanese society that is itself growing more and more diverse.