"Light the Night" and Netflixian Nostalgic Nationalism
The Moon over Shanghai
When I was in middle school, my family moved to Shanghai. Having lived to that point in a small Swiss town of about 4,000 people, moving to the middle of a city with 14 million people was a bit of a culture shock, to say the least. I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t know anybody, and all of the musical groups and communities that I had been part of growing up suddenly vanished from my life.
For whatever reason, my early musical experiences in Shanghai really stand out sharply in my head. Maybe it’s because my musical life was suddenly a lot more constrained than it had been in Switzerland, or it’s maybe because the nature of the music I was exposed to was so different from what I had been used to in Switzerland. Whatever the reason, my musical experiences in China have stuck with me.
One of those early experiences was in my Chinese class, when we were taught the “classical Chinese song” “Yueliang daibiao wo de xin” 月亮代表我的心. As it turns out, the song isn’t exactly “classical,” having only been written in 1973. But it certainly counts as “classic”—it’s one of those songs that everybody knows, everybody can hum, and that just sort of exists as part of life’s soundtrack. Indeed, although she was not the first to record it, “Yueliang daibiao wo de xin” is one of the iconic songs of the equally iconic Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun 鄧麗君), the daughter of a Taiwanese military family whose career spanned Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Southeast Asia, and later became part of the the massive cassette smuggling industry that sprang up in Mainland China in the wake of Mao’s death (a phenomenon that was memorably captured in the 2017 film Youth 芳華 by Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛, albeit with a different Teresa Teng hit).1 With a sweet melody (sort of a major-mode, Chinese-language adaptation of Japanese enka), simple lyrics, and a rather irresistibly ear worm-ish quality, it’s no wonder that the Chinese teachers at my school were smitten with its pedagogical merits.
The Moon over Taipei
This is all a long way of saying, when you first turn on the 2021 Netflix series Light the Night (Hua deng chu shang 華燈初上), you will immediately be confronted with a modern remake of “Yueliang daibiao wo de xin.”2 Now, the fact that the series opens with a modern remake of the classic song isn’t particularly remarkable in and of itself—it would take a lot of pages to catalog all the of the covers that have been made of this song. But for a series that seems very committed to relative historical accuracy—the fashion, the hair, the cars, the buildings, even the karaoke numbers in the bar are all resolutely 1980s Taipei—the choices made in this performance really stand out as anachronistic.
These anachronisms turn up particularly in the tone color employed by the singer, Ashin Chen 陈信宏. Some of these issues are minor, such as the breathy timbre of the singer. Though this is a little closer to the crooning of current Mandopop idols like Jay Chou than some of the most popular male artists in 1980s Taiwan (including several of the so-called “Four Heavenly Kings”), this is more a question of degree than of type, as early queer idols like Leslie Cheung had already adopted fairly breathy vocal stylings in their rise to mega-stardom. Other factors, like the recourse to vocal fry and the subtle traces of pitch correction software live in a decidedly more post-“Baby One More Time,” post-“Believe” world.
Today’s Moon, Yesterday’s Taipei
So why do I care? It’s a theme song, right? Here’s the thing: despite the fact that Light the Night takes place in 1980s Taipei, it also creates a certain air of nostalgia for Taiwan’s former Japanese colonial masters. The hostess bar in which much of the action takes place—a social space that is a direct legacy of the Japanese period—is patronized by a largely Japanese clientele who come to enjoy the almost implausibly elegant and glamorous atmosphere. The role of Nakamura-san, a lonely businessman who finds companionship and solace with the hostesses at the bar while never overstepping the bounds of propriety, cuts a largely sympathetic figure. And Japan itself occupies an aspirational space in the imaginations of many of the characters in the show.
Now, this last point may be entirely plausible. For 1980s Taiwanese citizens, Japan may indeed have represented an aspirational lifestyle—I don’t know enough about Taiwanese attitudes toward Japan at the end of the martial law era to judge one way or the other. But the rather uncritical nostalgia that swirls around all things Japanese in this show rather conveniently papers over the significant history of suppressing local language, culture, and identity during the 50 years of Japanese rule over Taiwan.
It is this point that seems most interesting to me here. This show is many things: romantic, hard-nosed, binge-worthy. But it also crafts a narrative about what it meant to be Taiwanese in the late 1980s, and thereby subtly suggests what it might mean to be Taiwanese today. Taiwanese audiences increasingly demand depictions of a Taiwanese identity that accounts for the whole of Taiwanese history, rather than the history since the arrival of the KMT in the wake of their 1949 defeat at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, the period of Japanese rule is seen as a significant source of difference between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland (which famously still lays claim to the territory). In this media landscape, painting some of the seedier aspects of local nightlife as charming, glamorous holdovers of a bygone age has a certain utility in discussions of national identity.
And this is where I circle back around to Ashin Chen, Teresa Teng, and “Yueliang daibiao wo de xin.” For all of the nostalgia that permeates this series, for all the attention to historical detail, by choosing a performance of this song that is in so assertively of our moment, the theme song seems to announce that the recasting of a particular period of historical transition in which Light the Night takes part is very much for audiences of today. Of course all productions—film, television, theater, opera, you name it—are made for the audiences of their time, this rendition of “Yueliang daibiao wo de xin,” which we hear over and over as the prelude to each episode, never lets us forget that we are a 2020s audience watching a drama set in the 1980s. And in this sense, whether or not it meant to, Netflix has inserted itself into the heart of the discussion of what a modern Taiwanese identity looks like.
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Other Posts in My Series on Nostalgia
Scholars such as Andrew Jones have also discussed Teng’s second life as a popularly contrabanded commodity. See Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020): ch. 6.
NB. For all ye Netflix users who haven’t seen this show: if you’re a fan of 1980s fashion, who-done-it mystery series, or plots based around super messy interpersonal relationships, I strongly recommend this series. (This is of course a personal opinion, and should in no way be construed as a commercial endorsement.)