One of the things I get asked a lot about being in Taiwan is, “Why are you here?” (Or, depending on where the asker is, “Why are you there?”) In fact, this is one of the few questions that rarely changes, regardless of who’s asking, how old the asker is, where they come from, or the nature of our relationship.
In the dual interests of answering this question and cutting down on writing time, this week’s post is an expanded version of a brief talk I gave a few weeks back introducing my research. As a result, a few readers will have heard significant portions of this talk before, #sorrynotsorry. Regardless, I still recommend scrolling through to the music videos in this post—there’s lots of fabulous 80’s music here, including some Teresa Teng, because who doesn’t love Teresa Teng?
In my first three months in Taiwan, I got shunted in and out of quarantine and/or self-health management1 five times. Not only did this weirdly ease the transition into the relative freedom of Taiwan after two years basically spent hunkered in my Chicago apartment, my sporadic bursts of isolation also provided ample time to start watching Taiwanese television. Among the shows that I binged during my homebound stints was Light the Night 華燈初上, the glamorous, glossy whodunnit released by Netflix earlier this year.
On the one hand, if I couldn’t leave my apartment, it was fun to at least watch a show set in Taipei’s Zhongshan district 中山區, the very same neighborhood in which I’m now living. But my enforced binge sessions also gave me the chance to reflect on my current research, which explores how music and the performing arts help to build, sustain, and contest nationalisms and national identity.
Specifically, the project that brings me to Taiwan looks at the ways in which transnational flows of culture come to be localized and recoded as nationally representative. For example, how does “God Save the Queen” (or, since September 8th, “God Save the King”) become equally iconic of American and English identity? How do accordions drift across the sea from Japan or march across the border from Russia to become musical symbols of modern China? How does Cali, Colombia become the self-appointed protector of salsa music?
Of course some of this recoding can happen when governments or big money get (explicitly) involved. After enough interventions by Third Reich propagandists, Beethoven can be become a proto-Nazi. Singin’ in the Rain iconography can merge with bubblegum-pink hairdos to form the backbone of one of the biggest K-pop hits of all time (no, really, watch the final minute-and-a-half or so of the video!) Depending on your perspective, Toscanini can become a symbol of American or Italian or European musical achievement.
But although I’m interested in government activity, I’m also interested in the kind of musical recoding that happens as we come into contact with the banal multimedia fabric of everyday life: the ways students encounter music in the set curricula of public music education; the tension between Han legacies and contemporary multiculturalism in guoyue 國樂 performances; the algorithmically generated Mandopop Spotify playlists that are strikingly similar, whether I’m sitting at my desk in the US or at a high-top in a trendy bar in Taipei; or, yes, even the theme song for a soapy Netflix murder mystery.
“What do you mean by ‘musical recoding?’”
Good question! For anyone who’s soldiered through the last few weeks of this blog, you’ll know that I find it hard to stop talking about Light the Night, and today is no exception. In this case, the show’s opening theme, Ashin Chen’s cover of Teresa Teng’s “The Moon Represents My Heart” 月亮代表我的心 can help illustrate what I mean by “recoding.”2 (I've fast-forwarded to the most illustrative part of the song in the clip below, but if you want to hear the whole thing, by all means, please rewind. Also, to be clear, this music video has absolutely nothing to do with the show, other than the fact that it is the theme song.)
From the very outset, this is clearly a performance of the here and now. In it, we have a contemporary Taiwanese performer combining 21st-century Mandopop vocalism with the autotuned, vocal fry-laden pop aesthetics of a post-“Baby One More Time,” post-“Believe” world.
If we go back a little further, “The Moon Represents My Heart” was one of the iconic vehicles for the silver-voiced Teresa Teng 鄧麗君 (click here to listen to her version). Teng herself was a product of border-crossings: the Taiwan-born daughter of a KMT military veteran from China’s Hebei province, her career reached international megastardom after successfully breaking into the Taiwanese, Southeast Asian, Hong Kong, and Japanese markets (the latter on account of her near-flawless Japanese, learned as a legacy of Japanese imperialism in Taiwan, as you can hear in the performance below.)
Speaking of Japanese, Teresa Teng’s style was itself very Japanese in some ways. Though her sweet timbre was unique to her, many of the stylistic features of her repertoire were indebted to Japanese enka (for a point of comparison, listen to this heartrendingly fabulous final performance by the Queen of Enka, Misora Hibari.)
Then of course there’s the subject matter of the show itself, which revolves around a Japanese-style hostess bar in the Zhongshan district—a Japanese colonial legacy that gave my neighborhood a less-than-savory reputation that it has never quite been able to get rid of.
And finally, there’s the fact that the whole endeavor is funded, promoted, and broadcast by the multinational, multi-billion dollar media megalith called Netflix.
At the same time, however, Light the Night provides strikingly local watercooler fodder. In fact, almost everyone I’ve spoken with in Taipei has seen this show; the couple of exceptions simply serve to prove the rule. In fact, when I asked one senior faculty member in my Chinese program about the show, his almost indignant response was, “Of course I’ve seen it. Anyone who says they haven’t is lying.” (Even the mafiosi who were seated next to us on our first trip to The Village Mouth 村子口 were talking about it!)
“So … what are you doing in Taipei?”
Now, my half-baked, binge-watching analogy reaches its limit here. Although I’m willing to say that this show most probably fits into a contemporary Taiwanese national imaginary, I can’t really say exactly how just now. Furthermore, because I don’t anticipate including this TV series in my dissertation, this is probably as much as I’ll have to say about it for the foreseeable future. But in synthesizing a huge array of transnationally circulating cultural resources, Light the Night gives rise to certain kinds of local discourses in a way that aptly illustrates the kinds of processes I’m concerned with in my research.
What does my interest in “the banal multimedia fabric of everyday life” mean for my research process while I’m in Taiwan? Well, in effect, it means that everything is fair game (especially now that I’m done watching Light the Night). I spend a lot of time attending cultural events—from the flagship venues like the National Concert Hall, to performances by student ensembles, and even documentary film screenings about classic Taiwanese authors and drag queens (to be clear: those were two separate documentaries). I’ve spent time speaking with practicing artists about the way they see their work in the context of contemporary Taiwanese society, and I will be conducting more formal interviews with these artists as time goes on.
I also keep my ears wide open in taxis, on subways, and at restaurants and bars. I’m listening for soundtracks, Spotify playlists, grumblings about how bad the musical tastes of young people are, or celebrations of how much better today’s music is compared with the golden oldies (again, perspective is everything). I seek out restaurants whose soundtracks are composed entirely of the Taiwan Airforce barn-burners of yesteryear, and whose décor glorifies Taiwan’s KMT past (more to come on this topic in the coming weeks), or bars that go all in on Taiwan’s colonial past. And I spend hours at a time in bookstores, not just looking for reading material, but also to see what’s being translated for a local readership, and who’s reading it (more, too, on Taipei’s glorious bookstores in the coming weeks).
Finally, like any researcher armed with a digital camera and a healthy post-pandemic paranoia that I’ll once again be locked out of archives, I’ve spent huge amounts of time scanning documents (we’re talking in the tens of thousands of pages, here). I’ve been collecting public school textbooks, music and arts magazines, old concert programs, even housing receipts for faculty members from China’s Republican-era National Conservatory of Music (now the Shanghai Conservatory).
Will all of this end up in my dissertation? Absolutely not. Does it all fit together into a coherent picture? Well, probably not all of it. But some of it certainly does.
And when I figure out exactly how that is, I’ll be sure to get back to you.
This was the period following quarantine where you were supposed to monitor yourself for any late-appearing symptoms. During this time, you were definitely allowed out of your hotel, and definitely not allowed to eat in restaurants, and in which everything else depended entirely on who you asked. For example, some workers in the Public Health division told friends of mine that riding public transportation was a major no-no. On the other hand, I was told by my Public Health official that public transit was fine, unless it seemed crowded. (I erred on the safe side, and just didn’t take public transit.)
Teresa Teng wasn’t actually the first to sing this song, but she was definitely the one to make it world-famous.