Jan Hung-tze, CEO of the PC Home Publication Group and a cultural critic, thinks that Taiwan for many of its inhabitants is little more than city-god temples, noodle stands, fish-ball soup and Fong Fei-fei. Missing the songs of his youth while abroad, Jan decided that she is “the voice of the homeland.”
Stage legend Fong Fei-fei also made a deep impression on Wen Tien-hsiang, a film critic and organizer of the 2006 Taipei Film Festival. “Listening to her songs brings back the films of my youth and my own personal memories.” Like many Taiwanese of his generation, Wen’s cinematic and emotional experiences feature a soundtrack by Fong. But unlike Wen and his peers, Albert Chen , assistant professor in Tamkang University’s Department of English, is researching the significance of this woman and her music on Taiwanese society and culture, a project sponsored by the National Culture and Arts Foundation.
The study that Chen is working on is redefining Fong as a crucial phenomenon in Taiwanese culture, reflecting a locally-oriented consciousness, in contrast with the colonial Chinese variety that has prevailed for the last half century. Wen points out that in the prime of her career as a pop celebrity, she was considered by many of the Sino-centric intellectual elite as indicative of an escapist, low-brow pop culture.
Born in Taoyuan County’s Dasi Township, Fong Fei-fei, the stage name of Lin Ciou-luan, started her legendary career by winning the first prize of a radio station singing contest in 1968 when she was a junior high school student. She then moved to the capital to become a restaurant and dancehall singer and eventually acted in television dramas. In the 1970s, Fong became one of the most popular singers and TV variety show hosts in Taiwan. She was at the forefront of the latest technological breakthrough in television--live-broadcast shows--which brought her singing and entertaining talents to the fore, like no other celebrity before her.
Fong’s 2003 concert album unfolds. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)
Wen Tien-hsiang recalls that during a summer vacation when he was an elementary student, a neighbor was to drive him to his grandmother’s house in rural Yunlin County. But the journey was cut short at his neighbor’s home. Wondering why he was not taken to his grandmother’s, Wen discovered the entire household sitting fixedly in front of the television watching Fong Fei-fei’s show. He can no longer remember what happened later, but the title song from that year’s blockbuster movie, Cloud of Romance, sung by the hostess, marks that summer in his memory.
Featuring charismatic actress Lin Ching-hsia, Cloud of Romance was typical of the cinematic romance genre in the 1970s when Taiwan was a leading light in Asian filmmaking. This sentimental romantic style, largely based on the novels of Chiung Yao, rarely presented the ordinary people one meets in the street, but rather improbable heroes and heroines falling in love, requited or otherwise. The movies are described as the “three-room” type because most of the action takes place on the sets of living rooms, dining rooms and coffee shops. From 1965 to 1983, a total of 50 films were made from Chiung Yao’s novels as they were easy to adapt to the screen and later to dramatic series on television.
Singing many of the soundtrack songs for these films and then on her own widely popular TV shows, Fong Fei-fei helped forge a strong film genre and her own entertainment powerhouse. In Cloud of Romance, the heroine is torn between two lovers. She loves one more but, with his mother standing between them, marries the other, with whom she gradually develops a better relationship. One day, the husband gets upset with his wife’s former lover’s insistence on resuming their relationship and attacks her in a sudden fury. She regains consciousness to find her husband by her side. He goes to work and is killed in an accident. Realizing that she actually loves her husband, the heroine looses her mind and thereafter endlessly mutters “I am a cloud.”
“These love stories had little connection to real life,” Wen says. “But they satisfied a need in young female audiences for a world of imagined beauty.” In fact, a large number of young women were working in dismal factories on the production lines that fuelled Taiwan’s social and economic transformation. That Fong was an ordinary country girl who made it in the big city all alone added to her dream-come-true appeal--legions of young women working in the cities hung her posters on the walls of their small rented rooms and listened to her songs every day. “That’s why she’s had such an active fan club for so long,” says Chen. “Few singers in Taiwan, or anywhere, inspire the kind of heartfelt loyalty that she does.”
Fong’s charm was not just for the girls. Wen says that some of the film songs, sung in her somewhat masculine voice, actually portray the male protagonists’ feelings, so male listeners found great empathy in them. Unlike a lot of female stars that male audiences drooled over, Fong liked to wear trousers. Chen points out that this gender-crossing, almost androgynous aspect of her image might have also formed part of her attraction for the female audience. Indeed, in a sexually repressive society, this swapping of gender roles was also apparent in other performing arts, such as Taiwanese opera.
Chen thinks that Fong attained a goddess-like status among her fans and that this was certainly a product of the times. “In the 1970s and 1980s, considerable limitations on a still unsophisticated society gave rise to such stardom,” he says. “But, to her credit, she always maintained an amiable manner.” Wen points out that her geniality and the plain lyrics and simple melodies of her songs, which are easy to sing along with but whose vocal intensity is difficult to copy, produce a unique mix of legendary virtuosity and approachable reality. “She’s part of the collective Taiwanese memory of a time of great social and cultural change,” he says.
A significant part of that memory of change is the emergence of songs sung in Holo, Fong’s mother tongue. The language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group, Holo was severely discouraged in any form by the Kuomintang government which had promoted Mandarin as the only acceptable and “tasteful” national language since it came to Taiwan in the late 1940s. As Fong’s popularity grew, she started to host TV shows and introduced Holo ballads to the then Mandarin-dominated entertainment world. The first Holo ballad she sang for her enormous TV audience was “Sorrow in the Moonlit Night,” one of the most popular songs from the golden age of Holo ballads in the 1930s, when Taiwan was under Japanese rule (1895-1945). The enthusiastic response from the audience led to the release of several Holo albums, which soon became chart toppers.
Fong not only sang old Holo songs but also engaged herself in reviving the Holo-ballad tradition. In 1992, she released her 78th album, Wishing to Play the Same Tune. The title song was composed by Deng Yu-sian (1906–1944) and its lyrics written by Jhou Tian-wang (1910–1988), the writers of “Sorrow in the Moonlit Night.” Like other songs on this album and its 1995 follow-up, “Wishing to Play the Same Tune” had long been forgotten until Fong came along. “She made the greatest contribution of all the superstars of her age to preserve and revive the Holo-ballad tradition,” Albert Chen says.
Like the singers behind the great surge of Holo pop songs in the early 1990s, Fong also sang new Holo songs that broke free from the typically slow and sad style on her albums such as What Are You Like? (1987). In 1993, she was invited to sing again--in Holo--for a film. The Puppetmaster was directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, a leading figure in the Taiwanese New Wave Cinema movement of the 1980s. Fong was the heroine in two of Hou’s earlier works, Cute Girls (1980) and Cheerful Wind (1981), at the threshold of the New Wave shift from glaringly commercial entertainments toward more introspective, multi-narrative movies.
Today, the cultural base laid down by the early-1990s Holo pop wave continues to nurture a broader Taiwanese cultural movement that is sometimes labeled tai ke. While the term tai ke has negative overtones historically, Chen thinks that these days it symbolizes above all the confident, creative combination of elements from different cultural traditions. “Fong Fei-fei has a good command of Japanese songs and Western music like R&B,” Chen says. “But what’s really cool about her is that she sings so well in both Mandarin and Holo--not just Holo alone. This is what Taiwanese people have in common and can call their own.”
As a significant connection between the past and present of Taiwan’s pop culture and social development, Fong Fei-fei is indeed crucial to the ongoing reevaluation and redefinition of Taiwanese culture. On an album of a 2003 concert, Fong Fei-fei wonders toward the end of the show if she is at the end or the beginning. She answers herself a little later: “Embracing the past is good, but embracing the present is wonderful.”