In May this year, seminal Taiwanese songstress Teresa Teng (鄧麗君, 1953–1995) made a virtual comeback in a concert at the Taipei Arena. As the lights dimmed at the start of the show, a remarkably lifelike hologram of the diva appeared on stage, moving with all of her signature elegance and grace. The digital representation performed pitch-perfect renditions of six of the star’s most celebrated songs, drawing gasps of amazement from the audience. The concert, held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Teng’s untimely passing, also featured a number of contemporary stars singing some of her hits. The show has since been staged in Tokyo and Shanghai, highlighting the beloved songbird’s enduring appeal across the region.
During her 30-year music career, Teng became the most widely known pop star in the Mandarin-speaking world. The diva, who died aged 42 after suffering an asthma attack while vacationing in the Thai city of Chiang Mai, was also a pioneering figure. Her trailblazing performances at large venues in Taiwan more than three decades ago helped establish the nation’s concert industry. She was also the first Mandarin-language singer to stage shows at Lincoln Center in New York and Caesars Palace hotel in Las Vegas, in 1980 and 1983 respectively. “She didn’t put on a huge number of concerts,” notes her brother Frank Teng (鄧長富). “But many of those she performed were groundbreaking.”
Frank Teng heads the Taipei-based Teresa Teng Foundation, which was formed in 1995 not long after the singer passed away to manage and promote her rich legacy. In 2013, it released a collection of 600 songs to mark the 60th anniversary of her birth. Selected from the more than 1,700 tracks she released, the songs on the compilation highlight Teng’s remarkable gift for languages. The set features works in Cantonese, English, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin and Holo, which is also known as Taiwanese and is the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group. In its 1995 obituary of the singer, The New York Times described Teng as a “brilliant linguist.”
Chen Ching-ho (陳清河), a professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Film and vice president for academic affairs at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, notes that Teng’s cross-cultural competence was a key factor in her international appeal. “Her songs are about universal topics and feelings, so they transcend national boundaries,” the scholar adds.
Teng was born in Baozhong Township in southern Taiwan’s Yunlin County, where her father, a serviceman, and mother settled after relocating to Taiwan from mainland China along with the Nationalist government during the late 1940s. Her family later moved to a military dependents’ village in today’s Luzhou District of New Taipei City. Due to her family background, she was frequently invited to sing for soldiers at military sites around Taiwan throughout her music career and is remembered as the “sweetheart of the army.”
From an early age, Teng exhibited an exceptional voice, winning first prize in a radio singing contest in 1964 while a student at Luzhou Elementary School. In the following years, she gained experience by performing at restaurants and traditional music salons, before becoming the host of a singing show in 1969 on the recently launched China Television Co., which was set up the previous year as Taiwan’s second TV station. Around the same time, she also began releasing records and appearing in films.
Over the course of the subsequent decade, Teng achieved widespread fame in Mandarin-speaking societies and Southeast Asia. She was particularly beloved in her homeland and Hong Kong, where virtually all of her albums topped the charts. During this period, Taiwan was a major force in the Asian film industry, and the love songs she recorded for the soundtracks of romantic movies like The Young Ones (1973) and The Story of a Small Town (1979) played a significant role in boosting her stardom overseas.
Teng began developing her career in Japan in 1973, and the following year earned a major prize for emerging singers in the country with her classic song Airport. By the end of the 1980s, her numerous other Japanese-language hits, such as Lover and Give Yourself to the Flow of Time, had made her one of the most successful performers of all time in the nation and cemented her status as an international superstar.
During the peak of her career in the mid-1980s, Time magazine described Teng as one of the world’s most admired female vocalists, which represented “the hitherto highest honor for a Mandarin-language singer,” wrote media scholar Chao Yi (趙怡) in a 2013 article about her career. The article was published on the website of the National Policy Foundation, a Taipei-based think tank, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Teng’s birth. Chao is a former minister of the Government Information Office, whose functions were transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture (MOC) when it was dissolved in 2012 as part of a government restructuring program.
In 2010, CNN named Teng one of the top 20 global music icons of the past five decades alongside legends such as Madonna and Michael Jackson. In his article, Chao called Teng the foremost Mandarin-language songstress of the 1980s, a period when, amid the growing liberalization of Taiwanese society, pop music became the most dynamic field in Taiwan’s internationally renowned entertainment sector. During the final two decades of the 20th century, the golden age of the nation’s record industry, Teng’s albums “sold tens of millions of copies all over the world,” Chao noted.
In 1983, the singer released the acclaimed album Light Exquisite Feeling, a collection of 12 songs pairing lines from classical Chinese poems with melodies by songwriters from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The star was working on a sequel to this record at the time of her death, and had completed a track featuring lyrics drawn from an ancient composition by revered poet Li Bai (李白, 701–762).
This recording was incorporated into a new song released in May this year by mainland Chinese singer Faye Wong (王菲), an eminent pop star who started her career by releasing albums of Teng’s songs. Wong performed this track for the first time at a 2013 concert in Beijing to mark the 60th anniversary of Teng’s birth. The Taiwanese diva’s version of the song was also played at the event.
Chao, who attended the Beijing show, noted in his online article that Teng’s soft, captivating voice and genial manner represent a collective memory for people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Her albums became immensely popular in mainland China in the late 1970s and 1980s as it began opening up under the rule of Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平, 1904–1997). Teng’s songs, which were passed around on pirated cassette tapes and played on the radio, presented a striking alternative to the propaganda music that dominated the airwaves at the time. Indeed, Chen points out that as the communist leader and Taiwanese songstress had the same surname, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s mainland Chinese people were said to listen to the senior Deng by day and the junior Teng by night. “She was a major cross-strait cultural force,” he adds.
In 2011, The Moon Represents My Heart, a track first recorded in the early 1970s but made famous by Teng when she included a rendition of it on a 1977 album, topped a list of classic songs in an online survey sponsored by the MOC to celebrate the centennial of the Republic of China. Earlier in 2009 in mainland China, as part of events marking the 60th anniversary of the communist regime, Teng emerged in first place, followed by Wong and Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou (周杰倫), in a poll by a government portal site to choose the mainland’s most influential cultural icons.
As with Wong, Chou is a lifelong fan of the diva. Indeed, the virtual representation of Teng made its debut alongside the pop star at a 2013 concert in Taipei, during which Chou expressed his joy at realizing his dream of “traveling back in time 30 years to sing with her.”
Frank Teng notes that his foundation plans to stage full concerts using the hologram once the special effects company behind the depiction, Digital Domain, has added more songs to its repertoire. Chang Hsiao-hung (張小虹), a professor of cultural studies in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University in Taipei, hails the technology as a way to boost Teng’s popularity among younger generations. This 3-D representation is “very much like Teresa Teng and yet not her. It’s more ghostly than a ghost, but offers a wonderful new way to appreciate her,” she opines. Judging by the success of the trio of concerts held this year, numerous fans across East Asia are eager to be haunted by this apparition.
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw