HOKKIEN LANGUAGE SONGS - A VERY BRIEF INTRO

Several years ago I knew more Hokkien speakers than I do now. They're rather rare in SF, less so in the Netherlands and South-East Asia. Most of the Chinese in the Philippines are of Hokkien ancestry, and the same goes for several communities in Java.

The Hokkienese language is quite unintelligible to speakers of Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as other Sinitic tongues, deriving from an older linguistic stratum and having developed as a separate regiolect for close to two thousand years.
So even though related languages are spoken in parts of neighboring Canton province (Teochow and a few others), one really should think of Hokkien as reflecting a different Chinese cultural world.

SONGS

This cultural and linguistic otherness is quite evident in their songs. Many of the Taiwanese songs show a Japanese influence from the long occupation of the island, while mainland Hokkien songs have folksong elements. Cantopop has had little impact, neither has the Mandarin nightclub repertoire from 1930's Shanghai. But Hokkien 'popular music' on each side of the Taiwan Strait reflects an awareness of the other.
Increasingly, cross-fertilization will enrich repertoires, but probably not erase distinctiveness.


Teresa Teng (鄧麗君 January 29, 1953 – May 8, 1995) sang in Hokkien as well as in Mandarin (and several other languages).


鄧麗君:
望春風 BAN CHUN HONG
Here miss Teng sings a lovely romantic ballad - 'observing the spring breeze'. The visual is what you would expect for karaoke, namely two handsome people (neither of whom is miss Teng) enacting the content of the song in a rather pablumish and saccharine way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsC_Te6XkBs&feature=player_embedded
The themes of the song are familiar to any student of Chinese lyric, being the yearning of a young girl for a husband / lover / companion, coupled with the freshness of Spring symbolizing youthful emotions and feminine beauty, as well as the fear of ending up without ever experiencing romance. Some of the verbal imagery is tongue-in-cheek, and a few of the metaphors are innocently suggestive.


The old-fashioned atmosphere in the video above is quite different from the gloomy modernism in the following video (miss Jiang Hui and Ah-Tu singing 'Dream's Love talk').

江惠 & 阿杜:
BANG TIONG Ê TSING HWE 夢中的情話

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ca3x1TveiU&feature=player_embedded
The language is more straightforward, and instead of a plaintiveness, the emotional content is on the borderline of despair. The video is gloomily beautiful.


Equally modern is this offering by miss 黃乙玲 in which angst, seediness, lonesomeness, and a heat wave combine in a typical Taiwanese social environ. Lang sying ê gwa - song of life.


黃乙玲:
LANG SYING Ê GWA 人生的歌
Unhappiness, unfulfilled longing, heartache - and restaurant work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dzebYfqtvo&feature=player_embedded
A very elegant offering, and the video itself is quite interesting too.
The visual language shows both Japanese and Hong Kong influences, the ending is particularly Chinese, and fits in with the underlying narrative.


NOTE: Hokkien-hwe (Fujianese, FuJian-Hua) is referred to as 'Amoy Dialect' by many educated Chinese in the Philippines, but also known as 'Min Language' (閩話) elsewhere. The characters that spell out the name of Fujian province (福建) are pronounced 'Hok Kien'.



==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly: LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================