THE WANDERING SONGSTRESS

The moon is frosty above the street, like a hook curving over the willow trees. Singing does not requite the melancholy mood, tears fall.
A mother and daughter wander alone, cold and hungry.
Alas!

That, more or less, is the gist of one of the loveliest songs by Zhou Xuan (周璇), from a classic Shanghai tearjerker from the thirties (possibly 馬路天使 "Street Angel").
I did not remember that song from any of her movies.
But I saw them a long time ago.

It's been covered by several singers a number of times since then, and can be found on youtube.


街頭月
詞：吳村　　曲：張昊

街頭月　月如霜　冷冷地照在屋簷上
街頭月　月如霜　冷冷地照在屋簷上
母女淪落走街坊　饑寒交迫只得把歌唱
唱呀唱　唱呀唱　唱不盡悲歡離合空惆悵
唱不盡白山黑水徒心傷

街頭月　月如鈎　彎彎地掛在柳梢頭
街頭月　月如鈎　彎彎地掛在柳梢頭
母女相依沿街走　低彈緩唱唱到淚雙流
流呀流　流呀流　流到了心碎腸斷不憂愁
流到了天昏地暗有時休


Little Red (one of Zhou Xuan's nicknames: 小紅) really did have a lovely voice, as the song 銀花飛 makes very clear. There are times when her enunciation seems drenched with honey.

You may not find such songs to your liking.
They are perhaps a bit old hat.
As are my ears.



老國音

You could, I suppose, ascribe that to "Old National Pronunciation", that being a standardization of Mandarin as revised during the twenties and thirties, but, going out on a limb, I'm guessing it's more than just that.

Even so, it is primarily for that reason that I did not provide a phonetic transcription of the lyrics; you probably would not sing along, and the tone system might flummox you anyway.


FYI: I'm still having difficulty with the 入聲。
There are no glottal stops in Mandarin.

She also sang in Suzhou dialect, FYI.




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SMELLS LIKE WOOD SMOKE, SMELLS LIKE COOKING FIRES

Friday evening after dinner, while wandering the neighborhood, two tunes alternated in my head. Remarkably they were both about food, though unrelated to anything that I am exceptionally fond of. Neither meat-filled glutinous rice packets steamed in long bamboo leaves (粽), nor sesame sprinkled flaky fried buns (燒餅), even if fresh out of the hot fat, are a particular must-have favourite.
Oh, yummy enough that they hit the spot, yes. But I shan't go out of my way to hunt them down.

A good rendition of bittermelon and black bean chicken or pork, on the other hand, is a different story. Delicious with rice, and the oily hot sauce that you will regret several hours later.
Seriously worth jumping for.
Oh indeed yes.

[Jung (粽): often called a 'Chinese Tamale', this is glutinous rice packed in a cone made of remoistened dried bamboo leaves folded over, with a sweet or savoury filling -- often fatty pork and peanuts or yellow beans -- closed up and steamed for several hours. Because of the bactericidal properties of bamboo, and the fact that the leaves have effectively sealed it, this keeps at room temperature longer than many other comestibles, and is often favoured for journeys or picnics. Shaobing (燒餅): a wheat flour layered dough bun, often pan-fried and topped with toasted sesame. Distinguish two main kinds: the sweet variety, most frequently with a red bean paste filling, and the savoury, which may or may not contain meat. It once was the quintessential cold-weather street food.]











[Source for both photos: Wikipedia. Of course.]


The image on the left is shaobing ready for sale, that on the right shows one jung divested of its wrapper, another waiting in anticipation of its own impending nudity.


Here's a bittersweet Hokkien ballad about selling glutinous rice packets by the side of the road to pay for school books.

燒肉粽 SIO BA TSANG

[Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjJX-WKloDI.]

The singer is mr. 郭金發 (Kwek Kim-Hoat), who made the song famous in the post-war years. It has also been done by Theresa Teng (鄧麗君), whose rendition I do not find as appealing.

Subsequent covers by other singers compete to render it the most heartrendingly depressing song ever. Full of funk, misery, and hopelessness. It is, consequently, a Taiwanese ever-green.



You're probably already familiar with my fondness for 1930's songbird Chou Hsuen (周璇), whose performances during the dark years of civil war and Japanese invasion brought brightness and cheer to a population desperately in need of precisely that. Her career could not have spanned a more appropriate time, her golden voice is the signature of her era.

Her she is in a sprightly ballad about buns.

賣燒餅 MAI SHAOBING

[Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oaisTrZQAM.]


Neither sio ba tsang nor shaobing are available anywhere near here. Sio ba tsang (Cantonese pronunciation: 'siu yiuk jung') is something slightly more northern, as the natives of LingNan do not do it the same way as the Min peoples, shaobing (Cantonese pronunciation: 'siu beng') is so far north as to be almost on the moon. Or in any case, beyond the mountains and the rivers. Further utterly far away.
Are they even Chinese there?

No, I have no idea why those tunes came back to me. As I said, I had already eaten well. Bittermelon and black bean chicken over rice.
It would not have been the pipe either. Although it was filled with an old-fashioned and evocative English-style recipe, such as I smoked in the eighties and nineties. Heavy on Latakia, light on flue-cured.
Smells work subconsciously on the memory.
Latakia perhaps more than most.
Fragrant recall.


Okay, maybe that WAS it.

I shall compound more of that tobacco mixture.
It's stench is magic to my mind.
Marvelous.



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SHANGHAI BUND: A PLACE, A TELEVISION SERIES, AND A WAY OF LIFE

Late the other night I dined on Japanese crispy objects made by a company in Thailand (Taokaenoi Food & Marketing Co., Ltd.) and distributed in the United States by a Chinese enterprise whose name cannot be found anywhere on the label.

It is delicious with good nutrients from the sea, best served as snack with your favourite drink: tempura seaweed, spicy flavour. Yumminess in a re-sealable bag, invented by a computer game nerd.

Manufacturing facilities are in Nonthaburi and Pathumthani.

Naturally I washed it down with Jameson's Irish Whiskey. Which is a fine product of the Pernod Ricard Company in France, though founded by a Scotsman in Dublin. After which I smoked an English pipe tobacco produced by a factory in Germany.

Life may not be multicultural, but my habits are.
Though you might say "messed up".

I will blame exposure during my mis-spent youth for some of that.

In the mid-eighties I moved to North Beach, which is next to Chinatown.One of the tunes that seemed to be constantly playing in the background all over Grant Avenue and Stockton Street was the theme song from a popular Hong Kong television series starring Chow Yun-fat (周潤發), Ray Lui (呂良偉), and Angie Chiu (趙雅芝).


上海灘 - SHANGHAI BUND



In 1920's Shanghai two young men, Hui Man-keung (Chow Yun-fat) and Ting Lik (Ray Lui), become members of a gang headed by Fung King-yiu (played by Lau Dan 劉丹). Both of them have a serious crush on Fung's daughter, Ching-ching (Angie Chiu). For the next twenty five episodes, things go wrong in great style, ending with the death of Hui (Chow) outside a fancy restaurant on his last night in Shanghai.

You can see Hui being killed in this short clip:



As a side note, to me the scene above highlights precisely why smoking should be allowed indoors again; bad things happen when you have to go outside for a fix.

Of course, back in the eighties you didn't need to do so. You could have stayed inside, safe and out of harm's way. Since then, the non-smoking yutzes have obviously wanted us dead.

The series was a smash hit, and propelled Chow Yun-fat (the smoking gentleman in the photo above) to stardom. You may have seen him in any number of gangster flicks made during the eighties, in which he often played a man on the wrong side of the law, but with a strong sense of morality and ethics. What you probably remembered was the gallantry and likability of the character. A rogue and a crook, but an upright man with an admirable style.

The series also helped speed the end of the chip-on-the-shoulder style of entertainment characterized by every single Bruce Lee movie, most of which are only barely watchable, but only if you read Bruce Lee as a clown of monumental proportions, a veritable master of physical comedy.

By the mid-eighties, Hong Kong movies no longer took themselves quite so seriously, and many of the people involved had realized that as important to the genre as giving the viewers roles to identify with was imparting a sense of mood, and images of style. Shanghai in the twenties and thirties, as an exemplifier of both of those things, become a trope. Many of the classiest gangster films from that era (the eighties) are either set there, or recall that time and place in key ways.

Shanghai during the republican period was indeed all that. At that time it was a world city, and a trend-setter. A hotbed of international commerce and intrigue, filled with wheeler-dealers, crooks, secret agents, tycoons, and smugglers, as well as jazz, nightclubs, restaurants, tailors, and beautiful women.

It was the flash and dazzle of the shiny metropolis which the exiles who ended up in Hong Kong after the war missed most of all. The poverty and desperation of the time there was forgotten, the vibrancy and excitement remained. Shanghai was where China grew up.
Writers, intellectuals, and the Chinese entertainment industry had experienced a golden age.





The Shanghainese sense of pride in their city infected all Chinese, and in the fifties, after twenty years of war and chaos, it seemed like nothing like that would ever come again. The Twentieth century had, on the whole, proven rather miserable, and Shanghai by sheer contrast had seemed such a beacon.

[The video clip above is Chou Hsuen (周璇) singing Yeh Shanghai ('Shanghai at night'). One of my favourite songs by her is Moon Over the Street Corner, which can be heard here: 街頭月. Just open it up in a separate tab or window to listen, as the visuals are static. A television documentary about Chou Hsuen is here: 金嗓子.
Probably her most famous song is When Will You Return (何日君再來), recorded in 1937. Teresa Teng sang it in 1979, at which time the communists described it as an obscene pro-Japanese ode, and the Taiwanese government banned it because it could be interpreted as an invitation to the People's Liberation Army.
It's actually a plaintive love ballad.]

For the next two decades, things scarcely improved.

Shanghai had been the stage on which the ideals of revolutionary China had had their fullest play, and the arena where all movements had most memorably come to fruition. Nationalists and Communists, Imperialists and Missionaries, all had plotted, manoeuvred, and manipulated in Shanghai for several decades. When the Communists swept to victory on the mainland in 1949, that ended.
Refugees flocked to Hong Kong, and the British kept a tight lid on them for fear that the revolution would take away their European foothold in the Far-East.  The exiles found safety in the Crown Colony, as well as stultifying boredom.

[A parting duet evoking exile, and the promise of return, can be heard here: 叮嚀.
As with the other links, right-click to open in a new window; static visuals again. Recorded by Chou Hsuen and Yan Hwa (嚴華) in 1939, two years before their divorce. It should be mentioned that they had known each other since their very early teens, when both were part of the Moon Song and Dance Society (明月歌舞團樂社), which produced many performers for the Shanghai movie industry who later became famous. They married in 1938, when she was 18 years old and he was 23.]

But their creativity was not routed into propagandistic insanity, as happened elsewhere; Hong Kong was an island of unexciting calm.

The gilded memory of Shanghai grew more glorious as time passed.
In reality, Shanghai had seen exploitation and bloodshed on an operatic scale, engineered by the Japanese, the warlords and bankers, Nationalists and the Communists, the gangsters of the Green Gang (青帮) headed by Big Eared Tu (杜月笙), as well as the British and French authorities in the concessions, and others. But it had also been China's first modern city.
Life had been more fast-paced, and there had been so many more opportunities for everything, including crime.

By the late seventies, the Shanghai of legend was larger than life; all good things, all style, all greatness and grandness, everything worthwhile in Chinese popular culture, had a place in the myth.
The mainland and Taiwan both failed to offer realities that matched.

And Hong Kong was realizing that it, in part, was the primary heir.

Shanghai as it had been was gone. But there was money to be made off the corpse, and lovingly the authors, actors, and directors mined the material.


It was not so much cannibalism as regurgitation of cultural themes which by that time had become instinctive, an inherent part of their make-up and their welt-anschauung.
Their interpretation was in truth a version more Hong Kong than Shanghai, just as the gangster movies set in the Hong Kong of that day and age also shaded, gilded, and repainted the facts to fit a tale.

The results were often stellar.

Fantasy is, in the final regard, what art is all about.

The Shanghai of the show had never existed in real life, but was built on a sound stage in Kowloon Tong (九龍塘), Hong Kong. None of the main actors have any connection to Shanghai either. Chow Yun-fat is of Hakka ancestry, born on Lamma Island (南丫島), Ray Lui is Chinese from Vietnam, Danny Lau (Lau Dan) is a native of Shantung, Kent Tong is a Hong Kong native.....
Even the singer who made the series theme song famous (Frances Yip 葉麗儀) is local (and like Chow Yun-fat, of Hakka ancestry).

Only the executive under whose aegis the show was produced can arguably even be called Shanghainese: Run Run Shaw ((邵逸夫) was the son of a textile merchant from Chekiang based in that city. He moved to Singapore when he was nineteen in 1926. He and his brother founded South Sea Film (南洋影片), which later became Shaw Brothers Studio and was headquartered in Hong Kong, in 1930.

When the television series came out in 1980, over a generation had passed since the period portrayed.

 

What the show represents is a fairy-tale of a different era, one comfortably remote enough that it need not impinge upon the present. Both of the men about whom the stories revolve are in love with the good girl, but only one of them really stands a chance. And although she is the daughter of a gang leader, Ching Ching really does represent an ideal of femininity and Chinese womanhood. She is the one good thing that stands out above all else in the violent and sordid world in which her two suitors by necessity find themselves, and inspires their continuing humanity.

In the tale, successful gangsters and thugs are not always coarse and vulgar, but can indeed represent the same gallantries, idealism, and gentlemanly qualities that Chinese have always aspired to. Circumstance may determine one's station in life, but the person should nevertheless be faithful to what is civilized and worthwhile.
True to the constraints of real life, however, this tale is at times convoluted and messy. After having worked for Fung for several years, Hui (Chow Yun-fat) settles in Hong Kong, later returning to Shanghai. For both the very highest of motives as well as personal vengeance, Hui ends up killing Ching-ching's father, who was co-operating with the Japanese, and whose paid goons had slaughtered Hui's wife and in-laws.
He dies on the night that he was going to leave for France to find Ching-ching, determined to make things right again.

One should always aspire to rectitude, but events may sabotage the attempt. That does not mean that it isn't worth doing, merely that life sometimes really stinks.

Constancy does not necessarily get rewarded.
But it's worth it for its own sake.


Other than casting ideal ethical conduct into a new format, the show also achieved one other remarkable result: anti-heroes who dressed with style and pizzaz, and didn't act like idiots.
These were men that one could emulate, if not in actual life, but in personal behaviour and attitude. Instead of goobers wearing floppy kung-fu pajamas, Hong Kong television and movie screens started showing gangsters and crime-fighters with realistic clothing. The violence and moral questions were still there, but the characters had fleshed-out.

Up till the seventies, Hong Kong cinema had always shown right and wrong simplistically, with few shades of grey. All of sudden (actually, over a period of five or six years) snappy suits and multiple shades of grey became the norm, and the stories more complex and challenging.



Of course, for the juvenile delinquent element black and white was still the most recognizable facet, but they started aspiring to better presentation.
Clothes may not make the man, but they make the man much more.

It's that sense of real people, admirable individuals, rather than strictly two-dimensional epitomes, that made Hong Kong movies during the mid to late eighties worth watching. You might judge the actions reprehensible, but the characters were more complex and understandable in their responses.
And afterwards much of them stayed with you.



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MEMORIES SOUND LIKE THIS: ZHOU XUAN

You will not like these songs. They probably do not meet your exacting criteria, and they are rather simple and old-fashioned. And they are in a language that is foreign to you besides.

I first heard them at the house of an elderly auntie. She had listened to the songs before the war, at the movie theatre in the Chinese part of town - which her parents had expressly forbidden, of course, because nice girls do not go there.
After the war she bought the records because they reminded her of happier times, before the Jap invasion and the camps.

When she returned to the Netherlands - we say 'returned', because it was called 'repatriation, even though she had never been there - she brought the records with her. During the fifties and sixties she hardly listened to the music, as it did not suit the refined European tastes of the Dutch, and it was embarassing to be 'too Indies'.

In the seventies she lived alone, and started listening again, trying to recapture memories that were fading.

I came back to the US in 1978. For six years I did not hear these songs, or even remember them. Then one day I went to watch a movie at the World Theatre - this was just after it opened, before the owners realized that there is almost no audience for Mandarin oldies in Chinatown.

The next day I bought an entire collection of songs by Zhou Xuan - a set produced in Malaysia, from old recordings - a bit scratchy, a bit warped. Cheap tapes, probably pirated. But it was heaven. I have since acquired better sets, including a remastered cd set. The songs still evoke.

I know most of the songs by heart. Yes, you do NOT want to go to a Chinese Karaoke bar with me.



FIVE LOVELY AIRS SUNG BY ZHOU XUAN
[周璇, born August 1, 1918, died September 22, 1957.]


街頭月 - Moon Above The Intersection
http://californiadream.com/personal/ZhouXuan/moon.html

街頭月，月如霜，
冷冷的照在屋簷上。
街頭月，月如霜，
冷冷的照在屋簷上。
母女淪落在街坊，
飢寒交迫只得把歌唱。
唱呀唱，唱呀唱，
唱不盡悲歡離合空惆悵，
唱不盡白山黑水徒心傷。

街頭月，月如鉤，
彎彎的掛在柳梢頭。
街頭月，月如鉤，
彎彎的掛在柳梢頭。
母女相依沿街走，
低彈緩唱唱到淚雙流。
流呀流，流呀流，
流到了心摧腸斷不憂愁，
流到了天昏地暗有時休。


五月的風 - May Breeze
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUYPTylKPLU&feature=related

五月的風，吹在花上,
朵朵的花兒吐露芬芳。
假如呀花兒確有知,
懂得人海的滄桑,
它該低下頭來哭斷了肝腸。

五月的風，吹在樹上,
枝頭的鳥兒發出歌唱。
假如呀鳥兒是有知,
懂得日月的消長,
它該息下歌喉羞愧地躲藏。

五月的風，吹在天上,
朵朵的雲兒顏色金黃。
假如呀雲兒是有知,
懂得人間的興亡,
它該掉過頭去離開這地方。


采槟榔 - Picking Betel Nuts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v8R7caOtPo

高高的樹,上結擯榔,
誰先爬上,誰先嘗。
誰先爬上我替誰先裝。

少年郎,採擯榔,
姐姐提籃抬頭望,
低頭又想
誰能比他強,
趕忙來叫聲,
我的郎呀
青山好呀流水長,
那太陽已殘,
那歸鳥而在唱,
叫我倆趕快回家鄉。


四季歌 - Four Seasons' Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIEUeMiJBhY

春季到來綠滿窗，
大姑娘窗下繡鴛鴦。
忽然一陣無情棒，
打得鴛鴦各一旁。

夏季到來柳絲長，
大姑娘漂泊到長江。
江南江北風光好，
怎及青紗起高粱。

秋季到來荷花香，
大姑娘夜夜夢家鄉。
醒來不見爹娘面，
只見窗前明月光。

冬季到來雪茫茫，
寒衣做好送情郎。
血肉築出長城長，
奴願做當年小孟姜。


天涯歌女 - The Wandering Songstress
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxu8Kxuf-Sg

天涯呀海角, 覓呀覓知音,
小妹妹唱歌, 郎奏琴。
郎呀咱們倆是一條心,
哎呀, 哎呀, 郎呀咱們倆是一條心。

家山呀北望, 淚呀淚沾襟,
小妹妹想郎, 直到今。
郎呀患難之交恩愛深
哎呀, 哎呀, 郎呀患難之交恩愛深。

人生呀誰不, 惜呀惜青春,
小妹妹似線, 郎似針。
郎呀穿在一起不離分,
哎呀, 哎呀, 郎呀穿在一起不離分。



You will note that two of the youtube videos given above are clearly the karaoke versions - the visual for the betelnut song is rather gooberish.
The last two are from the original movie (馬路天使).

Would you care to guess what I saw that day at the World Theatre?

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Post scriptum: You may be wondering why I felt moved to post these songs. It could be the mood I'm in, but more likely it is the lilies. You see, Savage Kitten stayed home sick today, so I bought her some lilies from the stand at the foot of the street. They are now on my desk waiting to be taken home, and they smell very old fashioned, very evocative. There's just something about that fragrance.

Savage Kitten NEVER listens to Zhou Xuan's songs, by the way.
She listens to Madonna, disco, Broadway musicals. Some classical music, especially when she is driving.
And songs from Valley of the Dolls.