Sounds of My Childhood: Rediscover Cantopop (and Cantonese-Style Mooncake) in Chinatown
The acoustic guitar was the instrument I minored in while attending my childhood music academy. (My preferred second instrument would have been the violin or flute, but that’s a vexing story for another day.) My guitar teacher happened to be the nephew of a famous Chinese TV personality. Hence, though I did not particularly enjoy it, I went to class religiously for between-lesson scoops on various celebrities.
My teacher knew that most of us kept daily company on the keyboard with Baroque, Classical, and Romantic sounds. To change things up a bit, also in hopes of kindling our interest in his beloved instrument, he introduced the class to a group of minor chords commonly used in Cantonese pop songs.
I had had little exposure to Cantopop before studying the tapes he shared. To everyone’s surprise, at least in singing, I picked up the language rather effortlessly. My father was born on the Luichow Peninsula in the southernmost part of Canton and spoke only Cantonese for the first decade of his life before moving back to Beijing with my grandparents. Perhaps Dad has passed down to me his ear for Cantonese.
Guitar lessons indeed became more interesting. I was one of three girls in that class but I strove to strum and break up those chords as well as any prepubescent boy. Further, I mobilized my network of cousins, aunts, uncles, and family friends who made regular business trips to Hong Kong to collect new albums to share — or show off — in class.
Before long, I agreed with my teacher and classmates that “The Great Wall” by Hong Kong-based rock band Beyond is an absolute classic. Beyond’s critical take on the Great Wall of China, comparing this most prized national symbol to a “revered scar,” and their profound reflection on Chinese history waxed prophetical about the state of mind in the Middle Kingdom to this day.
Meanwhile, virtuoso “God of Songs” Jacky Cheung monopolized my bandwidth with his romantic ballads, many of which are Cantonese adaptations of Japanese melodies. Among others, “Love You More Each Day” (adapted from “Manatsu no Kajitsu” by Southern All Stars), “Breakups on Rainy Days” (adapted from “Nakenai Kimi e no Love Song” by Maeda Nobuteru), and “She’s So Far Away” (adapted from “Romantetsudo Satetsuhen” by Tanimura Shinji) have remained on my playlist next to the Japanese originals for decades.
Upon graduating from the academy, I stopped listening to Cantopop. Years later, in Honolulu, on a weekend trip to the Leeward coast, a friend introduced me to N, a Cantonese speaker whose family originally hailed from Hong Kong.
On the white sandy beach of Ma’ili, N played several Cantopop songs on the boom box and was astonished to hear me sing along almost accent-free. The truth is I prefer singing in Cantonese because its pronunciation most closely resembles ancient lyrical Chinese, and its grammatical structure retained a succinct specificity no longer found in modern-day Mandarin.
I saw N with some regularity thereafter, often in a large group, a few times just the two of us, until I moved away from the island. Every time we met, N endeavored to share more of his cherished Cantopop artists and singles with me. As such, I was brought up to speed enough to add the genre back to my playlist.
I gravitated toward talented female artists in this period, especially those with a talent for arousing controversy. Sammi Cheng, Miriam Yeung, and their soulful renditions thus reentered my life.
Later, I discovered “grassroots diva” Kay Tse on my own, whose “Zhu Ying-tai” (an examination of the current state of gender equality/gender-based violence by reflecting on the legendary journey of the heroine from The Butterfly Lovers) and “Song of the Year” I obsessively kept on repeat for months at a time.
N’s CD player was not the only place where I heard Cantopop on O’ahu. The genre permeated the air whenever I grocery shopped with my mother in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Although Asian spices, condiments, and fresh produce are indispensable to my and my family’s cooking, I am not a fan of procuring them from America’s run-down Chinatowns — even the Honolulu version, which had once provided crucial support to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Chinese Republic.
On the other hand, Mom always felt at ease patronizing Chinese-owned shops and befriending the proprietresses despite not speaking a word of Cantonese, the official language of old-fashioned Chinatown. While waiting for her to meticulously select the most attractive Big Island papayas, mangoes, or the liveliest bunches of rambutan, I identified the background music playing in different stores.
Time flies. Our mother-daughter duo has grown into a tri-generational team with little ones in tow, and we’ve relocated to frequent Boston’s Chinatown, plus a couple of smaller yet more diverse Asian enclaves in the adjacent suburbs. Mom now closely watches the available stock of Toisan cauliflowers because her grandchildren love how she prepares them. What has not changed is the BGM when we shop — mostly Cantopop oldies that I still recognize.
Next Friday marks this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival, a celebration of harvest on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month, and an occasion for moon appreciation and mooncake consumption. “May We Last Forever” (但愿人长久), sung by both the prolific Jacky Cheung and Faye Wong — the latter a fellow Beijing native who has moved to Hong Kong to pursue her career and learned to perform in Cantonese — is a must-listen on this festive day.
Its lyrics are from the poignant poem “Prelude to Water Melody: How Long Will the Full Moon Last” (水调歌头·明月几时有) by Su Shi, one of the best-known Song-Dynasty (AD 960–1279) poets. In 1983, Taiwanese songwriter Vincent Liang composed the melody for its debut by the renowned Teresa Teng, with little inkling his finished product would start a tradition of its own.
Please treat yourself to a sweet serving of Cantonese-style mooncake on Friday. My family will venture into the heart of Chinatown again to get the type filled with jujube paste and a salted egg yolk. Should you have loved ones in company that night, remember to step outside, gaze up, and put on “May We Last Forever” or another Cantopop classic of your choice in the full-moon-lit background.