The Zhus

I know I haven't posted here in a while. The reason for that is that I've actually started writing for the book instead of just writing for this blog. I'm a couple chapters in, and now I've reached a spot where I realized that I need to compile more information for a particular period of time before I can really write more. So that means more interviews with my dad and more learning about family history. More information to come, and I'll also try to put up a real post on here before too long.

I haven't posted to this blog in a couple weeks. One of the reasons for that is that I've actually been spending my time writing the book from which this blog sprang. I'm about one-and-a-half chapters in, and part of the first chapter includes a quick review of the history of Guangzhou. I'm using the my research in that area to build a Dipity timeline on the subject. It's not complete yet, but I'll keep working on it a little bit at a time and maybe start adding tidbits about the Zhu family into the timeline when I get to more recent time periods.

A few days ago, I was poking around in the iTunes Store for something new to add to the collection of podcasts on my iPod. I had caught up with the long-running, outstanding The History of Rome series, as well as the not-as-long-running-but-also-outstanding The History of China series, and I only had a scant two episodes left in the BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects. Out of curiosity,  I checked to see what kind of Cantonese podcasts were on iTunes and stumbled across a 27-episode historical novel about Xiang Yu, a prominent military figure who vied for control of China in the late 200s B.C. in the wake of the collapse of the Qin Dynasty. The program aired on a radio station in my hometown of Guangzhou a few years back, and someone had thought to add it to iTunes a couple years ago.

I was hooked five minutes into the first episode, not so much because of how great the story is but because of how it was told. While the program is a bit more structured and polished than a conversational-style podcast, no one would mistake this for a mere dramatic reading of a book or script either. The main voice was more village storyteller than narrator, as he spoke in a very colloquial manner and told the story with more than a little dry sarcasm and dramatic flair. When recounting dialogs between characters, he would do different voices for each part, and every now and then he would interrupt the story and explain something further to put it in a present-day context. He wasn't merely reading a book to you, but instead was talking to you as if you were just shooting the bull with him by a campfire and listening to him regale you with a tale about the rise and fall of a great historical figure. It makes for a very intimate connection and really pulls you into the story.

One of the reasons this program appealed to me so much is the fact that it instantly brought back fond memories of one aspect of life in Guangzhou back in the 1980s. At a time when the Chinese economy was just starting to emerge from the turbulence and stagnation of the previous decades, television sets were still not yet a common-place household item, and radio remained the primary mode of entertainment for a huge portion of the population. One of the most popular parts of the daily radio schedule was this type of storytelling. Basically, it's the transplantation of an ancient oral tradition -- which dates back to before the Qing Dynasty -- from the teahouses, where it had been widely practiced, to the radio realm. Narrators took novels, usually about historical personages or events, and retold them in a colloquial and colorful manner, and it was a huge hit with listeners as people tuned in every day. Think of it as sort of the equivalent of an American family gathering around the radio after dinner in the 1930s and 40s, except this was happening a few decades after that cultural phenomenon had faded away in the U.S. and at a time when America was already singing "Video killed the radio star."

The most beloved and well-known practitioner of this craft on Cantonese radio from the 1980s was Zhang Yuekai. Every day at noon and 6 p.m., my grandmother and I would sit by our old transistor radio during lunch or dinner and wait for Zhang to come on for his performance. He'd begin every broadcast with "Picking up where we left off last time ...", except the Chinese expression (原文再续，书接上一回，话说) is much more poetic. We would hang on every word, and when that day's broadcast was over, we eagerly awaited the next day's performance, even though in the case of many of these novels, we already knew how the plot goes. The point was not to find out how the story turned out, but to hear it told by a master of the craft of storytelling. I think this excerpt from an entry on the Chinese version of Wikipedia about Zhang's performance is pretty spot-on:

For the old people in Guangzhou, Guangdong Radio Station evokes nostalgia, just like seeing a rice noodle shop, ice cream shop, or bakery on an old street might.

For four years from 1983 to 1987, Zhang Yuekai, who along with Liu Lanfang were known as "Liu of the North and Zhang of the South", recounted novels in Cantonese, such as "Water Margin", "Three Kingdoms", "Warriors of the Yang Family", "Mao Zedong in His Later Years", and this became a program that people in Guangzhou followed religiously. How many "old Guangzhouers" in the Xiguan area of the city remember rushing home to catch his recount of ancient tales? Their devotion can only be described as "forgoing sleep and forgetting meals." Mr. Zhang's performance showcased the whole range of his voice. He could sound strong and arrogant, or slow and steady, or angry and saddened, or smooth and harmonious, or snappy and decisive, or full of joy. The vivacity of his voice is something that could be felt but not explained. His opening line, "Picking up where we left off ... ," still echoes in the memory of the old Guangzhouers.

The podcast I discovered on iTunes continues this great tradition, even adopting Zhang's opening line for each episode. Of course, since it's being told in a colloquial style, there are elements in there that reflect how the times have changed from the 1980s, such as an occasional English word or phrase being thrown in, just as it's now often done in normal conversation in China. After just a couple episodes, I found myself "forgoing sleep and forgetting meals". Well, maybe not quite that far, but I have been listening to this program every chance I get, whether in the car, on the bus, or when I'm just going out for a short stroll during lunch. Nothing else on my iPod has hooked me like this has, and it has rekindled my appetite for such storytelling. The only drawback is that at the rate I'm going, I'll soon be done with these 27 episodes. To that end, I went searching for recordings of Zhang's performances, and to my delight, I found a whole stash of them in MP3 format. We're talking about novels that can be as long as 150-some chapters, so I've found a supply that'll last me a good while. Here's hoping we'll see more of such programs. I think they are a great fit for the episodic, conversational-style format that we are becoming more and more accustomed to with the proliferation of podcasts, and perhaps new technology will help breathe new life into an old art form.

NOTE: This entry is cross-posted on my other blog.

When you're talking about GDP. Check out this neat interactive graphic from The Economist comparing individual provinces in China to countries in economic terms. My home province of Guangdong leads China in GDP, exports, and population, but ranks a less impressive ninth in GDP per person, a category in which it, along with every other place in mainland China, lags way behind Hong Kong and Macau, which have two of the smallest populations on the list. So next time you hear people talk about how China has the world's No. 2 economy, bear in mind that it also possesses about a fifth of the world's population, and in terms of living standards, most of China still has a ways to go to match the Western world (see this list of countries by GDP per capita and compare where China ranks vs. Japan, which China just overtook in terms of GDP), and there's a huge disparity among certain regions.

(download)

Click here to download:

meet-uncle-kangtai-AppctEGkjjpkCwcdbxtk.zip (216 KB)

I haven't done one of these "Meet the Family" posts in a while, so here's a quick introduction to my uncle Kangtai. He's the sixth of the eight children from my father's generation of the Zhu clan. In the summer of 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, Uncle Kangtai and my father were sent to the countryside as part of the mandatory rustication program for youths who had "graduated." Although Kangtai was not yet 16 at the time and would've been only in the equivalent of ninth grade, he was classified as a high school graduate because of the tumult of the previous two years had shut down schools and created a logjam of students, so several years' worth of students were simply declared graduates and sent to the countryside so that schools would have space available for new students.

Uncle Kangtai worked in real estate during the 1990s -- Guangdong province was the site of the first experimentations with the housing market in China after the policies of reform and opening up were implemented. Uncle Kangtai endured the boom and bust of the housing market in Guangzhou, and now he owns and operates an art gallery and studio in Foshan, a city on the outskirts of Guangzhou. When we visited China in 2008-09, one of our most memorable experiences was the day when a large contingent of the Zhu clan went to Foshan, consumed ample amounts of alocohol over lunch, and then went back to Uncle Kangtai's gallery to watch Uncle Zhaohua, my dad, Uncle Kangtai, and Uncle Zhongping create some fine Chinese brush paintings while still tipsy and raucous :-)

Rice paddies in Guangdong Province (photo by pawightm)

I sat down for another two-hour session with my dad over the holidays, and this time, he talked about his experience as one of the millions of youths who were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. There are, of course, many facets to that subject, and I'll share some details focusing on one particular area -- food and cooking.

In the village that Dad and Uncle Kangtai went to, there were a total of 16 "rusticated youths" or "educated youths" (知青). They were to live together and cook together. I'll leave the "live together" part for another post. As for cooking together, that lasted about a month or so before the youths splintered into smaller groups due to differences in taste, the level of support from their families, and work ethics.

Playing with Fire

As for the cooking itself, the youths had to master wood-burning stoves rather than the coal-burning stoves they were used to in their homes in the great metropolis of Guangzhou. That learning process took a while, and in the beginning, they made a mess ... and a lot of smoke. There was so much smoke that they couldn't stand in the kitchen while stowing the fire. Instead, they piled up the wood and grass that were to be used for fuel in front of the stove, then stood back in the doorway, and tried to use a long bamboo pole with a pitchfork tied to the end to lift the wood into the stove, often with hilariously disastrous consequences. Aside from filling the kitchen with smoke, they would also occasionally drop a lit piece of wood from the stove and set ablaze the entire pile of firewood that they had stacked up in front of the stove. Until they got a handle on the stove, the youths' pots of rice were either undercooked or burnt and infused with a ... umm ... mesquite from the smoke rising out of fire.

Oh, and by the way, the fire wood and grass came from mountains that were a five-hour trek away.

Vegetables

While the rusticated youths never really lacked for rice, other dietary needs -- vegetables, oil, and particularly meat -- were in short supply. Vegetables generally came from each person's private plots. The villagers used their private plots to raise pigs or grow sweet potatoes -- a white variety that, instead of producing delicious tubers, was known for producing lots of leaves, which were then mixed with ground rice husks and used as pig feed. The rusticated youths, on the other hand, planted vegetables they wanted to eat -- leafy greens like bokchoy or cabbage, cucumbers, and sweet potato varieties that were actually good for human consumption. While their plots did produce some decent harvests during good years, it was tough going during droughts. While the peasants in the village would carry water from a distant pond to water their private plots, the rusticated youths -- not used to the backbreaking work of rice growing -- were often too tired to do so after spending the day laboring in the fields. So they either planted drought-resistant plants such as peanuts, or just gave up on the plot altogether and let the vegetables die. In years when they really didn't have the time or desire to tend their private plots, they gave the land to the peasants to use as they see fit, as long as the peasants grew some vegetables for them as well.

Oil

Oil was even harder to come by. To get oil in the countryside, one had to grow peanuts and then sell those peanuts to government clearinghouses, which would then give the seller a certain amount of oil stamps according to how much peanuts they sold. Peasants could also take their peanuts directly to a processing plant and have them turn it into oil and a crushed pulp that could be used as fertilizer. The rusticated youths, of course, usually didn't have a whole lot of peanuts to sell or to be converted into oil, so they often had to take some oil from home when they go back to Guangzhou to visit their families.

Of course, even the city wasn't exactly swimming in cooking oil. Each person typically got half a tael (a little more than half a pound) of oil per month, and families with children in the countryside would do whatever they could to save up a little bit of oil for their kids to take back with them. Also, when they went back to Guangzhou, the youths would sometimes visit the butcher's shops and buy hog fat, which they then fried and congealed into gobs of saturated goodness to be used as cooking oil.

Protein

Sources of protein were also scarce. The main source of meat for a peasant in the countryside is pig, but the meat the peasants consume doesn't come directly from their own pigs. Instead, they sell their pigs to the village store, which estimates how much meat each pig is carrying and gives the peasants the corresponding amount in pork stamps. The store slaughters pigs once a week and puts the meat on sale, and the peasants could then buy the meat with their pork stamps. The portions, though, were meager by today's standards -- one yuan of pork stamp got you just a couple ounces of meat.

The rusticated youths, however, didn't have their own pigs, so while a few kind-hearted peasants would occasionally share a few pork stamps with them after selling a pig, there was no consistent source of meat. So the youths had to be opportunistic:

• On their way to and from work in the rice paddies, they would look for small fish or shrimps in the flooded fields.
• While working in the rice paddies, they or the peasants would occasionally come across frogs. These made for a nice delicacy, but also set the youths up for a practical joke when some of the young men in the village told them about a large gathering of frogs at a nearby pond. The youths did indeed come back with a bucketful of hopping critters and started preparing them for dinner, only to find out from a village woman who happened to be passing by that these were, in fact, potentially poisonous toads.
• After school, kids in the village often went to the local streams to build makeshift dams to trap small fish, which they would then sell at a low price (a few mao, or tenths of a yuan) to the rusticated youths.
• Sometimes a peasant would have a "lagging behind piglet" -- a young pig that can't compete with its siblings for milk or had caught parasites and therefore couldn't grow as big as the others. These piglets had to be done away with at some point so as not to hinder the healthy pigs' growth. Whenever the rusticated youths spotted one such piglet, they would make nice with the peasant and try to buy it -- usually a little more than a yuan for a six- or pound-pound piglet. Slaughtering a piglet when you've never done it before, though, was a bit adventurous.
• When things got really desperate, the youths even resorted to killing and cooking snakes that they came across on the roadside.
• In the winter, the village would sometimes hold public auctions for animals killed by the cold -- typically ducks. The dead animals would be displayed in a public place, and the men of the village, who had relatively little to do in winter, would gather and bid. The rusticated youths, who got a little bit of financial support from their families in the cities, would pool their money together and send one person to these auctions. The bonanza was the time when they mustered together more than eight yuan -- a huge sum by their standards -- to win a 30- or 40-pound calf that had been killed by the cold. They had beef and cow parts for days after that, with no refrigeration.
• Occasionally, when they've saved up some money, the youths would hitch a bike ride or make the two-hour hike to a not-so-nearby hamlet that had a farmers market, where one could buy vegetables, fish, chicken, or eggs. For special occasions such as major holidays, the youths would go not to the hamlet's farmers market, but its animal hospital. The animal hospital serviced primarily pigs, and when the vets came across a pig that's beyond help, they would often buy it from the owner at a discount. The sick animal's organs are discarded, and the meat is never sold raw. Instead, the hospital would roast the pig whole and sell roast pork. It was from a sick pig, but it was roast pork, and it was cheap, and the rusticated youths were ecstatic to get it.

My research on 1980s Guangzhou led me to the discovery of a 1984 Chinese film called Yamaha Fish Stall (雅马哈鱼档). It's a story about a trio of young people who start a fish stall in early 1980s Guangzhou, just as economic reforms were encouraging many people to start their own businesses (although judging by the way the main character, Ah Long, dresses and some of the hilariously bad English subtitles on the DVD, you would swear there's a "Guangzhou Gigolo" subtext running through the movie). The film was a big hit, in part because it was an accurate depiction of early 1980s Guangzhou, and in part because it advocated for the economic reform policies and showed the results that could come from them.

Unfortunately, I was only able to find little fragments of the film online, and there are no English subtitles in any of them. If you are interested in getting a glimpse what life was like in my hometown during the early years of my childhood, as well as a chance to keel over laughing at the unintentionally dirty subtitles (we're not entirely sure about the "unintentional" part), I'd suggest buying the DVD.

The thing that led me to the film in the first place was an interview in one of my books with the author of the short novel upon which the movie was based. In it, he discusses the inspiration for the characters, the societal changes that were going on when the novel was written, and the impact of the film. Here's a translated excerpt:

Yamaha Fish Stall was created against the background of the rapid development of Guangzhou's private enterprises after economic reform and opening up.

After the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party, Guangzhou was a step ahead in reforms. Guangzhou's private enterprises began developing very rapidly. My deepest impression was that Guangzhou's streets were lined with peddlers selling T-shirts, socks, umbrellas, shoes. There were many peddlers. Even though the streets seemed very messy, they also conveyed a very vibrant feeling.

You couldn't see this kind of scene before. Guangzhou may be the land of fish and rice, yet you couldn't buy fish here. Back then, each family had several fish stamps per year, and still it wasn't guaranteed that you would be able to buy fish. Even if there were any for you to buy, it was salt-water fish or dried fish. Back then, you would be thrilled to be able to just buy a couple dace. ...

After reforms and opening up, control on fish prices were loosened up and you could buy fish anytime. At the time I was living in the dormitories of Guangzhou People's Hospital on Bailing Road. Next to the dorm there was a market, where people sold fish, roast geese, and there was a hair salon. It was all very bright and colorful. Among all those stalls, the most interesting was the fish stall, because the stall owner rode a motorcycle. On the back of the motorcycle was a water tank, which he used to transport fish to the stall. I still remember that his motorcycle wasn't a name brand like Yamaha, but rather a brand made in Chongqing. By today's standards, that fish stall couldn't be simpler. It was just a simple piece of colorful tarp with bamboo poles on the sides and a fish hanging from it as advertising. The fish was still alive and kept flapping its tail. This showed that society was slowly changing. Overall, society as a whole was beginning to become vibrant, and people's state of mind was vastly improved as well. ...

The inspiration for the main character Ah Long was one of my students. ... One day I was walking along the street when suddenly someone tapped my shoulder from behind. I turned around and looked, and it was one of my students from back when I was teaching in high school. This student didn't look like any special and didn't carry himself well. He said, "Mr. Zhang, I haven't seen you in a long time." I asked him what he was doing now. He said, "I'm doing pretty well. Let me take you out for dimsum." I tried to decline, but he said, "Mr. Zhang, you have to go. Let me take you to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum." In 1983, the Eastern Hotel was not somewhere that ordinary citizens could go, and to be honest I hadn't been there. So I asked him whether he had struck it rich. He told me this: "I'm living like a human being now." That had a big impact on me, so I went with him to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum. We talked over tea, and it was then that he told me he had started his own private business.

I was this student's home-room teacher. He used to have a problem: His conduct wasn't very clean, his performance wasn't good, and he didn't do well in school. But I still was very attentive toward him. I asked him what kind of work he was doing now, and he said he was selling fish. He said he could make up to 300-some yuan a month selling fish. Good heavens! At that time my salary was just 80-some yuan, and his income was four times mine. He said he was very grateful for my kindness toward him in the past, so that's why he wanted to treat me to dimsum. He told me some of his life experiences. At the time I thought, "This wayward kid has found a proper path, become a private entrepreneur selling fish, found a career, and found a pretty good situation for himself. To use his own words, he was living like a human being now. So I was very touched.

Actually, he represented the majority of the people who were starting private businesses. These young people's way of thinking isn't too high. To use my student's words, for them this is scrounging a living. But human beings -- if you can give them work, a legitimate job -- generally will strive upward. Human beings can change. People don't want to do improper, immoral things; it's only when they have no other way out. The problem was that our society didn't provide such a platform. That's why once the economic reforms and opening up were implemented, many people changed.

... 

Before I wrote Yamaha Fish Stall, I had already published a lot of work. ... Because I was publishing a lot of fiction at the time, my work was often published in the newspapers. ... Although there were a lot of people submitting their work, my submissions still were often published, such as essays, short stories, one-act plays. ... I drew upon my real-life inspirations and wrote Yamaha Fish Stall as a short novel.

Yamaha refers to the motorcycle, with a equipment box on the back. My thinking is relatively liberated. Even now I think my thinking was even ahead of the young people at the time. Liberation of thought is very important to a writer. So why use Yamaha? I was thinking: One, this name sounds good, very unusual, very strong. Second, Yamaha motorcycles is a foreign business. In our reforms and opening up, what we are doing is bringing in things from outside. Later, when we were making the movie, a well-known veteran editor reviewed the script and said the title won't work. But I insisted that it would. I said you can edit the story, but the title cannot change. So in the end they kept the title. ...

The draft of the novel was about 6,000 characters, and I submitted it to the Yangcheng Evening News. A well-known editor at the newspaper wrote me a letter after he read it and asked me to go to his office to discuss it with him in person. He said this story was about a fresh topic and full of life. However, the Yangcheng Evening News only had four pages for submitted content, and to run the entire 6,000-some characters would take up an entire page. So he suggested that I shorten the draft. I asked if it would be possible to run it on an entire page. He said, "You're not famous. How can we give you an entire page?" ... He suggested I condense the story to 3,000 characters. But I felt if I took out that much, the story would lose its flavor. He gave me a few days to think it over. A few days later, he wrote me a very long letter. I was so moved; he was such a dutiful editor. His handwriting was very neat, and he wrote about six or seven pages. His letter said that my view was correct, that to turn 6,000 characters to 3,000 will leave only the skeleton, without flesh or blood, without meaning. He suggested I turn this into a medium-length novel and submitted to the publishing house, otherwise such a good subject would be wasted.

After returning to campus, I collaborated with one of my students and turned Yamaha Fish Stall into a medium-length novel and submitted it to Flower City magazine. Later this novel received the inaugural Flower City Literary Award, and Flower City magazine's readership base was very large. An executive from Pearl River Films saw this novel and said it was very good.

At the time, Zhang Liang was a nationally known directory. When he saw this novel, he said I should turn it into a movie script because they would like to make it into a movie. Later, Pearl River Films put us up in their guest house to let us turn the novel into a script. We stayed for about a month, and the script was approved after only one round. It went very smoothly.

Zhang Liang's thinking was very liberated, very innovative, and he embraced new things. He suggested that this movie should be as authentic as possible, so we should use real independent shopkeepers as actors. ... Only the main character Ah Long and one other role used professional actors; everyone else was an amateur.

In using amateur actors, I felt Zhang Liang was very brave, very bold. This was no simple matter. What if they didn't do a good job and ruined the film? So everyone was still a little worried at the time. These amateur actors received one week of training. During the shooting, usually the director showed them how to do something, and then they just went along by feel, and in the process, they showed their authenticity.

...

After Yamaha Fish Stall was released, most people's reaction was pretty good. They held a film festival at Beijing at the time, and we showed this movie at Beijing University. It played nonstop from 7 p.m. one night to 6 a.m. the next morning. After the movie, many of the leading figures and famous directors on the Beijing movie scene, about 200-some people, all stood up and applauded for a long time. ... They said they had never seen a movie so full of life..This movie reflected our lives, our time. This story, these things were happening in Guangzhou. At that time Beijing had not yet had such scenes. Upon seeing this movie, they said it was as if they could smell the stench of Guangzhou's fish. They joked that it would be great when you can smell that in Beijing as well. More importantly, the movie let them experience something -- economic reforms and opening up. Back then the slogan was there, but there still weren't many tangibles and the people didn't have a deep impression of reforms and opening up. But movies are imitative, and this movie gave people a strong experience. At the film festival, Beijing University students said, "Guangzhou's present is our future. We love this kind of life."

...

Later this movie was even selected as one of the 100 most influential movies in the history of Chinese cinematography. ... Why? Because it was very representative. It was the first movie to reflect reforms and opening up and acted like a mile marker. Looking at it today, this film also had another special quality -- it reflected the lives of the Cantonese people during reforms and opening up in the early 80s. ... To understand life in Guangzhou in the 80s, to understand their attitudes toward life, you have to watch Yamaha Fish Stall.

...

Of course, there were dissenting opinions about the film at the time. Some said this movie was about money, and what is money? It's the source of all evil, and that this was a revisionist film. This showed that at the time people's way of thinking hadn't changed completely yet. I felt that such opinions were normal at the time, because people's views were still relatively traditional.

For a piece of work to be able to illicit such a big reaction from the audience and leave a deep impression, it's because of one of two reasons: One, it really is a classic, such as War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, and such. Second, some work can't qualify as classics, but they were created at certain key turning points in history and carried a big message. Yamaha Fish Stall became such a hit because it was created at such a turning point -- the key moment in China's shift from planned planned economy to market economy.

The previous excerpt I translated from the book of interviews with pioneers in Guangzhou's reform-and-opening-up period looked at one small Cantonese restaurateur's experience. This time, I'll offer a glimpse at one aspect of the cultural changes happening at that time by translating excerpts from another interview from the same book. This one is with Lü Nianzu, one of the earliest pop stars from this period. I still remember some of his biggest hits, including the title song from a TV series about the life of a famous Kung Fu master from the early 1900s. The gist of the TV series was basically: Awesome Kung Fu master defends his country's honor in a time of crisis by thoroughly and repeatedly pummeling cartoonish foreign devils from Europe, Russia, and Japan with his bare fists. Here's a video of the title sequence, with the song performed by Lü Nianzu, a stirring, nationalistic/patriotic, and incredibly catchy tune called "The Great Wall Will Never Crumble." 

And here's Lü Nianzu performing the song live on CCTV's Chinese New Year's Gala 1985, a performance that played a key role in making him a national star.

Lü Nianzu was special because he was among one of the first singers in mainland China to sing pop music in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, and during the 1980s Guangzhou was a hotbed for the burgeoning pop-music scene in China. Much of that, however, has disappeared since the 90s as pop singers who sang in Mandarin shifted north to Beijing, which offered a much bigger market, while those who sang in Cantonese moved south to Hong Kong and a potential international audience. Still, it is interesting to read about the early days of Cantonese pop on the mainland, which sprang up in the newly created music lounges that were a shiny novelty in China and an appalling sight for many with more traditional mindsets (singers walking around on stage with the microphone?! Perish the thought!).

Here's the interview excerpt:

When reform and opening up first began in Guangdong, there were many foreigners and out-of-towners who came to Guangzhou for business trips or to work, and most of them stayed at the Eastern Hotel. At the time, the Eastern Hotel was a pretty  high-class place, not a place that commoners could go into. Because reforms had just begun, in the entire city of Guangzhou there were basically no recreational facilities or venues. Even a high-class place like the Eastern Hotel didn’t have any recreational activities. Therefore when those people got off work in the evening, they were bored and could only sit at the hotel and stare at the ceiling.

In order to provide its guests with some decent recreation and diversion, the Eastern Hotel renovated its existing restaurant to create a music lounge where people could gather to drink tea and listen to live music. The new restaurant had a standalone stage and relatively modern audio equipment. During the day the restaurant served food, and at 9:30 at night, it turned into a music lounge.

The creation of the music lounge at the Eastern Hotel caused a big stir in Guangzhou and a lot of people wanted to go. But at that time, music lounge wasn’t something just anyone could attend. You must have a “homecoming certificate” to be able to buy tickets. A “homecoming certificate” is a special certificate that the government issued to Chinese in Hong Kong or Macao who were coming back to China to visit their relatives. After the Eastern Hotel, the second music lounge to appear was at the China tourism bureau’s Overseas Chinese Tower, because at the time many overseas Chinese who were coming back to visit were staying there. Therefore, in some ways, you can say that the music lounge grew out of trying to enrich the night life of the overseas Chinese who were coming back and the Chinese from Hong Kong and Macao who were working in China.

I remember that back then the Eastern Hotel charged five yuan for a ticket, and the Overseas Chinese Tower charged three yuan per ticket. At the time our monthly income was 36 yuan, so a five-yuan ticket was a very extravagant expense for many people back then. Nonetheless, there were a lot of people who came to listen to music. Basically you couldn’t buy a ticket on the day of the show.

When the music lounges first started, a lot of people couldn’t accept them. At the time they saw us as a scourge. For instance, in the past the microphone on stage was fixed in place. But it was different in the music lounge; you could hold the microphone in your hand and walk all around the stage. The newspapers made a big bruhaha over this. A lot of culture critics bashed us, saying we were learning the ways of capitalists. They felt that the stage is a dignified place and that it’s not dignified to walk around with the microphone. In addition, at that time the songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan naturally had a different style than those from China, so someone said the songs we were singing were “simply wasted notes.”

Later even the Cultural Department got involved and began to monitor and regulate the lounges, including imposing some restrictions on the performers' attire, on-stage demeanor, and song selection. For instance, for every five songs that a performer sings, at least one of them must be a folk song. Each night the Cultural Department also sent a small team to come check for violations. Fortunately, the lounges weren't subject to any really strict regulations.

At the time I was an actor in the Guangzhou Theater Group. The plays we performed included some songs, and I would occasionally do some singing. I remember singing in a play called “The Prodigal Son”. Perhaps because of my interest in music, in my spare time I would sing the songs from the plays and record it. Later someone discovered that I could sing pretty well, so they hooked me up with a gig at the music lounge.

Back then, you could make 10 yuan for each performance at a music lounge. At a time when our monthly salary was just 36 yuan, 10 yuan was a rather big figure for me, so it goes without saying that I was thrilled!

When we first started, because none of us were familiar with pop music, we performers looked everywhere to collect songs, such as some of the pop songs being sung by stars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and some Chinese songs from the 1950s. At that time the special economic zone of Shenzhen received the biggest direct influence from Hong Kong and Macao. When we went to Shenzhen, we saw a lot of Hong Kong TV shows. The first time I heard the Hong Kongnese sing a song in Cantonese, I was stunned. I had heard Cantonese operas, but had never heard a Cantonese song before. It was a duet by Luo Min and “Fei Fei”, and it was very pleasing to the ear, so I really wanted to learn. The songs I had heard up till then were basically all red revolutionary songs, and love songs like this was pretty rare, so they were a new sensation to me.

Because I had built a pretty solid musical foundation at the theater group, when I learned these songs and performed them in the music lounges, I generally did pretty well and was often the closing act. Speaking of learning the songs, there is also an unforgettable experience related to that. Back then learning the songs mainly involved listening to tapes, but in Guangzhou you basically couldn’t buy such tapes. A friend of mine, after she went to Hong Kong, used her first month’s salary to buy a tape player and several tapes of Liu Wenzheng for me. I was really moved. She really helped me learn so many songs and made it possible for me to leave an impression on the music scene.

As far as pop singers go, we were the first group in the nation who dared to take on that challenge. There was a lot of pressure, and my theater group also criticized me and cut my pay. But I wasn’t afraid of anything back then. Perhaps ignorance was bliss. I was trying to make some extra money to help the family, and that motivation kept me going. Typically, each night around 7 p.m. the theater group would stage a play, and the subsidy for each play was about four mao (0.4 yuan). The music lounges generally started at 9 or 9:30, so after the play, I would rush to the music lounge to sing. When I was a performer at the music lounges, it was a great help to my family. Each month I could make two or three thousand yuan. Back then 3,000 yuan was probably unfathomable to many people. Through that, I quickly became a “Man of Ten Thousand Yuan”. On our street, we were the first household to buy a color TV. At the same time, I was among the earliest people in Guangzhou to have a motorcycle.

Perhaps because I sang pretty well, Li Huayong, Chen Gaoguang, Chen Dong, and I were dubbed the “Four Kings” of Guangzhou, and you could say we were kind of famous in Guangzhou. After you got “famous”, all the music lounges wanted to hire you, so sometimes I would do three or four shows a night, and I’ve been to the Overseas Chinese Tower and the Overseas Chinese Restaurant. Sometimes it was tough running all around. …

…

Perhaps because everyone saw that music lounges were big money makers -- they were charging 10 yuan ticket -- a lot of restaurant and hotel owners saw this opportunity and opened music lounges. … In the blink of an eye almost all the hotels in Guangzhou had opened music lounges. More unexpectedly, this caught on at the Guangzhou Song and Dance Troupe, the folk music group, and other trade groups. Even the Guangzhou acrobatics group formed a pop music troupe. But the one that was the best and the most influential was still the Eastern Hotel.

Later, even the common citizens could buy tickets to listen to pop music. I remember the first time I performed at a venue that was pretty public -- it was at the Friendship Theater. It was also the first time they had invited a star from the music lounge scene to perform on a big stage. That really caused a huge stir in Guangzhou, and tickets were sold out quickly, because people had never heard pop music before. The day of the show, there were almost 10,000 people there, and my rendition of “Childhood” caused an eruption of screams, whistles, and applause from the audience.

The storm that was the Guangzhou music lounges caused rumbling around the country, because at that time, for a lot of people, walking around on stage with a microphone and singing pop music was very new, very hip, so a lot of people came from other places to Guangzhou to see this. CCTV also thought the music lounge was something new and came to Guangzhou to report on it. …

…

Back then the singers who were born in Guangdong generally tended to sing in Cantonese, because a number of them didn’t have very standard Mandarin accents. But I grew up in the north and lived in the south, so I was pretty fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. …

Later, when I began performing in the interior of the country, for some unknown reason, the people there loved to hear Cantonese songs. Perhaps they felt this was hip and that listening to Cantonese songs meant they were “with it,” even though nine out of ten of them couldn’t understand the songs. Because the lyrics, singing style, and pronounciation of Cantonese songs are very different from Mandarin, before I sang a Cantonese song, I had to briefly explain the lyrics to the audience. It's really hard to picture the craze for Cantonese songs back then, especially in the Hunan area. If you don’t have any Cantonese songs in your repertoire, you might as well not go there.

For me, singing was a very enjoyable thing. Later, I felt that my prospects for development in the theater group weren’t that great, and the market for stage plays was starting to wither, so I left the theater group and joined China Records. During this period, I went on numerous tours with the company’s performing troupe to various places in China and left an influence around the country. I also released a lot of albums, which all sold one or two million copies. Nowadays most stars would have done really well to sell 200,000 albums. I think perhaps the reason my albums sold so well back then was that piracy still wasn’t as rampant. Even though people were recording and copying cassette tapes back then, it wasn’t as well done as now. And back then, the common citizen could also afford a legit tape at five or six yuan each.

…

At the end of the 80s and early 90s, music lounges were gradually replaced by karaoke. Many of us in the first wave of lounge singers don’t perform anymore. … I sang for about 10 years and have also quit. In 1991 I left the music scene and went to Guangzhou Television Station and became a TV host. Even though I occasionally make an appearance on some CCTV “lookback” specials, I very rarely sing these days.

Most of Guangdong’s performers have gone elsewhere, and the locally produced music has gradually vanished. … Almost no one sings in Cantonese anymore. …

As for the reasons for the decline of Guangdong’s music scene in recent years, firstly, I think it’s related to our market. Even though there’s a big market, Guangdong performers can’t command big money for performances. Some of the famous stars from Beijing get 200 thousand yuan for an appearance, while a star from Guangdong would have done well to get 20 or 30 thousand yuan.

Second, I feel that there’s not much unity in the Guangdong pop music scene. There’s no unifying force. Many of Guangdong’s popular singers, songwriters, and composers have all gone to Beijing to build their careers, because Beijing’s market is bigger. It is, after all, China’s center of politics and culture. It not only has a lot of cultural resources, but has also gathered top talents from around the country. This is very advantageous, whether for individual development or the advancement of the industry.

...

I've started doing some research into China, and specifically Guangzhou, in the early to mid 1980s. It's a particularly interesting time period for me in part because it comprises half of the 10 years I spent in China. Of course, it also happened to be the first years of my life, so even though I lived in Guangzhou then, I really don't have a strong recollection of those days, much less an awareness of the socio-economic changes that were under way. And there were plenty of changes happening then. It was the beginning of reforms in economic policy and China's opening up to the world. Guangzhou, having been designated one of the first special economic zones, was on the forefront of the changes that would eventually lead to China's rapid ascension.

As part of my research, I've stumbled across a very interesting book. Its title, roughly translated, is "Recollections by Pioneers of Guangzhou's Economic Reforms and Opening Up". The book is a series of interviews with various people from all walks of life who were part of that first wave of changes spurred by the new economic policies in Guangzhou. I think I'll translate excerpts from some of the interviews and share them here, since they offer an interesting glimpse into how those nationwide changes in government and society were affecting the daily lives of individuals, which is the angle I'm trying to take with my book. The excerpts also shed some light on people's mentalities at that time.

I'll start with excerpts from an interview with Yong Zhiren, a man who opened a small eatery in Guangzhou in 1979 -- the year I was born. Yong is a member of a large group known as "zhi qing" (知青), or literally "knowledgeable youths". While the term in a general sense describes young people who have received high levels of education, it also specifically refers to students who, in the period from the 1950s through the 1970s, left the cities and settled in the countryside, either voluntarily or forced to do so by government policies. The irony is that the majority of people in this group actually only received middle- or high-school educations because of their often involuntary relocations. It's also a group to which most members of my parents' generation belong.

In March 1979 I left the countryside and returned to the city, going from a valley in Yanghong back to within the Guangzhou city limits. In order to make a living, many among us "zhi qings" began looking for our own work. I, too, went to the neighborhood living services bureau to submit a request to start a business and later received a business license. My original intent was to do something related to art, since painting and calligraphy were my interests and strengths. I wanted to use my specialty to earn money. However, the district I lived in, Xihua, was neither a cultural nor a commercial district, so my neighborhood committee suggested I open an eatery serving breakfast. This small district had many factory workers and students who needed a hearty breakfast, but there was only one breakfast shop, in a nearby restaurant, and every morning there were long lines at that shop. So I decided to open a breakfast eatery.

...

In the beginning I didn't know how to make breakfast items, so my kind neighbors patiently taught me how to cook congee and make rice noodles. My menu and prices were: Rice noodles without beef tendons, 1 mao (1/10th of one Chinese yuan, or about 1.5 cents) per plate; rice noodle with beef tendon, 2.5 maos per plate; congee, 1 mao per bowl. Because the food was good and the prices low, business was booming from the first day, and the noodle and congee quickly sold out. However, because I didn't make enough food the first day, I only made 3.7 yuan. The next day we managed things just right and quickly made more than a dozen yuan. At that time, the average monthly salary was only a few dozen yuan, so I felt there was a future in the restaurant business. Firstly, it would improve my life, and secondly it leaves me plenty of time to create art. I'm an educated man, so it would be a very productive and stimulating life to run a restaurant in the morning and then compose Cantonese operas and write essays in the afternoon.

...

My eatery kept doing better and better, and I faced the problem of not having enough help, since I had to not only make the noodles and cook the congee, but also bus tables and disinfect utensils. The mentality of those times was only slightly liberated, not yet completely liberated, so you couldn't hire more than seven employees. It's because Marx said hiring seven or fewer employees doesn't count as exploiting the value of others' labor, but rather still qualifies as socialism. Therefore in the beginning I was afraid to hire anyone. Fortunately the students who ate at my shop voluntarily came in small groups to help me bus tables. They said, "Uncle Yong, we'll help you." Every morning there were eight of them there to help. I tried to give them free breakfast, but they refused and insisted on paying. 

...

When I first started operating, I ran into the problem of not having enough coal. At that time we were depending on coal obtained through coal stamps from the government, but that was only enough for personal use, not for a business. Our earliest solution was to barter: Customers could trade one coal stamp for one plate of rice noodle with beef tendons and a bowl of congee. Some families that didn't cook breakfast themselves tended to have spare coal stamps, and they were willing to trade them for our food.

It went on like this for two years, then on August 28, 1981, the provincial secretary met with twelve young people from the province who had started their own businesses, and I was one of them. ... I recounted my experience to him. ... The secretary was very happy when he was done listening. He smacked the table, stood up, and said, "Great! Yong Zhiren, you are doing a great thing!" He told me that it's terrific that young people have the courage to start their own businesses, and that the party and the government want to help us get started. He felt that our private businesses weren't capitalist, but instead socialist. ... He even asked us what problems we encountered in our businesses. I told him about the coal shortage. The secretary had people from many departments there at the time, and he told each department to take care of us. From then on the government gave me a lot of help. My coal problem soon fell to the Yuexiu district office, and that department appropriated four tons of coal to me at once. The government even sent the coal in separate shipments out of consideration that my house was small and couldn't hold all that coal at once.

...

There was a derogatory name in Guangdong for private businesses -- "small-time peddlers". "Small-time peddlers" were not a respected group. At that time the common view around the whole country was that only working in a company was respectable, and that running a personal business was not honorable. In the beginning I also felt that way, since educated people have the pride that comes from possessing artistic skills. Later, my thinking gradually changed, and I felt that the career I pursued was an honorable one.