Five lectures on longing, diaspora, and the voice that crossed every border — from Teresa Teng's cassette tapes smuggled across the Taiwan Strait to GEM's stadium Mandopop. The music of a culture that has always been, in some sense, away from home.
The singer whose cassette tapes crossed the political border that her body never could — and what it means when a popular song becomes the most powerful form of soft power in modern Chinese history
In Chinese poetry, the moon has been the symbol of longing for more than a thousand years. Li Bai's 靜夜思 — “Quiet Night Thought”, written in the 8th century — describes a traveller looking at moonlight on his bed and mistaking it for frost, then raising his eyes to the moon and lowering them to think of home. The poem is four lines. Every educated Chinese person knows it from childhood. The moon represents not beauty or romance in the first instance but absence — the distance between where you are and where you belong.
Teresa Teng understood this. Her most famous song — 月亮代表我的心, “The Moon Represents My Heart” — uses the moon not as metaphor for a lover but as witness, as constant, as the thing that can be seen from everywhere and belongs to no particular place. The song is simple. The melody is uncomplicated. And it crossed every border that 20th-century Chinese political history had drawn, because longing does not require a passport.
The Chinese word 鄉愁 (xiāngchóu) combines 鄉 (xiāng, home village, native place) and 愁 (chóu, sorrow, melancholy). It is usually translated as homesickness or nostalgia but carries a specific charge that neither English word quite captures: the longing for a place one may never return to, or a place that may no longer exist in the form one remembers, or — for the children of exiles — a place one has never been but which is nonetheless home. This condition is not incidental to modern Chinese popular music. It is its primary emotional subject. Teresa Teng's parents fled mainland China with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces in 1949. She grew up in Taiwan singing about feelings her family embodied.
The People's Republic of China officially banned Teresa Teng's music as “yellow music” — the Chinese term for decadent, bourgeois, politically corrupting popular culture. The ban was consistent with the Cultural Revolution's categorical rejection of sentiment, romance, and any music that suggested the individual's inner life mattered more than the collective project. But the ban was unenforceable. Cassette tapes of Teresa Teng's recordings circulated throughout the PRC on the black market, traded and copied and played late at night when no one was supposed to be listening.
The joke that circulated in China during the 1980s Reform era was straightforward: 白天聽老鄧，晚上聽小鄧 — “Listen to Old Deng [Xiaoping] by day, listen to Little Deng [Lijun, Teresa Teng's given name] by night.” The two Dengs ruled different registers of Chinese life simultaneously — Deng Xiaoping the public world of politics and economics, Teresa Teng the private world of feeling, longing, and the emotional life that official culture refused to acknowledge.
When China began opening in the 1980s and Teresa Teng's music became semi-officially tolerated, the response from Chinese audiences was overwhelming. People who had spent years listening in secret suddenly found they could listen openly. The music hadn't changed; what had changed was the political context that had made their listening illicit. The songs were exactly as they had always been — simple, direct, emotionally honest about experiences the state had tried to prohibit.
Teresa Teng was not only a Taiwanese and Chinese cultural figure. She was a major Japanese pop star, performing and recording under the Japanese reading of her name (Teng Lijun becomes Teresa Teng in Japan, where she recorded exclusively in Japanese for much of the 1970s). She navigated between markets — Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Southeast Asia, eventually mainland China — in a way that was itself a form of diaspora existence: perpetually performing identity, always slightly elsewhere.
She died in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on 8 May 1995, from a severe asthma attack. She was forty-two years old. The cause of death was ordinary. The grief that followed was not. On both sides of the Taiwan Strait, in Japan, in Hong Kong, in Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, the mourning was genuine and immense — the grief of people who had understood their longing through her voice and found, on the day it stopped, how much of their own emotional life they had been carrying in her music.
Leslie Cheung, Anita Mui, Beyond — and the 1997 shadow that fell across every record made in the decade before midnight on June 30th
Hong Kong has always understood itself as a city on borrowed time. The phrase — borrowed time, borrowed place — was used by the writer Han Suyin in 1959, and it became the city's self-description for the following four decades: a place whose continued existence depended on arrangements that could, in principle, be renegotiated or revoked. The handover of sovereignty from Britain to the People's Republic on July 1, 1997, was the scheduled end of the borrowing. Everything that Cantopop made between 1984 — when the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed — and 1997 was made in the knowledge of this approaching deadline.
Stuart Hall's theorisation of diasporic identity describes a self that is never fixed, always in negotiation between the culture of origin and the culture of settlement, between the past that is remembered and the present that demands adaptation. Hong Kong identity is diasporic in this precise sense — shaped by waves of migration from mainland China, by British colonial administration, by proximity to Taiwan and Southeast Asia, by its own specific history of trade and displacement. The Cantopop of the golden era is the music of this negotiated, plural, contingent identity. It is not Chinese music in any simple sense; it is Hong Kong music — a distinction that became politically charged as 1997 approached.
Beyond were formed in Hong Kong in 1983 by vocalist and guitarist Wong Ka Kui, who understood the band's music as explicitly political — unusual in Cantopop, which tended toward romance and entertainment rather than social commentary. In 1990, Wong Ka Kui visited Africa and was moved by what he learned about Nelson Mandela, then still imprisoned. He wrote 光輝歲月 (Glorious Years) about Mandela's struggle — the refusal to surrender dignity in the face of systemic oppression, the light that survives in the worst circumstances.
Hong Kong audiences heard the song as being about themselves. The correspondence was not subtle: a people living under a system that did not represent them, facing a future they had not chosen, maintaining cultural identity against political pressure. Beyond had intended to write about South Africa. They had accidentally written the anthem of the handover generation. When Wong Ka Kui died in Tokyo on June 30, 1993 — exactly four years before the handover, on its future anniversary — the song became a monument.
Leslie Cheung (張國榮) and Anita Mui (梅艷芳) were not the same kind of artist. Leslie was from a middle-class family, educated partly in England, possessed of an aesthetic sophistication and an ambiguity of gender presentation that was genuinely unprecedented in Chinese popular culture. Anita came from poverty — her mother ran a flower stall outside a cinema — and had been performing since she was four years old, her voice carrying the experience of a childhood spent at the margin of survival. What they shared was a quality of absolute commitment to the performance, a sense that the stage was the place where the fullest version of the self could exist.
They were close friends. Anita sang at Leslie's funeral in 2003. Then she died, of cervical cancer, eight months later, on December 30th. In a single year, Hong Kong lost its two greatest cultural figures — and did so in a year already marked by SARS and the July 1st protests against Article 23. 2003 was Hong Kong's terrible year, the year the city understood what it was losing.
On April 1, 2003 — April Fools' Day — Leslie Cheung stepped from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. He was forty-six years old. He had been suffering from depression, a condition he had discussed privately but that his public image had never acknowledged. Initial reports were disbelieved because of the date; people assumed it was a hoax. When it became clear it was not, the disbelief became grief of a particular intensity — the grief of people who felt they had not understood what was happening to someone they loved.
Leslie had been, among other things, the most openly gender-fluid major star in the Chinese-speaking world — his 1997 Crossover concert, staged in the months before the handover in elaborate gowns designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, remains one of the most significant statements of queer identity ever made in a Chinese cultural context. He did not use the language of queer politics; he simply performed as he was, in front of 50,000 people, in the city that was about to change. The concert was understood, correctly, as a statement about Hong Kong identity at least as much as personal identity.
Born in Beijing, made in Hong Kong, accountable to nobody — the most artistically serious figure in Cantopop — Chungking Express, the Cocteau Twins, the Cranberries, one extraordinary year
Faye Wong did not want to be a Cantopop star. She wanted to be herself, which turned out to be more interesting than any Cantopop persona her record company might have invented. Born in Beijing in 1969, she arrived in Hong Kong at age seventeen and began performing as Shirley Wong — a stage name her label chose, compliant and forgettable. Within a few years she had reclaimed her own name and begun making records that nobody in the Cantopop industry quite knew how to categorise or market.
In 1994, Faye Wong released 胡思亂想 (Random Thoughts) — an album whose title translates roughly as “wandering thoughts” and whose cover said everything: no photograph of the singer, just overlapping text in partially-formed Chinese characters reading “no new images” and “no photo booklet.” It was the first of her albums to feature her Mandarin name 王菲 alongside the Cantonese. And its content was a deliberate act of aesthetic declaration: a Cantopop album built almost entirely on Western dream-pop, containing two Cocteau Twins covers and one Cranberries cover.
The title track “胡思亂想” itself covers the Cocteau Twins' “Bluebeard” from their 1993 album Four-Calendar Café. A fifth track covers another Cocteau Twins song from the same album. And 夢中人 (Dream Lover) covers the Cranberries' 1992 debut single “Dreams” — Dolores O'Riordan's floating, barely-there vocal over a guitar that seems to dissolve rather than play. Faye Wong sang her own Cantonese lyric over the arrangement and found in it exactly the quality of emotional indirection she was looking for: feeling without explanation, presence without declaration.
Then Wong Kar-wai cast her in Chungking Express, also 1994. Her character in the film is obsessed with the Cranberries' “Dreams” — the very song she had just covered — playing it on repeat in her tiny apartment and mouthing along while she cleans. She also plays “California Dreamin'” at high volume. The character is a young woman in Hong Kong who wants to be somewhere else — not unhappily, but constitutionally; someone for whom the present location is always provisional. The use of the same Cranberries song, diegetically in the film and as a cover on the album, released in the same year, by the same artist, collapses the distinction between the performer and the character entirely. Faye Wong was not playing someone who felt that way. She was that person.
The Cocteau Twins and the Cranberries are not obviously related bands. The Cocteau Twins are Scottish, abstractionist, the voice as pure texture, Elizabeth Fraser singing in a language she appeared to be inventing. The Cranberries are Irish, much more direct, Dolores O'Riordan's voice urgent and clear. What they share is a quality of emotional float — music that carries feeling above the level of lyric, that refuses to pin down what it is about. This is precisely what Cantopop's mainstream idiom could not offer, and precisely what Faye Wong found in both simultaneously. That the same Cranberries song appears on her 1994 album and in the 1994 Wong Kar-wai film she starred in is not coincidence; it is the same sensibility operating in two forms at once. Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins also appears in the Trip Hop series as the voice on Massive Attack's “Teardrop” — the same quality of emotional indirection, found independently by Bristol producers and a Hong Kong singer, in the same year, without either knowing about the other.
Faye Wong's artistic conduct was, by the standards of the Cantopop industry, extraordinary. She reportedly told a photographer she “didn't smile for free.” She refused to perform at corporate events. She declined interviews that she considered pointless. She chose collaborators based on artistic rather than commercial criteria. In a music industry built on the management of image and the cultivation of a certain kind of approachability, she was systematically unapproachable — and became, paradoxically, one of the most beloved figures in the history of Chinese popular music.
Her relationship with Buddhism was not a PR exercise. She retreated to a monastery between albums. She named her daughter Leah — who was born with a cleft palate, for which Faye became an advocate — a name that sits outside any Chinese naming convention, a private choice made public. When she returned from retreat, she returned changed, and the music changed with her.
Two different models of surviving a culture's transition — the eclectic refuser of category and the craftsman who outlasted every trend by being simply too good to ignore
If Faye Wong represents the artist who transcends genre by refusing it entirely, Karen Mok and Eason Chan represent two other available strategies: the cosmopolitan who refuses categorisation through sheer breadth of reference, and the craftsman who survives by doing one thing so well that no era can make it irrelevant.
Karen Mok was born in Hong Kong in 1970 to a father from Shanghai and a mother from Hong Kong, grew up partly in the United Kingdom where she studied drama, and returned to Hong Kong to pursue parallel careers as an actress and musician. She speaks English, Cantonese, and Mandarin with equal fluency. She has recorded in all three. She has played in Hong Kong action films and international art cinema. She does not fit the Cantopop template and has never tried to.
Karen Mok's best-known album title is simply 我 — “I” or “Me,” the first-person singular pronoun. The choice is not accidental. In Chinese pop, the “I” of the song is usually a specific kind of subject: romantic, vulnerable, longing, defined by relationships rather than by self-determination. Mok's career has consistently interrogated this: who is the “I” who sings in Chinese pop, and does that subject have to be what the market expects?
Her eclecticism — moving between Chinese opera-inflected pop, jazz, rock, electronic music, film soundtracks — is not restlessness. It is a sustained argument about the self that cannot be reduced to a single genre any more than it can be reduced to a single cultural identity. She is Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, and none of them completely. The music reflects this with unusual clarity.
Eason Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1974 and has been releasing music since 1995. He is, by the consensus of anyone who takes Cantopop seriously, the greatest vocalist the scene has produced — possessed of a technical control, an emotional intelligence, and a range of expression that allows him to inhabit a song completely regardless of its genre.
Where the 1990s generation of Hong Kong stars — the so-called Four Heavenly Kings (四大天王: Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau, Leon Lai, Aaron Kwok) — represented Cantopop's peak commercial era, Eason Chan has outlasted that era by refusing to compete with it. He makes records that reward serious listening. He performs with the emotional commitment of someone who has something at stake. He has crossed from Cantopop to Mandopop without abandoning the Cantonese emotional directness that defines his best work.
The generation born after 1997 — making music for 400 million viewers and asking what survives when Cantopop's cultural gravity shifts permanently to the Mandarin-speaking mainland
Gloria Tang — GEM, 鄧紫棋 — was born in Shanghai in 1991, raised in Hong Kong, and made her first records in Cantonese before crossing to Mandopop and achieving a scale of success that earlier generations of Hong Kong artists could not have anticipated. She is not simply a Cantopop singer who found a bigger market. She is the first major artist to embody, in her career trajectory, the post-handover reality: Hong Kong as origin point, mainland China as primary audience, the world as eventual destination.
For most of the golden era, Cantopop held a specific cultural position: it was the prestige form of Chinese popular music, the sound that mainland Chinese audiences aspired to before and alongside Teresa Teng. Hong Kong's relative freedom — from the Cultural Revolution, from the political controls on the mainland — made it possible to make music that was more sophisticated, more emotionally direct, more connected to international currents than anything the PRC could produce in the same period. After 1997 and especially after 2003, this cultural gravity began to shift. Mandopop, produced in Taiwan and increasingly in the mainland itself, became the dominant form. The question for post-handover Hong Kong artists was: do you follow the gravity, or do you insist on the specificity of what Hong Kong is?
In 2014, GEM appeared on the mainland Chinese television talent show 我是歌手 — I Am a Singer — which at its peak was watched by approximately 400 million people per episode. She had been relatively well known in Hong Kong and among Chinese diaspora communities internationally; after her performances on the show, she was famous throughout the Chinese-speaking world in a way that few Hong Kong artists had ever achieved.
The show required contestants to perform well-known Chinese songs in their own arrangements, competing against established mainland and Taiwanese stars. GEM consistently chose to sing with full vocal commitment rather than the polished restraint that characterises much of the competition format. Her performances of songs including 我是歌手's signature pieces went viral in ways that crossed the traditional boundaries between mainland, Hong Kong, and diaspora audiences. She was doing something specific: bringing the Hong Kong tradition of emotional directness — inherited from Anita Mui, from Leslie Cheung, from Teresa Teng — into a context built for Mandopop's more measured register. The audience heard the difference and responded to it.
GEM's vocal power is not an isolated gift. It is the latest expression of a tradition that runs from Zhou Xuan's Shanghai cabarets through Teresa Teng's cassette tapes through Anita Mui's farewell concert through Faye Wong's Buddhist silence to this stage, this voice, these 400 million people. The emotion in the singing is not performance emotion. It is the accumulated emotional knowledge of a century of Chinese popular music — all the longing, all the displacement, all the 鄉愁 — carried forward by someone who was born in Shanghai, raised in Hong Kong, and now sings in Mandarin for audiences her predecessors could not have reached.
The moon that Li Bai saw from his bed in the 8th century, the moon that Teresa Teng named in her most famous song, the moon visible from both sides of the Taiwan Strait and from every city where Chinese people have made a life away from home — GEM sings under the same moon. That which follows is like to that which was before. The tradition lives in the voice that carries it forward.
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