Chyi Yu & Michelle Pan

Full Chinese title: “回聲 三毛作品第15號”

Translation: “Echo – Sanmao's Work No. 15”

Transliteration: “Hui sheng – Sanmao zuo pin di 15 hao”

Born in 1943 in Chongqing, China, Chen Ping emigrated to Taiwan in 1949, following the Communist victory over the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War. After a difficult adolescence, marked by her rejection of the rigid educational system imposed on the island by the Kuomintang, starting in 1963 she spent several years abroad, studying first in Spain and then in Germany.

The written record of the experiences she lived through while travelling the world, particularly in the part of the Sahara desert then under Spanish control, would make her the most important Sinophone writer of her generation.

Her first novel, “撒哈拉的故事” (“Stories of the Sahara”, published in Italy by La Nave di Teseo under the title “Un granello di sabbia caduto dal cielo”), became the literary sensation of 1976 in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.

For publication she chose the pen name Sanmao (三毛), inspired by the homonymous wandering orphan created in the 1930s by the celebrated cartoonist Zhang Leping (張樂平). From that moment on, everyone would know her by that name.

She returned to settle permanently on the island only in 1980, following the accidental death of her husband, the Spanish naval engineer José María Quero y Ruíz, with whom she had shared the journeys that inspired her work.

By the mid-1980s her name had become a cornerstone of Taiwanese culture: every student read her work, and her influence had long since spread beyond the literary world. In 1979, for instance, she wrote the lyrics for “橄欖樹” (“Gan lan shu”, “Olive Tree”) by Chyi Yu (齊豫), one of the great classics of Sinophone song.

Determined to develop her ties with the music industry, in early 1985 Sanmao approached Rock Records & Tapes, Taiwan's leading record label, presenting a series of poems to be adapted into love songs for an album to be entrusted to the industry's most important performers.

It was Chyi Yu herself who analysed the proposed lyrics, together with Wang Hsin-Lien (王新蓮), another well-known singer who was at that time setting aside her own career to focus on the role of producer.

While both women appreciate the literary content, they find the verses extremely difficult to set to music, since they follow no metrical scheme. They get in touch with the author, doubtful that any common ground can be found, but Sanmao surprises them by proving open and receptive to their proposals. After several exchanges, the project takes a completely different turn, becoming a concept album inspired by Sanmao's life.

Each lyric stands on its own, reading now as a love song, now as a meditation on the meaning of existence, but placed one after another they form a narrative that chronologically traces the author's biography, from childhood to adulthood, up to the uncertainty of the future.

Given the intimate, and therefore strongly feminine, turn taken by the work, it is decided to forgo male voices altogether: prestigious names such as Li Jianfu (李建复) and Jonathan Lee (李宗盛) are set aside. The songs will be performed partly by Chyi Yu herself and partly by Michelle Pan (潘越雲), another leading name at Rock Records & Tapes.

Pan was chosen not only for her popularity but also for how different her voice is from Chyi Yu's. While Pan sings in soft tones that move within the realm of pop music, Chyi Yu has a higher register that reveals the influence of both Western opera and Chinese folk tradition. Chyi Yu's style is ultimately more eclectic and sophisticated, but perhaps also less spontaneous: Pan serves as her perfect counterpart. Four songs are duets, four are performed by Chyi Yu alone, and three by Pan alone.

The album is introduced by a text written by Sanmao included in the liner notes, which is not set to music due to its complexity. Rather than an explanation of the work, it is a stream of consciousness describing the state of need from which the songs emerged:

The echo is a threat,

it digs deep into people's hearts, unstoppable,

asking only for confirmations.

Someone asks her: "Will you be able to remember all these things in the future?"

The echo tells her "yes, yes, yes, yes..." and she ends up crying.

Perhaps she did not actually live through it,

but there were slow, hallucinatory voices that whispered it into her ear.

When the echo pauses for a moment, she senses that all along she should have been doing something else, but she doesn't know what, she will never know what, she will never be able to know, and this is the reason for her sadness.

This is why she wrote "Echo," song after song.

And so the singing went on, ever louder and more persistent.

At the boundaries of love, only songs manage to speak of it; after all, unspeakable things have happened to her in the past.

So she lay down on the ground and cried, until redemption came back, carrying her far away.

In the dead of night, when she wakes, those voices keep breaking over her like the tide. But that's not what she wants; what she wants is dawn, a soundless dawn. Even though she longs for it, the echo won't let her go.

The album was recorded in 1985, with Chyi Yu, Wang Hsin-Lien and Sanmao serving as producers. Chen Chih-yuan (陳志遠), one of the local scene's eminences grises, was brought in as chief arranger, handling eight of the eleven tracks, while the team of composers is more varied, including Li Tai-hsiang (李泰祥, already Chyi Yu's trusted collaborator), Chen Yang (陳揚), Jonathan Lee - who found a way onto the project after missing his chance as a performer - and Wang Hsin-Lien herself.

"Hui sheng" stands among the high points of campus folk, the movement that emerged in Taiwan around the mid-1970s as a reaction to the Western world's rapprochement with Communist China: up to that point, the student world had had little interest in local music production, preferring the big names imported from the Anglosphere.

The discontent stirred up by a series of historical events unfavorable to Taiwan, such as the loss of its seat at the United Nations in favor of the People's Republic of China (1971) and Richard Nixon's subsequent visit to Beijing (1972), gradually pushed the local intelligentsia to give voice to its own culture. Campus folk thus took shape out of the Anglophone music imported up to that point, ranging indiscriminately from the most politically committed songwriting to the most lighthearted (among students, Bob Dylan and John Denver were equally popular), blending it with Chinese folk tradition. The movement soon became dominant, covering much of the Taiwanese music industry, with particularly varied results: everything from the most delicate acoustic song to pieces with orchestration derived from Western classical music, from folk rock to ballads influenced by Chinese opera.

"Hui sheng" further broadened the palette, pushing campus folk into territory hitherto unexplored, blending marching-band fanfares (the intro of "Gui wai"), harmonies influenced by Celtic tradition ("Mi", "Meng tian"), orchestral ballads in typical mandopop fashion [note 1] ("Qi dian zhong"), radio-friendly folk pop ("Fei", reminiscent of Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy"), but also structurally complex pieces, like the three that occupy the middle of the tracklist, averaging six minutes each: "Sha mo" and "Jin shi" are ambitious chamber folk experiments for piano and small string orchestra, over which Chyi Yu's voice soars with operatic tones, following non-linear melodic lines.

"Shuang" stands out for its originality: played entirely by Chen Yang on keyboards, it creates a kind of futuristic, transcultural folk music, in which one can glimpse ethereal tones close to the contemporary work of Ireland's Clannad, but also echoes of Chinese folklore. A song with an imaginative, cinematic quality (unsurprising, given that Chen Yang is one of the most important soundtrack composers in the Taiwanese industry), it isn't all that far from what Enya's solo singles would become, and could well boast a considerable cult following among new age listeners (it's no coincidence that, in the late Nineties, Chyi Yu would go on to collaborate with Suzanne Ciani).

Also worth noting is the extensive use of electronic keyboards, far from common on campus folk records of the era: the tracklist features analog synthesizers (the Roland Jupiter-8 and the Roland Jx-8P - the latter only just introduced to the market at the time of the sessions) and digital ones (the Yamaha Dx7), as well as electroacoustic pianos (the Yamaha Cp-80) and programmed drums (a Simmons emulator appears on "Shuo ji zi ji ting").

The stylistic and arrangement variety is matched by that of the lyrics, which range from lovesick yearning to enigmatic, metaphorical writing, by way of childlike nursery rhymes, fully showing off Sanmao's versatility.

"Fei" displays an almost conservative romantic narrative (the woman willing to give up everything for her partner), but should obviously be read in light of the depression afflicting the author following her husband's sudden death:

I'm not afraid to wait for the answer you won't give,

but my bags are packed and the suitcase is shut,

I'm about to leave.

This is the last night,

sitting face to face on a train with no destination,

I'll fly away tomorrow

toward a place without you.

The key is locked away in your heart, the plane ticket in my left hand, the passport in my right.

It's all a mystery,

a mystery I don't want to solve.

The journey ahead of me could be long,

our goodbye might not happen at the airport,

if you promise me a future

I'll be yours, I'll give up everything else.

“Sha mo” is a melancholy anthem steeped in symbolism [note 2]:

The longing for a life gone by spreads out before me.

Ah, a scrap of cloth yellowed by the sand.

While I'm captivated by this primordial scene,

my drifting heart slowly sinks into the dust.

The wind that howls in the sky sweeps away the road of no return,

and so the earth reveals its secrets.

Then the desert is no longer just a desert,

but it turns into a well.

Inside the well a pair of eyes made of water,

a pair of eyes made of water with a smile.

"Meng tian", which became the best-known track of the lot and a classic of Taiwanese music, ultimately draws on elementary, almost childlike metaphors (an element that is, moreover, common to folklore in many parts of the world), repeating them like a divinatory mantra:

In everyone's heart there is an acre of rice paddy,

in everyone's heart there is a dream,

every seed is a rice paddy in my heart.

What shall I grow there?

I'll plant a peach tree, a plum tree, the spring breeze,

when the pear trees blossom, spring returns.

This is an acre of rice paddy in my heart,

this is the dream in my heart that I cannot wake from.

The album hit stores on November 19, 1985, in vinyl and cassette editions, but it's the compact disc edition, pressed in January 1986, that truly made history: it was, in fact, the first CD ever released by Taiwan's music industry.

After this milestone, the careers of Chyi Yu and Michelle Pan would go on to enjoy success right up to the present day, reaching audiences in mainland China as well. Sanmao, on the other hand, would try her hand at cinema: in 1990, her novel "滾滾紅塵" ("Gun gun hong chen") was adapted into a film by director Yim Ho (嚴浩). The film kept its original title for Chinese-speaking markets, while it was released internationally under a faithful English translation: "Red Dust". It became one of the most awarded titles in the history of Taiwanese cinema, winning eight statuettes at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (臺北金馬影展), the island's top film honor. Paradoxically, the one thing that went unrewarded was Sanmao's own screenplay.

On January 4, 1991, the author took her own life at the age of 47. Rumors persist that the snub at the awards played a role in this tragic decision, but the cause should probably be traced back to the depressive disorder that, as already mentioned, had gripped her for some time. In any case, these are speculations and gossip unworthy of any serious account of her life, from which far more valuable lessons should be drawn — first and foremost, her ability to assert herself as a leading figure in a country that was, at the time, still under dictatorship and promoted a deeply male-chauvinist culture.

[note 1] Pop music sung in Mandarin Chinese. Musical currents sung in other varieties of Chinese, particularly Hokkien, would later spread in Taiwan, but at the time the Kuomintang banned any language other than Mandarin, for reasons of cultural identity. The ban did not affect Sanmao, however, since she originally came from a region of China where Mandarin was indeed the spoken language.

[note 2] We chose to translate the line "天地玄黃" as "primordial scene", to keep it consistent with the rest of the text, but it is actually an expression drawn from the "Book of Changes" (a classic Chinese text dating back to the 10th century BC), in which a world with yellow earth and a black sky is described: this would be the primordial form the world took before assuming the shape we know today.

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01/01/2023