lovers' tears

Tsai Chin in《青梅竹馬》(Taipei Story; 1985) by Edward Yang

because i'd rather give folks flowers while they're still around, here's celebrating 蔡琴 Tsai Chin, the legendary Taiwanese songstress and sometimes actress. my favourite film role of hers is in《青梅竹馬》(Taipei Story; 1985) by the late 楊德昌 Edward Yang, who she married soon after its filming. in this overlooked, atmospheric portrait of a childhood romance crumbling amidst capitalism, Tsai plays the quintessential career woman, held back by her past while forging ahead in the brave new world of New Taipei (and New Taiwanese Cinema). her perfectly coiffed, wavy hairdo threatening to come undone in the rooftop wind, those '80s sunglasses and spectacles alternately obscuring and highlighting her bad-luck mole, that disaffected look on her face, suppressing horrible fears, as she stares out of another office window...perfection.

today i got hung up on one of Tsai Chin's classic songs,《情人的眼泪》(Lovers' Tears), particularly the live version above. from at least 14 years ago, she prefaces it by sharing that this song still evokes deep emotions in her, so much so that she often skips performing it. but the feeling from singing it is addictive.

it's a deceptively simple number, as so many of the best songs go. just three verses, four lines each, with a coda, repeated twice, like a distilled, haunting poem.《情人的眼泪》, of course, is about the end of love, like most sentimental Chinese music. but what makes it stand out is the special resonance and vibrato in her voice (cinematically best captured in that scene in Infernal Affairs): she possesses a rare range of voice that could go up to Teresa Teng–like high sweetness, but blossoms in the lower contralto region, where she extends Chinese vowels (韵母) and makes them sing, plumbing the depths of sorrow.

in each verse, "Lovers' Tears" employs the rhetorical question: from "为什么要对你掉眼泪?" (Why should I shed tears for you?), repeated twice, to "你怎舍得说再会?" (How could you bear to say goodbye?), the latter even more pitying as parting comes when "Spring flowers are in bloom" (春花正开). the answer to each question is so painfully obvious, the departed lover's obliviousness, blindness, uncaringness stings: respectively, "你难道不明白为了爱?" (Don't you understand it's for love?) and, finally, a plea: "你不要忘了我情深深如海" (Don't forget my deep love, as deep as the sea).

it's funny typing out the English translations of the lyrics: they seem so trite, so sappy. but maybe that's one of the marks of a great singer: selling sap, making it true. (there's also an overwhelmingly sentimental quality to modern Chinese-language creations that's all but unavoidable.) i also love how, unlike many singers who'd rather hide these "flaws", Tsai uses the scraping, guttural quality of her bottom register and the ragged sound of her breath (around the 5'39" mark) for further emotional resonance.

listening to Tsai Chin on and off over the years, i treasure most her quality of singing as if holding back tears. in her pregnant pauses, artful vibrato, and her high, climatic drama, her voice—beautifully aged over the years—reminds me that, like this song, "只有那有情人眼泪最珍贵 / 一颗颗眼泪都是爱都是爱" (Only a lover's tears are precious / Every single tear is love, all love).

"love & its opposite"

quick note in praise of a song that's been on my mind recently, Aretha Franklin's "Angel" (1973). i admire, so much, its balance of pure pain and pure grace: how her howl of "there's no misery / like the misery i feel in me" is counterweighted, and softened, by the chorus of back-up singers, like voices of comfort, like the aunties who will be there for you in times of need, like the words we speak to ourselves: "(you'll meet him / now don't you worry / keep lookin' / and just keeping cookin' / he'll be there / now don't you worry)".

to anyone out there who has been seeking for love for so long, whose "heart is without a home": it will come, and you know what? even if it doesn't, you will be alright, because you love yourself.

the fact that Aretha's sister, Carolyn, cowrote this number of faith and devotion, simply doubles my love of it. Aretha references her conversation with Carolyn in her spoken-world introduction—"'Aretha, come back when you can / i got something that i wanna say' / ...she said, 'you know? / rather than go through a long, drawn-out thing / i think the melody on the box will help me explain'". how beautiful a sentiment, because, you know, there's so much that's better left unspoken, better felt than said, better implied than imposed, which also says so much about family relations, no?

it's an effortlessly transcendental song, in the way only Black pain and Black soul can convey. i treasure it so much.

FOTO: Jan Persson/Redferns/Getty Images

yelue - softscars

i must admit i wasn't fully convinced by Yeule, the SG-born, UK-based artist, when their previous album Glitch Princess (2022) brought them to prominence. i loved the Pixies-like hold-and-release dynamic of "Electric" (why it was never a single is beyond me), and the simple joy of "Don't Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty" (along with its inventive video), but the album as a whole lacked cohesion and solid substance. it left me distracted by their style, naming (after the Final Fantasy character), and Japanese presentation and online image, wondering if they were simply marketing gimmicks. were they another Gen-Z Asian who overcompensates for their only feasible identity in Western centres of power?

softscars (2023), their new album, corrects my misimpression, and then some. the 25-year-old Yeule (also a variation of Natasha Yelin Chang's Chinese name) has crafted a seemingly effortless, catchy, and multicoloured diary (or whatever kids call it nowadays), full of bodily fluids, healing, and ethereal happiness, an insight into what it must be like to be young nowadays. impatient with the very notion of genres, softscars Ctrl-Tabs from singer-songwriter territory to cyber glitch to L'Arc-en-Ciel-type stadium rock to ambient piano balladry. Chang, who also goes by Nat Ćmiel, lets you in, at a remove, into their hard-won fight for happiness. i'm surprised how a 1990s baby read my diary, with lyrics like "Only eyes like yours can see ghosts / Ghosts like me", "Some days I can't believe that I'm still here" and "I would still love you / Ten thousand years from now"; and distilled and transmuted such teenage sentiments into well-earned joy and release.

take "software update", for example: after a burst of guitars (she's an expressive player), a generation-defining line like "You're never alone / I'm inside your phone" is crooned, before her baby voice is transformed back and forth between digital territories. the guitars bloom into an expansive moor, and the most cliched of lines, "I love you, baby", somehow is delivered in a so particular and anti-Julie Andrews manner: "Twenty-five, traumatized / Painting white on my eyes / Handcuffs and hospitals / Are some things I despise".

i've been thinking of softscars in relation to another document of youth, Anthony Chen's The Breaking Ice (2023), whose film composer, Kin Leonn, happily, is a producer of Yeule's album. i can't imagine what it is like to be young now. i can't begin to imagine what it is like to have your body rebel against yourself in an age of "Technofeudalism" (Varoufakis), when Summer 2023 was the hottest-ever on record, when you're so poor and worse off than your parents and robots are really taking over, and it's so holistically hopeless to even begin to try. but i'm permeated with hope listening to softscars: whatever the relative challenges, what pure joy; what complete release! truly "Electric", it's fun that is cognisant; not end-times fun, but a type of resistance to doomism that a boomer like me feeds on, like a vampire, of unbroken, youthful, never-ending time.