Editor’s note: This bonus episode comes from director Chang Chao-wei’snew program Listen, the Island Is Singing: Taiwanese Folk Music, Culture, and Social Change. We invite you to listen!

 

Hello, I’m Chang Chao-wei. Today’s episode is our first bonus, something novel for me. First, what is a bonus episode? Although I am a heavy user of a certain famous young video platform, I never understood the term. I looked it up on Baidu and learned that in Chinese it means a side story.

I understand side stories—who has not seen My Own Swordsman? Whatever the label, it fits our program. Each bonus invites a guest to discuss the Taiwanese folk music they experienced, making it that person’s side story. Who is our first guest? No suspense: this is the Cheng Qing side story. Professor Cheng has created two Vistopia programs.

My connection with Professor Cheng came through The True Nature, my documentary on Master Sheng Yen. He repeatedly invited it to screen in Shanghai and hosted post-screening discussions that I attended. We are both Buddhists, though Cheng practices more diligently. His recent programs Introduction to Buddhism and The Diamond Sutra have both been popular.

At a later meeting, he asked me to sign a book. To my shock, it was my own Who Is Singing Their Own Song? A History of Taiwan’s Modern Folk-Song Movement in the 1970s, long out of print. We had a second shared interest: Taiwanese folk music.

Given these layered connections, I invited him to our first bonus episode to discuss his relationship with Taiwanese folk music, how people in mainland China first received it, and its influence. We recorded in a Shanghai tearoom where we often meet.

By coincidence, an unquestioned senior star joined us that day: an actor, director, and singer who personally experienced the folk-song movement. Do you know who? Sylvia Chang.

She intended only to listen to our discussion, but in the second half I handed her a microphone. What side story will the three of us create? Please listen patiently from beginning to end.

 

00:04 Mainland listeners discovered Taiwanese folk music through cover versions

01:48 Teresa Teng: folk music as an outlet for personal liberation

03:35 Understanding modern Taiwan through music history

07:34 Taiwan’s Chinese cultural tradition is also partial

09:26 Who am I under the influence of Western culture?

13:42 When the mind is unsettled and life has no center

14:56 Where should our thought go?

17:07 The good things found on records

18:58 The split between intellectuals and musicians

21:24 Vaina: how can music express the local?

25:04 The contest among elite, political, and folk cultures

28:07 Mahayana and early Buddhism: what Buddhist wisdom offers cultural creation

33:16 Bob Dylan: music fills an empty place in the heart

34:40 Lo Ta-yu had never visited Lukang when he wrote Lukang, the Little Town

40:18 Encounters in life require few explanations

44:14 Highly civilized societies suppress human expression

46:20 What is plurality? Face your feelings and sing your own song

50:04 My Deskmate: how do we express our experience of life?

51:43 Cultural difference fragments inner identity

53:15 Nature, cities, and modernization: folk music reflects life’s basic questions

55:05 The Olive Tree: many moving songs resist classification

55:41 Where Have All the Flowers Gone: folk music tells human stories

58:07 We use music to express our own lives

 

Sylvia Chang: Childhood

Zhu Fengbo: The Olive Tree

Bao Meisheng: Little Jasmine

Lo Ta-yu: Lukang, the Little Town

Bob Dylan: Blowin’ in the Wind

Liu Chia-chang: Plum Blossom

Tsai Chin: A Dream Boat Sailing Far Away

Hu Te-fu: Child on the Buffalo’s Back

Pete Seeger: Where Have All the Flowers Gone