songs-in-chinese-blog

[songs-in-chinese-blog]

To Look at the Past

My name is Mickey, and lately I’ve been looking at the past, my past, in particular. More and more I‘ve caught myself in involuntary retrospection, but what it was I was looking backward at, I can’t be sure. I grew up with a lot of Chinese melodramas under my belt. From the earliest, there have always been the stories that my mother read to me of Vietnamese folktales, and those inevitably include Chinese variants of characters. From early I was listening about stories of Hou Yi (后羿), the archer who shot down the other suns and left mankind with only the one, and Heng’e (姮娥), his beloved; stories about little local deities (土地公) that pop up here and there to bless children; stories about Nü Wa (女娲), the mother goddess who held up the Pillars of Heaven—little tales like these. And then there were the films and series that utterly captivated me as a child—and the music that went with them, too. To this day I can’t watch another Wukong adventures that weren’t filmed in the 90s; I still wish that Apple Music had old songs, like 原谅我过去不懂 (Forgive Me for Not Understanding in the Past) from the series (精卫填海) about Hou Yi that I watched in my first decade.

I’m not sure what I’m looking back at, precisely because these are parts of my past that are the most unanchored—located elsewhere (China) than where I was (Vietnam, Australia—my homes—as well as anywhere but). So I’m making this blog to translate some of these songs that I’ve come by (and will come by), both to learn Chinese (I’ve given up on this four years ago and am only coming back to it now) and to understand my fascination with these songs and series. The blog will be in a sort of spread format: songs and their translations (including pinyin); little blogposts about what I’m watching; little self-explorations (storytimes, if you will) about these. Hopefully I have the energy to keep this up. And hopefully strangers of the Internet will come by to leave me a thought or two as I embark on this.