11 Pop music as postcolonial nostalgia in Taiwan

Jeremy E. Taylor

Taiwanese is trendy. Despite four decades of government policy designed to relegate the language to a position of cultural relic, Taiyu (‘Taiwanese’ — the local term for the Hokkien language in Taiwan) has become decidedly fashionable on the island since the early 1990s. The current trend has gone beyond a fad. County governments have introduced compulsory Taiwanese language courses into school curricula; government officials who once supported banning public broadcasting in Taiyu are now flocking to study it; and advertising companies are dubbing their commercials into it. In the space of just a few years, the Taiwanese language has shifted from a position of virtual invisibility to one of ubiquity.

Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in the unprecedented rise in popularity of Taiyu ge, or Taiwanese-language songs. Different in sound, style and origin from the Gangpai (Hong Kong school) Mandarin-language pop for which Taiwan has become marginally (in)famous in recent years, Taiyu ge have a history dating back to the 1930s and the era of Japanese colonial rule. However, popular songs that were sung and performed in Taiwanese were hard hit during the years of political repression under the KMT (Nationalist Party). Government propaganda portrayed the ‘dialect’ as uncouth and, by association, so was the music which used it. For years, the KMT government tried in vain to convince the world that it was the only legitimate government of China. Even popular music was to reflect this. Mandarin songs (sung in Guoyu, or the ‘national language’ of the Chinese Republic) were promoted at the expense of Taiwanese, Hakka and songs in other languages. Broadcasting of any form of entertainment in Taiyu was persistently restricted by the authorities to one hour per day (Winckler 1994: 31–3), and the music was eventually forced underground. Until the early 1990s, Taiwanese-language pop could almost only be heard on illegal radio stations or at makeshift booths in the night markets.

In contrast, numerous stars who once made their names as Mandarin singers are nowadays switching to recording in Taiwanese (Independence Evening News 29 March 1997). Others have given up on Mandarin altogether, using the Taiyu ge genre as a means by which to resurrect their careers. There is clearly more than enough financial incentive to do so.

Yet the increased presence of the Taiwanese language in the electronic media, and the popular music which makes use of it, is part of a wider social trend. Since the death of President Jiang Jingguo in January 1988, and the subsequent ending of the Jiang family dynasty that had ruled the island under martial law for the better part of forty years, cultural and intellectual freedoms have been gradually restored. Local Taiwanese, once taught to embrace ‘Chineseness’, have begun to state their own, bentu or local, cultural identity. For many, this has involved coming to terms with the country's recent past. Heightened concern for local Taiwanese history, for example, has meant that the once taboo subject of Japanese colonial rule on the island from 1895 to 1945 is now back on the agenda and open for reinterpretation (Matsunaga et al. 1995: 59–67). This has gone beyond the corridors of academic history departments. Consumer trends such as the renewed appreciation (and renovation) of Japanese-era architecture and the emulation of pre-war interior design styles, for instance, have become particularly noticeable in recent years.

The success of contemporary Taiwanese-language pop stars such as Jiang Hui, Huang Yiling and Long Qianyu whom we shall discuss below, may seem a long way from the days of Taiwan's place in the pre-war Japanese empire. Yet, as I shall explain, the birth, development and present state of this popular musical genre are all inextricably linked to the Japanese presence on the island over the last one hundred years. In this chapter, I would like to examine the role that this form of popular music has had in postcolonial Taiwan. Moreover, I will discuss how the sound of the foreign coloniser has come to be localised by Taiwanese musicians and record companies, and has in turn come to be appropriated as a symbol of Taiwanese identity at a time when questions of national and cultural identity have become increasingly politicised.

The Greater China myth

In spite of the current popularity and commercial success of this music, the Taiyu ge genre has generally been overlooked or ignored by the majority of scholars outside Taiwan.¹ One reason for this can perhaps be found in a general Adornean disdain shown by many scholars towards anything associated with commercialism (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944: 120–67). As French theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1993) has noted, there has traditionally been a tendency to see art that is commercially successful (i.e. rich in financial capital) as lacking in creative merit (and cultural capital). This has become the dominant logic for many studies of popular culture in Taiwan, as the focus has often been directed at more ‘artistic’ musical forms such as the campus folk movement of Taiwan's universities in the 1970s (see, for example, Jaivin 1996). The huge increase in album sales that many Taiyu ge performers have enjoyed in recent times may have taken this music to new audiences around the island itself, but it has unfortunately also ensured its obscurity amongst Frankfurt-orientated scholars abroad.

There has also been a much more imposing hindrance to the study of this music, however. As in so many other fields, studies of Taiwanese popular culture are all too often overshadowed by the vastness of the island's northern neighbour, China. Even in spite of encouraging trends which show that ‘Taiwan studies’ is emerging as an independent field of research (Murray and Hong 1994: 7–16; Xiao 1995), scholars of Chinese popular culture have been all too ready to examine Taiwanese pop for its worth as an agent of change in the People's Republic of China (PRC) whilst failing to examine its context or significance for the country from which it originated (Barmé 1995; Jones 1992a: 15–18). With a limited following in the PRC, Taiyu ge are ignored or at best overlooked as irrelevant when compared to the ‘bigger’ issues of political liberalisation in China.

The euphoric popularity with which the Australian, European and North American academies have taken up the ‘Greater China’ concept is emblematic of this. There are of course a number of differing definitions of ‘Greater China’ (Harding 1993), yet in the large majority of models, the PRC takes centre stage, and the societies of Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and, in some instances, ‘overseas Chinese’ communities in South East Asia, orbit around the mother country like planets around a star. This theory owes much of its origin to the discipline of economics. East Asian economies and markets were seen to become increasingly integrated throughout the late 1980s and statistics pointing towards gargantuan levels of Taiwanese, Hong Kong and South East Asian investment in China were not only published in the pages of the financial press, but were soon used to support a perceived political and social rapprochement between the societies in question (Berger 1996: 106–7). At the same time, theorists such as Tu Wei-ming wrote of a ‘cultural China’ (1992: 286) which encompassed all peoples of ethnic Chinese descent within a single, homogeneous cultural bloc. Economic collaboration was explained as the result of Confucian cultural ties that bound the communities of the diaspora to each other and ultimately to their ancestral homeland.

The ‘Greater China’ thesis has come to influence many fields of scholarship, and studies of popular culture are no exception. In Joseph Bosco's article entitled ‘The Emergence of a Taiwanese Popular Culture’ (1994), for example, Taiwanese pop music is not even viewed in the context of its role in Taiwan, but rather for its place in the PRC. As far as Bosco is concerned, ‘Movies, music and clothing from Taiwan have helped to define modernity for the PRC, in the process changing the island's image on the mainland’ (1994: 397). What purports to be a study of Taiwanese popular culture per se, thus becomes a study of Taiwanese popular culture in China.

There is a similar inclination to be found in work by Geremie R. Barmé (1992) and Thomas B. Gold (1993) in which the idea of ‘Gangtai’ is prevalent. Gangtai is an abbreviation of the Mandarin terms for Hong Kong (Xianggang) and Taiwan (Taiwan) respectively, and references to Taiwanese popular music in the works cited above are commonly placed within this category. The very use of the term Gangtai links Taiwan with Hong Kong, and suggests that there is little different about music emanating from these two quite divergent societies. The Gangtai idea has clear links to the ‘Greater China’ concept, for it implies an inherent sameness about popular culture emanating from the peripheries of the ‘Chinese’ world. Taiwanese pop, be it Mandarin or Taiyu, is relegated to the ambiguous ranks of the southern ‘other’.

Whilst Mandarin-language pop does enjoy a large following in China, the case of Taiwanese-language songs is quite different. Rather than gravitating towards the PRC, either for a market, for musical inspiration or for historical precedent, the Taiyu ge genre speaks of a local history that has much more to do with Japan than with any notion of a ‘Greater China’. Even now, as Taiwan and the PRC are believed by some to be set on a course towards eventual unification and cultural homogenisation (Myers 1996: 1090), the resonance of Japanese musical and cultural influence rings clear through the themes of the newly invigorated Taiyu ge genre, challenging the claim that Taiwan is a purely ‘Chinese’ society. Ironically, then, it has been the popular music of the foreign coloniser, adapted and, to borrow a term from Ulf Hannerz, ‘hybridised’ (1991: 124) over the last half a century or more, that has come to symbolise Taiwanese cultural identity and uniqueness. In order to understand this clearly, however, it is first necessary to take a brief look at the historical development of Taiwanese-language pop, particularly in light of the Taiwan-Japan relationship during and since the end of the colonial era.

Echoes of the empire

As historian Zhuang Yongming has noted in his exhaustive work on pre-war Taiwanese-language pop, the first Taiyu ge were recorded in the early 1930s (1994: 22–3). This was the middle period of Japanese rule which preceded the patriotic fervour and assimilation programmes introduced in the lead-up to the Pacific War (Chou 1996). It was a time characterised by a relatively large amount of intellectual and artistic freedom in Taiwan. Newspapers were openly read by members of the educated elite whilst Taiwanese children were increasingly able to access an education on a par with that of Japanese expatriates (Tsurumi 1984). With the introduction of broadcasting and the establishment of radio stations in main cities throughout the island by the late 1920s (China Times 7 November 1996), a large portion of the population became exposed to the latest recorded Japanese music over the airwaves.

Within this climate of relative openness, and with the background of the beginnings of electronic mass media in the colony, record companies such as Columbia and RCA soon arrived with plans to establish a recording industry there. Columbia was the most active, recruiting song writers such as Deng Yujian and Zhou Tianwang, as well as singers A'ai, Chun Chun and others (Zhuang 1994: 27). The company sent their newly assembled clique of musicians off on a steamboat bound for recording studios in Tokyo. The result of this and subsequent trips to Japan was a flurry of songs that became Taiwanese pop standards. Songs such as ‘U ia hoe’² (Flower in the evening rain) first recorded in 1934, and ‘Bang chhun hong’ (Watching on the spring breeze), both hugely successful in the early 1930s, are still performed today as laoge (old songs/standards) on television programmes and the like.

Yet perhaps more important than the early commercial successes of the Columbia and RCA artistes, the latter years of colonial rule laid the groundwork for continued Japanese influence in Taiwanese-language pop in the postcolonial era. This was to occur in a number of ways. Firstly, the cities of Japan provided the training ground in which a whole generation of musicians, song writers and others affiliated with the music industry came to learn their trade before the end of colonial rule. In the postcolonial decades, this generation came to shape the Taiyu ge sound and style and to leave a legacy that has lasted to the present.

Historians have estimated that the number of Taiwanese students in Japan was in excess of 7,000 by the eve of the Pacific War (Tsurumi 1984: 292). Immersed in the rapidly modernising centre of the empire, many of these young Taiwanese came to be exposed to American jazz and Latin tangos, as well as the Japanese pop of the day. Some even took to music as a form of income.

The classic representative of this entire group of students was Yang Sanlang. Yang had travelled to Japan in 1935 to study music and, after taking the Japanified stage name of ‘Saburo’,³ ended up playing trumpet in his teacher's band in the evenings to make ends meet. He toured throughout Japan, eventually travelling to the Japanese colony of Manchuria before returning to Taiwan at the end of the war (Du 1993). Yang became influential in the 1950s, the so-called ‘heyday of Taiwanese-language pop’ (Winckler 1994: 31), as he single-handedly began transcribing dozens of Japanese enka songs into Taiwanese, as well as composing his own enka-inflected pop music, influenced by more than a decade of musical experience in Japan. Some of his most popular tunes, including ‘Kang-to ia u’ (Rainy night in the harbour town) and ‘Ku-cheng mi-mi’ (Endless nostalgia) continue to be recorded and performed by artistes today.

Yang's musical endeavours laid a foundation for others such as Ye Junling, a lyricist and later chief of Yazhou changpian (Asia Records) who introduced literally hundreds of Japanese songs into Taiwan during the 1960s (Zhang 1991: 141). Ye is perhaps the most prolific songwriter in the history of Taiwanese language pop. His songs were recorded by some of the music's biggest names, from the ‘talented childhood star’ Chen Fenlan (United Daily News 29 April 1996), to the contemporary female singer Huang Yiling. Ye has even been referred to as a ‘ Guobao’ or national treasure by government authorities, for the contributions he has made to the Taiwanese music industry.⁴ The songs that Yang Sanlang and Ye Junling introduced, labelled nothing more than hunxue gequ (mixed-blood songs) by a number of critics (Zhuang 1994: 83–6), came to dictate the sound of this genre of popular music. Writer Chen Fang-ming has elaborated on the dominance of this Japanese-inflected Taiwanese pop when describing the memories of his father ‘listening to those Japanese songs. I grew up with the sounds of an old fashioned record player spinning those songs into the air’ (Chen 1995: 38). The heartbroken melodies of Japanese enka which first came into Taiwanese pop in this period are now one of its defining features (Xu 1993: 184), thanks largely to the work of Yang, Ye and the performers who recorded their music.

However, the Japanese influence on Taiwanese-language pop also came from another source, and one that was definitely much ‘closer to home’. Whilst the recording industry had got well under way in the 1950s and the following decade, a thriving live music scene had been established, especially around Taipei and its environs. The bars in areas such as Danshui, the hot-spring resort of Beitou and the red-light district of Wanhua, increasingly became the focus of a new Japanese clientele. As Taiwanese feminist historian Ke Ruiming has mentioned (1991: 217–25), these and other nightlife centres throughout the island attracted large numbers of wealthy Japanese businessmen in the 1960s, who saw Taiwan as a source of cheap sexual entertainment. Still in a position of economic superiority to the people of their one-time colony then, Japanese men came to the island in their thousands to ‘buy the spring’.⁵ Japanese popular music, and in particular enka, was used by local Taiwanese musicians to cater for these patrons and to make them feel at home. Weng Jiaming (1996: 206–7) has noted that the 1960s and 1970s saw both an explosion of jiuge (wine songs) emanating from this very world of bars in which the postcolonial Japanese client was entertained, and the emergence of the jiujia nü (bar girl) figure as a mainstay of Taiyu ge lyrics. This bar music that employed Japanese enka and drinking melodies, incorporating Taiwanese lyrics concerning the pitiful life of the bar girl, came to be known as ‘nakaxi’.⁶

The word nakaxi is absent from most dictionaries in Taiwan. Whether this absence is due to a dislike for words perceived to be of foreign origin, or whether it fits into that hazy category or words known as slang and thus does not merit a place in such books is unclear. In any case, the term nakaxi is used commonly in the Taiwanese popular music world. The term most likely originates from the Japanese nagashi, which in dictionary definitions refers to ‘wandering musician[s]’ (Katsumata 1954: 1168). Nakaxi now tends to be used in reference not only to the melodies that Taiwanese bar singers adapted from Japanese drinking and enka songs, but to the very lifestyle and behaviour that these bar singers epitomised.

Nakaxi women

Today, many of the most popular artistes of the Taiyu ge genre claim to be from nakaxi backgrounds. Jiang Hui, by far the most popular female Taiyu performer in the 1990s, is a classic example, as her early career is commonly described in the music press as originating in the bar culture of Taipei's underworld. In a biographical article about Jiang, Taiwanese music critic Du Wenjing describes the artiste's youth ‘in the career of a nakaxi singer, [performing] in some sleazy establishments with her younger sister … gaining a reputation that was belittling and hard to enjoy’ (Du 1996). Others have referred to her as embodying the ‘the embittered woman's image of nakaxi style performance’ (Tao 1992: 67). Yet none of these are descriptions that Jiang would be likely to publicly shy away from. Indeed, Dianjiang Records, the company under which Jiang has released her most commercially successful albums, tends to aid in the creation of Jiang's persona as the quintessential nakaxi woman. Her album covers commonly portray her as a sad and pitiful bar girl, dressed in a low-cut black dress or gazing submissively towards the floor. Audio representations support this visual theme. Most of Jiang's better-known tracks are to do with jiu (wine), and by association the nakaxi world of bars and night clubs in which her career began. Her hugely successful 1992 release ‘Chiu au e sim siaⁿ’ (‘The sound of my heart after drinking’) is but one of the best examples: ‘I'm not drunk, I'm not drunk, please don't give me your sympathies’, wails Jiang in the chorus, ‘only the wine understands me’ (Jiang Hui 1992). This song, labelled ‘the national anthem of Taiwan's KTV’ by one writer (Ke Yonghui 1995: 163), has come to represent not only Jiang's image as the nakaxi bar singer, but indeed the entire Taiyu ge genre of the 1990s, and the conscious links it has with its roots in the bars of Beitou.

The term ‘national anthem’ is central here too, as it points to the fact that Jiang's music has gone further than entertainment, and now has appeal as an almost quasi-national symbol. Notes on the jacket cover to her 1995 album take a similar tone, for they present Jiang's songs as a symbol of a Taiwanese nation, a cultural expression that binds all Taiwanese together in a feeling of familiarity:

In this way, the symbol of the low-class nakaxi woman, the singer of drinking songs and entertainer of foreign men, becomes a definitive symbol of Taiwaneseness. From Los Angeles to downtown Taipei to the outlying islands of Penghu, the nakaxi woman becomes Taiwan. Interestingly, then, a figure that in the 1970s may have been nothing more than a reminder of the exploitation that Taiwanese women suffered at the hands of some Japanese expatriate men, today acts in the context of a world Taiwanese diaspora which seeks to define its own identity through a common cultural capital.

Jiang Hui may be one of the most popular Taiyu ge singers of the present era, but she is certainly not the only female performer to build a career on the nakaxi style. Huang Yiling is another female singer who has been presented in a similar vein to Jiang. A great number of Huang's songs, including the title song to the 1995 album Sim thang chiu lai se (Wash away my heartache with wine), concern liquor as a central lyrical theme. Huang's early career as an enka singer has been traced, like that of Jiang, back to the bars of Beitou in the 1970s by some music critics (Yue 1996). And in 1996 she symbolically returned to these musical roots by releasing the two-album series for Pony Canyon records entitled Ang e enka (Popular enka), in which she re-recorded Japanese enka songs dating from the early 1960s.

The legacy of this nakaxi bar girl persona has been far-reaching. Indeed, female artistes who do not adhere to the role are regularly criticised in the music press as being less than authentic. Long Qianyu is an interesting case in point. After releasing the album Sui-chheng (Drifting emotions) for HCM Records in 1996, one critic wrote of Long as being untrue to the Taiyu ge style. Sounding a little too light-hearted for a real nakaxi singer, it was said that ‘some people think that it [her sound] has lost its “Long style” melancholy’ (Hong Shuzhen 1996). After all, in accordance with the nakaxi sound, should not all Taiwanese songs hark back to the figure of pitiful helplessness exuded by Jiang and Huang? Long's 1997 release accordingly returned to the style of the bar song, with the title track to the album Goa bo chui la! (I'm not drunk) echoing Jiang Hui's drunken melody recorded six years earlier. In the accompanying video clip, Long's voice is played over a scene in which drunken businessmen are caressed by scantily dressed though less than enthusiastic bar girls. In her disgust, one of these nakaxi women tries to drink away the horrors of her profession, laying her head down beside a bottle of liquor on a bar table. Long voices the depression of the bar girl in the chorus of the song, even adding a drunken ‘hick!’ for full effect, as she sings:

Postcoloniality and context

Popular music in any part of the world tells us a great deal about the cultural tastes of its creators and consumers. What then do the wailing tones of Taiwanese-language pop tell us about the legacy of Japanese cultural influence on the island? Jonathan Friedman (1990), in his fascinating study of popular culture in Central Africa, has shed some interesting light on the links between pop music, nostalgia and postcoloniality. In his study, Friedman writes extensively of the sapeur movement in Congo, a social trend that saw young Congolese men consuming French cultural capital in the form of clothing and behaviour. The roots of this movement are traced back to the days of French colonial rule in the region, and in particular the strict social hierarchy that was imposed upon residents of the ‘typical colonial space of power’ (1990: 102) that was Brazzaville. Accumulation of cultural capital associated with the imperial métropole (i.e. Paris) distinguished an individual from other Congolese and could be used to find a place higher up the hierarchy of colonial society. The most sought-after signs of sophistication amongst sapeurs became clothing, and more precisely European designer fashion labels. As Freidman notes, this trend did not cease with Congolese independence, but in fact came into its own in the 1980s, with the advent of mass media and the rise of soukous music.

Soukous is the guitar-frenzied dance music born in the sapeur-frequented nightclubs of Brazzaville and Kinshasa. It became the musical accompaniment to the whole sapeur movement as singers such as Papa Wemba flouted their French fashion labels during stage performances and sang the praises of haute couture clothing (Ewens 1991: 141). Even in an independent Congo, then, Paris remained the centre of the sapeur/soukous world.

There are similarities here between Congolese soukous music and the sapeur movement within which it was immersed, and Taiyu ge's current status. One is tempted, as Leo Ching has been (1994), to consider that both cases are clear indications of Homi Bhabha's ‘mimic man’ — the warped mirror image of the oppressor that the colonial subject becomes through consumption of cultural capital — in practice. In both cases, we see a trend appearing in which the consumption of the cultural capital associated with the centre of empire becomes a sign of sophistication and even social power. However, whereas Bhaba's concept explains the role of cultural capital in empowerment of the oppressed and eventually as a tool with which imperialism can be fought, the situation with Taiyu ge is something quite different.

As we saw in the examination of the music of Jiang Hui, Huang Yiling and Long Qianyu, contemporary Taiyu ge, whilst certainly drawing on the postcolonial ties that Taiwan has had with Japan, particularly in the form of the sex trade and the bar culture built around it, is not used primarily as a weapon against a continued Japanese presence on the island. Yet Taiyu ge do indeed remind us that Taiwan's perceived cultural homogeneity, especially its ‘Chineseness’ and its place in a sinic world, is far more questionable than early KMT propaganda, and the ‘Greater China’ thesis, might suggest. Indeed, by continuing in the direction that was established by early Taiwanese musicians such as Yang Sanlang and Ye Junling, many contemporary singers, including those discussed above, have chosen to sustain a musical genre which specifically draws on those elements of Taiwanese history that link the island to Japan rather than China.

It is perhaps for this reason that Taiyu ge as an entire genre has been used with increasing frequency by political parties and organisations in Taiwan which seek to define a modern, independent Taiwanese identity. This is a trend that, not surprisingly, started with the main opposition movement in Taiwan (Xu 1993: 47), now headed by the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), but has now been taken up, ironically perhaps, by the KMT — the very party that had all but banned these songs until just over a decade ago.⁷ An indigenised musical form such as this offers the perfect symbol of Taiwan's cultural uniqueness which can be worked into partisan battles against a ‘Greater China’ on all sides of the domestic political spectrum.

There need be no contradiction in the fact that an artiste such as Jiang Hui may make her name singing Japanese-style melodies in an enka-inflected tone, and yet still be presented by the music press, her record company and government authorities alike as the ‘Queen of Taiwanese pop’ (Government Information Office 1995: 421), or even as a national symbol.⁸ At a period when questions of historical identity are still very much at the forefront of political debate in Taiwan, popular music, even that with as little political content as the bar songs of the Taiyu ge repertoire, can now find itself at the heart of discussions about Taiwanese identity at various levels of society.

Notes

1 One of the few exceptions to this can be found in the ground-breaking work of Fang-Chih Irene Yang (1993, 1994) who has looked extensively at the history of Taiyu ge over recent decades.

2 Note that all song titles are rendered in Taiwanese. The romanisation system I have employed here for Taiwanese is the so-called ‘Missionary script’, as first devised by the Reverend J. V. N. Talmage in 1850 (Fang 1994: 18).

3 Sanlang is the Mandarin transliteration of the Japanese name Saburo. My thanks to Ms Tsai Hsueh-hsing of the Taipei Language Institute for pointing this out to me. Yang's given name was Wocheng.

4 A Taipei city-government-sponsored concert was held in tribute to the elderly Ye Junling on 5 July 1996. The concert programme bore the title Taiwan Guobao Ye Junling chaozuo Taiyu gequ wushi nian qingzhu (A commemoration of fifty years of composition by the Taiwanese national treasure Ye Junling).

5 The Mandarin phrase mai chun (lit. to buy the spring) means to frequent brothels.

6 It is worth noting that the development of a bar music scene in the 1960s and early 1970s was occurring at precisely the same time as the US military presence on Taiwan was at its height, as touched upon in Allen Chun's contribution to this volume.

7 During the 1996 presidential campaign, for example, President Li Denghui (Lee Tenghui) publicly defied Chinese military threats, whilst at the same time inviting Taiyu ge artistes like Bai Bingbing to appear on stage at KMT rallies. Lee's association with this music signalled to many his sympathy towards an independent Taiwan.

8 Indeed, in light of Christine R. Yano's findings in this volume regarding the multiethnic roots of enka, a form of music that has been so instrumental in shaping Taiwanese popular music, the question of Taiyu songs as symbols of ‘Taiwaneseness’ becomes even more complicated.