For her, China loves as one
A beer in one hand, a microphone in the other, Meng Xiaoli stood in a crowded restaurant and began to sing.
“Your smile is as sweet as honey/ Just like flowers blooming in the spring breeze/ I wonder where I’ve seen you?”
During the workweek, Meng, 53, a straitlaced budget analyst who wears a red Chinese Communist Party pin on his lapel, spends his days shuttling between meetings and poring over reports as a budget analyst for a state-owned firm.
But on weekends, he retreats to what he calls his “spiritual home,” a two-storey restaurant and museum in Beijing that is a shrine to the woman he considers a goddess: the Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng, one of Asia’s most celebrated artists.
“She knows what it’s like to be human — to find love and to make mistakes,” Meng said.
Teng, who died suddenly in 1995 at age 42, was renowned for turning traditional Taiwanese and Chinese folk songs into maudlin western-style hits. She was once banned in the mainland, her music denounced by the authorities as “decadent” and “pornographic.”
But she never lost her base of rabid fans here, even as tensions have escalated between China and Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing considers part of its territory.
Her most ardent followers now gather at the Teresa Teng Music-Themed Restaurant in a sprawling residential neighbourhood in western Beijing, near liquor stores, barbecue joints and hot-pot restaurants. An enormous portrait of Teng, smiling as she holds a white rose, graces its front door.
Inside, singers dressed in elegant gowns perform renditions of her signature ballads like “The Moon Represents My Heart” and “Sweet as Honey.” Customers sample dishes inspired by Teng’s music, including “moon pancakes” and fried pumpkin with honey sauce.
More than two decades after her death, Teng’s mainland fans say her sugary voice and gentle personality are still one of a kind.
“She’s a storyteller,” said Zheng Rongbin, the media executive who opened the restaurant in 2011. “She looks like the girl next door.”
Teng is claimed by many mainlanders as one of their own, even though she was born in Taiwan. Her father was part of the Nationalist forces that fought Mao Zedong’s Communists in the Chinese Civil War. He retreated to Taiwan in 1949, four years before Teng’s birth.
In recent years, the government has warmed to her music and the state-run media has celebrated her mainland roots.