Taiwanese Pop Idol Embraced in Beijing
BEIJING — A beer in one hand, a microphone in the other, Meng Xiaoli stood in a crowded restaurant and began to sing.
During the workweek, Mr. Meng, 53, 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 stateowned firm.
But on weekends, he retreats to what he calls his “spiritual home,” a two-story 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,” he said.
Ms. 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 western Beijing. An enormous portrait of Ms. Teng, smiling as she holds a white rose, graces its front door.
Inside, singers dressed in gowns perform renditions of her signature ballads like “The Moon Represents My Heart” and “Sweet as Honey.”
More than two decades after her death, Ms. Teng’s mainland fans say her sugary voice and gentle personality are still unique. “She’s a storyteller,” said Zheng Rongbin, the media executive who opened the restaurant in 2011. “She looks like the girl next door.”
Ms. Teng is claimed by many mainlanders as one of their own, even though she was born in Taiwan. Her father, who grew up in the mainland in the northern province of Hebei, 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 Ms. Teng’s birth.
Ms. Teng was one of the first foreign singers whose music flowed into China after it began opening its economy to the world in the late 1970s.
But her music was quickly banned as part of a campaign by the Communist government to block “spiritual pollution” from the West. The Taiwanese government used her music as a psychological weapon, blasting it from loudspeakers positioned near the mainland.
But Ms. Teng never performed in the mainland.
In recent years, the government has warmed to her music, and the state-run media has celebrated her mainland roots.
Mr. Zheng said Ms. Teng’s music was popular in the mainland because it reminded people of the years after the chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
“For many people, it was a very new experience and very different from what they had heard in the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “Now when people hear it, they remember what it was like to be young.”
Ms. Teng has been hailed as a symbol of commonality between China and Taiwan at a time when relations have deteriorated. But Mr. Zheng said he did not have politics in mind when he opened the restaurant: “Music has no sense of borders.”