By Xinyi Ye
One of the most politically controversial songs of twentieth-century East Asia is When Will You Return (何日君再來). In the semi-colonial space of early twentieth-century Shanghai, a new urban culture featuring films, popular jazz-hybrid music, and dance became the synonym of the city. Popular music performed in cinema, musical theaters, dance halls, night clubs, and cabarets became the new social engagements for Shanghainese people, especially women who previously did not have access to public spheres. Meanwhile, as Shanghai became increasingly recognized as a cosmopolitan city, musicians from various backgrounds brought musical elements from across the world into modern Chinese popular songs.
| Chinese lyrics | English translation (by the author) |
| 好花不常開 好景不常在 | Good flowers don’t always bloom, good times don’t always last |
| 愁堆解笑眉 淚灑相思帶 | Melancholy dissolves smiles, tears shed on lovesick ribbons[1] |
| 今宵離別後 何日君再來 | After the farewell tonight, when will you return? |
| 喝完了這杯 請進點小菜 | After finishing this bottle [of wine], please have some side dishes |
| 人生難得幾回醉 不歡更何待 | There are hardly a few times to get drunk in life, so why not enjoy when you can? |
| 今宵離別後 何日君再來 | After the farewell tonight, when will you return? |
| 停唱陽關疊 重擎白玉杯 | Stop singing Yangguan Die, once again toast the white jade cups[2] |
| 殷勤頻致語 牢牢撫君懷 | Frequent and attentive words firmly touch your heart |
| 今宵離別後 何日君再來 | After the farewell tonight, when will you return? |
| 喝完了這杯 請進點小菜 | After finishing this bottle [of wine], please have some side dishes. |
| 人生難得幾回醉 不歡更何待 | There are hardly a few times to get drunk in life, so why not enjoy when you can? |
| 今宵離別後 何日君再來 | After the farewell tonight, when will you return? |
The Chinese-jazz hybrid music, shidai qu (時代曲, literal meaning “songs of the era” or “modern songs”), became the representation of early twentieth-century Shanghai, and When Will You Return is one of the iconic pieces. However, because the use of the song in Japanese war propaganda, it became a taboo in China after WWII. After the normalization of China-Japan relationship in the 1970s, the song came to public popular culture again, and along with its legacy, became borrowed, covered, and represented as reflections of the complex and intricate history of twentieth-century East Asia.
When Will You Return was originally an interlude of the 1937 Chinese film Three Stars Moving Around the Moon (三星伴月), sung by Zhou Xuan (周璇), one of the most celebrated actresses and singers in twentieth-century China.[3] The song was also released in an album by Pathé Records, the leading recording company in Shanghai at the time. The song features Zhou’s thin and sweet voice incorporating clear vibrato into Chinese folk voice techniques and an accordion playing the Habanera rhythm (also known as contradanza, a Latin American-originated syncopated dance rhythm) in split chords.[4] The Latin-American influence. Such hybrid style is an exemplar of shidai qu, a fusion of jazz with Chinese folk-song-inspired tunes and Chinese lyrics about contemporary themes popular in China from the 1920s to 1940s.[5]
Funded by entrepreneur Fang Yexian (方液先) to promote his brand Three Star (三星), the film Three Stars Moving Around the Moon tells a love story between a celebrity singer and a patriotic entrepreneur. The male protagonist is perhaps an embodiment of Fang himself and his business: Fang established his chemical plants with the vision that manufacturing industrial products made in China could strengthen the country’s economic power and ultimately help the nation gain independence.[6] The film was an incredibly successful advertisement, as the Three Star products shown in the film, from toothpaste to hand creams, became instantly popular in Shanghai.
The song is a melancholic farewell song. Every line of the lyrics consists of five characters, following the tradition of classical Chinese poetry. The choice of words in the lyrics, however, combines vernacular and formal phrases, which is also typical of the literary practices of its time. The specific composer or lyricist of When Will You Return is contested, likely because writers in Republican China usually had multiple pen names to maintain a level of anonymity. It is now believed that the melody was composed by Liu Xue’an (劉雪庵) as an unnamed tango piece when he was a student at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music years before the production of the film. The lyricist is believed to be Huang Jiamo (黃嘉謨), the playwriter of the film Three Stars Moving Around the Moon.
In 1938, Yoshiko “Sherley” Yamaguchi (山口淑子, known in China as Li Hsiang-lan 李香蘭), another popular shidai qu singer, covered When Will You Return in her album, which became a hit in both China and Japan.[7] The accompaniment in Yamaguchi’s recording continues the Habanera rhythm performed by an accordion, but the general structure of the song remains very similar to Zhou’s original album. It became so popular that the song was recorded and released twice in the 1940s in two other albums and is a representation of the heyday of shidai qu, during which the appearances and outfits of singers like Zhou and Yamaguchi led the fashion of the society.
Yamaguchi’s cover was featured as the soundtrack of Byakuran no Uta (白蘭の歌, 1939),a Japanese war propaganda film set in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. In the film, a Chinese woman Li Xuexiang falls in love with a Japanese engineer Yasuyoshi Matsumura, and they both sacrifice themselves in a battle against the Chinese troupes. The popular Chinese song When Will You Return thus serves the political purpose of dissolving anti-Japanese alliances that were forming in China by saturating the invasion with modern songs about romance.
Yoshiko “Sherley” Yamaguchi, When Will You Return, in Byakuran no Uta (1939)
Born and raised in China to Japanese parents, Yamaguchi was fluent in Chinese and started acting in Japanese-controlled Manchuria in 1937. Under her Chinese name Li Hsiang-lan as a member of the Manchuria Film Society (滿洲映畫協會), Yamaguchi performed stereotypical Chinese characters in Japanese propaganda films who surrendered to the Japanese invasion in China during WWII.[8] Though her films were controversial, her music became extremely popular and made her one of the most popular singers of 1940s East Asia, especially when she toured in Taipei and Tokyo in 1941.
After Japan lost WWII, Yamaguchi was arrested by the government of Republican China in 1945 and was accused of being a traitor for her engagement with Japanese propaganda for its invasion of China. However, her Japanese identity was discovered during her trial, and consequently, she was ruled not guilty and released to return to Japan in early 1946. When Will You Return was also scrutinized in the context of such suspicion. Afterwards, some of her songs, especially When Will You Return, became taboo in both mainland China and Taiwan for almost the following two to three decades, but these songs remained in the collective memory across the Sinophone spheres.
Nowadays when When Will You Return gets mentioned in popular culture, it is typically associated with Teresa Teng (鄧麗君). Teng’s version of recordings became so popular that she is often mistaken as the original singer of these songs even today. She covered various shidai qu, including When Will You Return and Tuberose (夜來香), another song of Yamaguchi.[9] Her recording, however, has departed from the intentional hybrid style in shidai qu, and the accompaniment is typical of the 1970s popular music in East Asia. Teng’s cover of shidai qu became popular in the Sinophone world because it evoked a collective imagination and nostalgia for the cosmopolitan Shanghai urban life during the 30s and 40s.[10] She also became a cultural icon shared across East and Southeast Asia.
Under the government of Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei 田中角栄, Japan normalized its relationship with the PRC in 1972.[11] With Tanaka and the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party’s invitation, Yamaguchi became an active politician upon successful election to the House of Councillors in 1974. Yamaguchi was deeply engaged in activist work for the acknowledgment of WWII War crimes in Japan and advocated the normalization and strengthening of the Sino-Japan relationship.[12] Her political engagements and the changing social-political environments somehow seemed to subside controversies about her identity and music.[13] In 1989, the TV series Bye Ri Kōran (さよなら李香蘭), a collaborative project of Fuji Network System (Japan) and China Central Television, narrated the story of Yamaguchi’s experience as a Japanese performing in China. The theme song, 行かないで (meaning Don’t Go), composed and performed by Tamaki Koji (玉置浩二), is refilled with both Mandarin and Cantonese lyrics and sung by Jacky Cheung (張學友), one of the most iconic Cantonese pop singers, in 1993 and 1990 respectively. The Cantonese version, titled Li Hsiang-lan, is a reflection of Yamaguchi’s cultural legacy in Hong Kong.
Today, When Will You Return, Yamaguchi, and their histories are no longer a taboo, but a popular repertoire for singers who aim to reach both Chinese and Japanese audiences. The Brazilian-Japanese bossa nova singer Lisa Ono, for example, arranged When Will You Return in an entirely bossa nova arrangement with a free-flowing rhythm and chords, enhanced by her iconic soothing voice. She frequently performs this piece in her concerts in China, which are well-attended by Chinese audiences. The simple farewell song embodies the historical complexity of the Sino-Japan relationship over the twentieth century, postwar reflections, and controversies that are still present today.
[1] Ribbon and lovesickness are typical reference in Chinese prose and poetry: the story goes that a lady is consumed by her lovesickness and she becomes so slender that the ribbons on her clothes became too loose.
[2] Yangguan Die is a Tang Dynasty Chinese farewell song.
[3] A ripping of Zhou Xuan’s original When Will You Return from a physical disc can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F_inY97xJU.
[4] The use of the Habanera rhythm in the composition is coherent with the claim that this song was initially composed by Liu Xue’an as an unnamed tango piece.
[5] Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001). Szu-Wei Chen, “The Rise and Generic Features of Shanghai Popular Songs in the 1930s and 1940s,” Popular Music 24, no. 1 (2005): 108.
[6] Harriet T. Zurndorfer, “Imperialism, Globalization, and the Soap/Suds Industry in Republican China (1912-37): The Case of Unilever and the Chinese Consumer,” Working Papers of the Global Economic History Network (GEHN) No. 19/06, 2006. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, Vol. 224. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 180–181.
[7] A ripping of Yamaguchi When Will You Return can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk79hTJe0jo
[8] Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 72–82.
[9] Yamaguchi’s cover of Tuberose can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_T72YgMtMI. Teng’s performance of Tuberose in Chinese can be accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEiHcL5RPPI. Teng’s Tuberose in Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLgvB3-j5z0.
[10] Dongfeng Tao, “Teresa Teng and the Spread of Pop Songs in Mainland China in the Early Reform Era,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 23:2, 269-287.
[11] One perspective of interpreting Sino-Japan relationship in the 1970s can be seen in: Go Tsuyoshi Ito, Alliance in Anxiety: Detente and the Sino-American-Japanese Triangle (New York: Routledge, 2003), 93.
[12] “大鷹淑子副理事長に聞く「21世紀のいま、若い人々に伝えたいこと」,” Asian Women’s Fund, 2001, https://www.awf.or.jp/pdf/news_18.pdf. For an English summary of Yamaguchi’s biography, see Paul Vitello, “Yoshiko Yamaguchi, 94, Actress in Propaganda Films, Dies,” New York Times, Sept 22, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/movies/yoshiko-yamaguchi-94-actress-in-propaganda-films-dies.html?smid=url-share.
[13] Yamaguchi’s returning trip to China was recorded in the NHK Documentary:李香蘭と初めての祖国日本での体験（NHK特集 世界・わが心の旅「李香蘭～遥かなる旅路」NHKBSプレミアム 2014年9月24日放送）.NHK Documentary, Sept 24, 2014. Also see her autobiography: Yamaguchi, Yoshiko. Ri Kōran watakushi no hansei 李香蘭私の半生, Tōkyō : Shinchōsha, 1987.