Chance Encounter

Tanya Visceglia

​
 

Karaoke first became popular in Taiwan in the early ‘90s as a fixture of Japanese hostess bars: dimly-lit watering holes, patronized by whiskey-soaked businessmen stumbling through ballads on the fleeting nature of true love and its inevitable disappointments. “Baby-princess” (1) hostesses were employed by these bars to perch at the men’s elbows and applaud their efforts. Most importantly, they had to keep pouring (and sharing) the customers’ watered-down drinks (2). Hostesses were also required to accompany customers in singing maudlin duets like Bar of Sorrow (3). “Dark little bar. Who can tell who’s sad? Drinkers have no feelings. Just take another sip if you understand. And don’t ask who I am or where I’m from.” Many of those hostesses ended up as customers in nearby lesbian bars (called T-bars) after their shifts were over.  My first experience of karaoke in Taiwan was at one of those red-light district T-bars, hidden from view in a basement storefront. Ringing the bell of the unmarked, windowless door, I waited as an eye-level panel slid open and shut to determine whether I was a customer or a threat. When the door opened, I was ushered in by the owner, a slight salt-and-pepper woman in a suit and tie. I saw a smattering of low banquette tables, partitioned off from one another by dim neon tube lighting. Standing in the entryway next to a dusty Christmas tree (it was July), a quick scan of the crowd revealed that I was the only person who had come there alone. There wasn’t even a bar to sit at.

 
In front of the banquettes, a lit karaoke stage dominated the front of the room, where a butch/femme couple was singing Rooftop, a popular duet about finding pure and simple love in a jerry-built rooftop apartment. “I sing your song on the rooftop. Let the stars sing on this most romantic night. In this moment, at this second, everything stops.  Love begins to weave around us.” (4) Still hovering awkwardly in the entryway, I watched a large cockroach weave its way through the limp, gold garland strung across the ceiling and started backing up towards the door. If I ever come here again, I thought, I’ll be sure to bring some friends. 

The name of that bar was 巧愛 (Qiao Ai - Chance Encounter), and the next time I went there, with friends in tow, I met my first Taiwanese girlfriend. We had a stilted conversation that I can barely remember, during most of which her hand was resting lightly on my leg. Lonely and new in Taiwan, I accepted the phone number she pressed into my hand as she went up to the podium to sing.  Settling into the stool, her husky voice took command of Chen Lei’s Beloved, Don’t Cry! “No need to cry, my darling. I owe you nothing, and you owe me nothing.” (5) Barely missing a beat, she waved and said “call me” into the microphone as I got up to leave the bar. 

A combination of stage fright and mediocre vocal skills prevented me from ever going up on stage at T-bars. But shortly after this, I discovered KTV: private boxes lined with couches facing a TV screen that projects music videos and lyric prompts. Only then did I begin to understand karaoke’s immeasurable therapeutic value. Karaoke’s appeal cuts across all age groups and walks of life, so some form of it can be found in every leisure spot imaginable: 10-cent-a-song vending machines are propped up in the corners of betel nut stands, snack vendors’ stalls and shrimp-pond beer halls. Rented karaoke machines provide entertainment at office banquets and weddings. Recently, soundproof karaoke phone booths have sprung up in shopping malls, so even the most self-conscious or tone-deaf office workers can belt out a few tunes on their lunch break.  People sing karaoke both to declare and to purge their true feelings. Songs offer a persona, a cocoon from which singers can alternately reveal and retreat, flashing glimpses of desire and regret, hope and pain. The cautious accountant who spends the day tethered to her one-cup thermos of warm water can let out her men sau (secret siren) (6) as she throws her arms wide to the chorus of Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina. And the stoic salaryman has a place to cry for that moment of farewell thirty years ago, when his first love sent him off with a homemade bento at a train station in the countryside. In fact, frustration in any area of your life can be driven away by simply singing and singing until they carry you out on a stretcher.

And to improve work relationships, the shortest distance between strained politeness and intimacy is a marathon KTV session. No frosty reserve exists that can survive a scenery-chewing duet performance of Endless Love.  When I started a job at a new company last year, my Taiwanese colleagues had been polite, but distant before our year-end banquet trip to KTV.  After a couple of drinks, my female co-workers started to soften up with Huang Xiaohu’s Not That Simple (7), in which we lamented the difficulty of maintaining a relationship without having to share the details of our own. Then, we hammed it up with Blue Sky, admitting that “behind all the walls we put up in our hearts, a sliver of blue sky could still stream through.” (8)

Applauding one another’s good taste in song selection, we also joked about how they gave away our age. The night ended with passing around the microphone, so each one of us could take a turn on a chorus of The Flower of a Woman because we were all fragile flowers inside, “wanting our loneliness to be warmed away by a pair of tender hands” (9). The tackiest, most sentimental parts of ourselves that we would never acknowledge in a meeting, at the tax office or on the MRT—these all have the space to come out and play at KTV. How did I ever live without this? 

Even if you don’t like to sing, the videos themselves are worth a trip.  Taiwan KTV chains are too cheap to buy the original backing tracks to English songs, so those songs are usually slapped together with a montage of the owner’s random vacation videos: Total Eclipse of the Heart is set to herds of sheep running over a paddock in New Zealand. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow pans continuously around the Granville Island Market in Vancouver.  Other English music videos are thinly plotted affairs involving the same two or three western models. A woman in a cocktail dress wanders around a beach or public park, leaning up against random objects and posing at intervals while running her hands through her hair. She appears to be waiting for some guy, who rarely shows up, and if he does, they end up engaging in some improbable, awkward activity, like strumming one guitar together or swinging in circles around a pillar. 

The more dramatic Taiwanese song videos often feature a male singer kneeling in the rain, regretting his poor relationship decisions, like using his wife’s chop without her permission to take out a second mortgage, or shoving his hand up his sister-in-law’s dress. Such songs conclude with the singer shaking his fists in the air. His fate is sealed. He’ll be alone forever. I still haven’t figured out why these guys always choose to kneel in the rain. Surely the only thing that will accomplish is a case of early-onset arthritis.  

Declarations of love and acceptance are also indirectly revealed in song. My ex-partner has a beautiful voice, with a clear amber tone sliding through phrasing leans and stretches. Early in our relationship, after I had confessed to her that I felt too damaged to deserve love, she learned a song just for me: Karen Mok’s Regardez. “I hope that you, having seen the depth of my sadness, understand that everyone has been afraid. Let me see your heart. Your scars, your panic, your confusion. Let me share the burden with you.” (10) I sang Sun Yan-zi’s Encounter to her in response: “Meeting you was the most beautiful accident. That one day will loosen all of the tangles inside me.” (11)
 

Every visitor I have in Taiwan is subjected to at least one KTV evening: I sell it as a “core cultural experience” and promise to ply them with alcohol until good taste and embarrassment are but a distant memory. The last time I took a visiting friend to KTV, A-lun had added a new song to her repertoire. The song particularly suited her voice, and I remember praising her performance. It was Jacky Cheung’s Willingness: “From far away you tell me you love me. The more freedom I give you, the more you want. In the end, love was pushed to the edge. And has faded.” (12) Every time she sang, I should have been listening more carefully.  

These days, I sing Na Ying’s Silence alone. “In the end, I can’t help slipping into the shape of a stubborn fish, swimming alone against the current. And all the promises I made in my youth sink silently to the bottom of the ocean.” (13) I never sing this one in public because I can’t bear the thought of being one of those teary, drunk women at 2am KTV, propped up by two friends while she throws up into a plastic bag. At home, I sing in the dark, watching the video on my phone with earbuds and a full glass of vodka. No kneeling in the rain. No scenes at the bar. Just silence.

​

​

​

​

​

​

FOOTNOTES:

1. 小公主 (xiǎo gōng zhǔ)

2. Boretz, A. (2004). Carousing and masculinity: The cultural production of gender in Taiwan. Women in the new Taiwan: Gender roles and gender consciousness in a changing society, 171-198.

3. Shi Wen-bing and Jiang Hui. “傷心酒店” (Bar of Sorrow). 1992. Author’s translation.

4. Wu Zongxian and Wen Lan. “屋頂” (Rooftop). 2000. Author’s translation.

5. Chen Lei. “心愛的甭哭” (Beloved, Don’t Cry!) 1994. Author’s translation.

6. 悶騷

7. Huang Xiaohu. “沒那麼簡單” (Not That Simple). 2009.

8. Zhang Hui-mei. 藍天 (Blue Sky). 1998. Author’s translation.

9. Mooi, Anita. 女人花 (The Flower of A Woman). 1997. Author’s translation.

10. Mok, Karen.  看看 (Regardez). 2014. Author’s translation.

11. Sun, Yan-zi.  遇見 (Encounter) 2003. Author’s translation.

12. Cheung, Jacky. 情願 (Willingness). 1995. Author’s translation.

13. Na Ying. 默 (Silence). 2015. Author’s translation.