Why Is Faye Wong Still So Popular? | QDaily Anthropology

Faye Wong fits many people's fantasy of a settled life and an independent mind. The powerful, the literary youth, the successful, the middle class — all of them can find something in her to project themselves onto. She is a miniature of this society's "ideal life."

On the night of December 30, 2016, the seats at Faye Wong's concert filled up after all.

News that ticket sales had collapsed had caused a stir beforehand. According to unverified rumors, after front-row tickets were scalped up to a sky-high 1 million yuan, radio DJ Yang Yue said the once red-hot tickets were in fact sitting unsold with the promoter and the ticketing agents, some of them going below face value; some people claimed that on the day of the show a few hundred yuan to a scalper would get you in.

The venue, the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, holds 14,000 seats. By January 1 this year, video of the concert had been played more than 300 million times; on the night itself, 21.49 million people watched the exclusive stream on Tencent Video — and sent 28.14 million virtual gifts worth more than 2.8 million yuan.

At 48, Faye Wong is still a very big star.

When Chinese people size up a 48-year-old woman, they add all sorts of things to the reckoning, and the most important of them are family and money.

Even female stars can't escape it. In the media, most of them appear as rich wives who married well and now tend to a husband and children. Faye Wong's close friend Na Ying may be the exception: she turns up constantly as a reality-show judge, holds decision-making power over talent management and live performances for The Voice of China, and trades insults with strangers on Weibo. But only one woman can drift through life this lightly and still pull in 45 million yuan at the box office, and that is Faye Wong.

Before the concert, a video leaked to the media: Faye Wong taking Nicholas Tse's hand and tucking it into his pocket to keep it warm. As always, the public split in two. One camp accused Faye Wong, a mother, of being "indecent." The other envied a woman who, after two marriages, still falls in love like a teenager.

In ordinary life, a woman of about 48 might have just joined the square-dancing crowd in her housing compound, taken up group tours and shopping trips abroad in the past few years, forwarded New Year's blessings in WeChat groups, and started lining up blind dates for her children. Most women of that generation grew up in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and caught the tail end of state-assigned jobs and housing, forming their basic view of the world inside the collective and the work unit. Beyond that, family and children were nearly all of life. Then retirement, children leaving home, and the physical changes of menopause arrived at once, and emptiness became one of life's great challenges. Collective activities like square dancing, with a social order buried inside them, give these women a sense of belonging. Compared with the generation after them, they clearly have more to say to the generation before.

The young people who resist that collective melting pot are exactly the ones who love Faye Wong. Most of them are in their twenties and older, and they found her just as they were testing out their own personalities and their own who-cares attitude — especially back when the internet did not yet have such power and many small, odd things had not yet caught on.

The New Concept Writing Contest, where Faye Wong's name and lyrics once appeared thick on the page, was "Faye fever" in miniature. A decade ago it was for a while the guidebook that manufactured and shaped literary youths' taste in writing, and it produced a batch of "new-generation writers" including Han Han, Zhang Yueran, and Guo Jingming. They admired Faye Wong's individuality, and they sold it, wrapped in their prose, to the young people of the day.

At the end of 2016, worried that Faye Wong might never sing again after "Faye's Moments Live," Hyouu, who lives in the United States, went through a friend to buy a floor ticket with a face value of 7,800 yuan for more than 8,000, and flew to Shanghai a week early. He is 31 this year, works for himself in the U.S., has built an app with friends, and has also put together a band of his own, "just for fun."

Faye Wong's earliest fans were in love with her offhand rebellion. "So cool," many of them said. At the 2004 Golden Melody Awards in Taiwan, Faye Wong won Best Female Vocalist, and Taiwanese media called her unapologetic acceptance speech "Faye-style coldness" — too arrogant. Fans have dug up those same words again and again as proof that Faye Wong is "unvarnished" and "true to herself."

Her fashion shoot for City Magazine still looks iconic 20 years later, and an interview clip of her smiling with her lips pressed shut holds up next to an interview with her daughter, Leah Dou.

In the late 1980s, a green young Lin Xi met Faye Wong when she was still going by Shirley Wong. He had doubted that a "beigu" — a slur in Cantonese for a mainland woman — could sing in Cantonese, and never expected that a single song, That Helpless Day (《无奈那天》), would begin the golden Faye-and-Xi partnership. Lin Xi and Faye Wong were never close, but that did not stop him from saying things like "Faye Wong is my skin" and "she and I are husband and wife without the paperwork." Through the hazy, decadent figures in Lin Xi's lyrics, Faye Wong turned into a metaphor no one could quite bring into focus. Together they gave city dwellers a way to vent about their humdrum city lives.

In the early 1990s, the mainland, long schooled on Hong Kong and Taiwan pop, began turning out rock musicians with a real streak of defiance: from Cui Jian's rock albums drawing notice abroad to the Three Heroes of Magic Stone and the band Tang Dynasty playing the Hong Kong Coliseum, mainland rock went further than its Hong Kong and Taiwan counterparts. Faye Wong got there first, folding mainland-style adult rock into her song Wilful and Unrepentant (《执迷不悔》), and then, after leaving Black American R&B behind, moving into dream pop. Among the mainland-identified singers, Faye Wong floated somewhere above the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all at once. She broke the mold of assembly-line love songs. She was fashionable and fine-grained.

Mainland listeners by then were used to the formula of Hong Kong and Taiwan pop, but they had not fully accepted the world it came from. The Four Heavenly Kings, Sally Yeh, Sandy Lam, and Wakin Chau all drew huge crowds, but a few years on the Four Heavenly Kings' pull faded, and the other singers were all missing, to one degree or another, that "rebellious and sexy" mark.

Faye Wong satisfied that fantasy.

Björk, often named as the model Faye Wong copied, had an avant-garde voice and a strange look that had already left the bounds of pop music — she won Japan's Tokyo industrial design award of the year in 1997. Next to Björk's harder, more industrial taste, Faye Wong's clothes and music were less extreme, but still half a step ahead of the pack of mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan singers, enough to make people feel their eyes had been opened. Her albums Fable and Restless were heavy with personal style, and even though they sold less than the more commercial records of the day, they were treated as the gold standard of "stream of consciousness" and "anti-commercialism."

If Teresa Teng stood for the first innocent stirrings of mainlanders in the 1960s, Faye Wong arrived carrying the moods of Hong Kong's city people, timed exactly with the urbanization of the 1990s, and became a symbol for the generations born in the 1970s and 1980s who were in a hurry to cut themselves off from their parents.

All of that vanished after 2003. Since To Love, apart from the CCTV Spring Festival Gala and the odd song for a film, Faye Wong has released no albums. People joked that the diva sings one song and her work for the year is done.

Even the rare times she does come out and sing, she gets criticized. The verdict on her voice this time was the same as ever: "her pitch was off, and her breath couldn't hold the sound," as Gong Linna wrote on Weibo. Her husband, the well-known German musician Lao Luo (Robert Zollitsch), then published a piece titled "Celebrities Fade, Art Endures": "Faye Wong is no longer an artist, so of course I won't judge her by an artist's standards (if you did judge her by an artist's standards, you could only say she is simply terrible). Faye Wong just wants to use her fame to make money. On that count she has already succeeded. What she sells has, as I said, no artistic value at all — so who allowed her to succeed like this? Who is responsible for Faye Wong deceiving a huge audience with such a poor performance?"

Some say Faye Wong's fans have all gone quiet. On Zhihu there is a question titled "How do you evaluate Faye Wong?" The top-voted answer sighs:

"This question came too late — or rather, Zhihu itself was built too late. So late that the people with deep feelings for Faye Wong, the ones who could write out a long and fair-minded review in one sitting, had already fallen silent as they aged. They probably couldn't stop themselves from clicking in when they saw this question, and then they shook their heads, sighed, and left. She marked a whole generation, solidly. Maybe fewer and fewer people will talk about her, but some will remember her for life."

The media, though, has never abandoned Faye Wong.

Before the concert, from the sky-high ticket prices to the sales collapse, every outlet kept its eyes fixed on Faye Wong at the center of the story. News of Leah Dou releasing a new album inevitably drags her in too, and even a photograph of Faye Wong walking down a street in Lijiang can lead the entertainment page of a newspaper.

Now that she has gone so long without singing, people envy the way she lives all the more.

Faye Wong "being a girl in love" stopped being news long ago. What people hear about now is that she chants sutras and keeps company with the qigong masters Li Yi and Wang Lin. What she shows the world is devotion.

Faye Wong pursues one thing single-mindedly: good fortune, no trouble, and peace of mind. In 2001 she released an album of Buddhist sutras titled Both Compassion and Wisdom; on Weibo she follows Living Buddhas and animal-release charities, and adds a small palms-together icon to every Buddhist verse she reposts. The entertainment pages regularly carry news of Faye Wong attending Living Buddha ceremonies with friends, or flying to India with Wang Lin for religious gatherings. After her divorce from Li Yapeng, there was even a rumor that she would become a nun.

All of this, along with Faye Wong's cool withdrawal from the world, has been labeled upper class. To outsiders, the secretive little circles that form around a guru or a rinpoche look like clubs with a high bar for entry, where you need certain resources and connections to get in. It was the same with the sky-high-ticket uproar around this concert: whoever got hold of the first batch of tickets, the public assumed, "must have had some kind of connection to land a scarce resource like that."

This envy of upper-class life dilutes the noise when someone like Wang Lin is exposed by the media. Nobody connects Faye Wong's faith in Buddhism and gurus with vulgarity — even though in 2014 the Financial Times cited a Hurun report saying that a third of mainland China's rich call themselves Buddhists. Most of them are middle-aged men who love rubbing their prayer beads to a glossy shine and reposting Buddhist verses.

For more than a decade, almost all the news about Faye Wong has been of this kind. She causes no trouble.

Meanwhile, celebrity scandals kept arriving in waves: Vicki Zhao's "Japanese war flag dress," Edison Chen's leaked photos, Jaycee Chan's arrest for drugs, several male stars caught with prostitutes. Some were about private life, some touched on political ideology, but without exception the public anger they set off rose higher and higher, because information moved faster and social networks had become the ordinary person's information center.

Social networks pushed up the PR cost of being a celebrity still further. The damage that used to come from media exposure has been replaced by a flood of online comment that gets into every crack and runs to greater extremes. A public figure, like any large company, runs herself ragged across a tangle of social platforms, carefully saying the correct thing in each place: correct politically, correct in speech.

Over the years, Faye Wong's withdrawal has been read as sophisticated. She doesn't need to tread carefully; she has always appeared before the public as someone free to come and go. The team that made the "Faye's Moments Live" documentary told QDaily: "Even one minute of footage of Faye Wong is precious. It's really hard." In her own documentary, the only people who speak are her staff. She doesn't say a word.

But whether she is handling her management company or facing the press, Faye Wong holds the upper hand in the conversation much of the time. Her rare interviews are treated as a scarce resource, compiled into collections of quotes and posted in the introduction of the Faye group on Douban for fans to read.

In the years Faye Wong hasn't been singing, what people consume about her has moved from her music to her way of life, from a young woman's sharp edges to a middle-aged woman's ordinariness, from doing what no one else dared to doing nothing at all.

Faye Wong fits many people's fantasy of a settled life and an independent mind. The powerful, the literary youth, the successful, the middle class — all of them can find something in her to project themselves onto. She is a miniature of this society's "ideal life."

The Zhihu user Ni Yining summed up Faye Wong's success this way: "Free in love and in hate, and still looking after her children, without resentment and without entanglement. Her good condition owes something to Botox and hyaluronic acid, and something to a stable life. Which shows that a 'golden age' isn't shouted into being, it's lived into being. Only when you can arrange your own life can you love someone cleanly, with nothing dragging and nothing mixed in."

People envy Faye Wong that "can" — a comfortable life, manageable risk, the ability to sidestep public opinion, the freedom to come and go as she pleases in a society that still has plenty of constraints.

Young people feel something more complicated. They sneer at chanting sutras and shopping sprees in the same life, but they have already found reasons for why Faye Wong rests her beliefs on such things, and they choose to look past them. "Holding no unrealistic illusions about any star's intelligence is the basic requirement of being a fan," Jiang Shui, 26, told QDaily.

In 2010, after six years away from the music business, Faye Wong came back with a national tour. The moment booking for the first show opened, every phone line at the ticketing company was jammed, and bookings passed 20 million yuan within 10 days.

At this concert, Faye Wong sang 30 songs straight through. Six years ago on that national tour she said two words, "thank you." This time she said nothing at all. But even a small gesture — covering her mouth, taking off her jacket — brought screams from the crowd.

An effect like that: how could singing a few songs alone ever produce it?

Cover image from: Visual China Group (VCG).