17/07/03 Thursday

I brought my mom to watch Fei Yu Qing on the first night of his performance. Incidentally it was also the singer's 48th birthday. Not that it mattered to my mom, she just liked his music and so do i. My dad has been complaining on the phone from china about missing out on his concert but it was just too bad that only my mom was back in singapore at that time.

The indoor stadium was totally packed and my mom could not stop remarking on how popular Fei Yu Qing is, even after so long. The act opened predictably enough with the singer crooning some of the familiar ballards with the ever glizzy backup dancers and life band. He sounded pretty much the same after all these years and surprisingly, i could singalong with most of the songs that night. It is the second time that i have watched him perform.

It is more than a sense of nostagia that i felt that night. I know the songs are familiar but never has other kind of music ever evolved the kind of feelings that 70-80s chinese music would. These are the music that never fails to transport me into a time and space which i could remember but never recall. The feelings and images of childhood that remain locked up deep in my mind except when i heard these songs. I don't recall ever listening to them or ever having a chance to but yet, they are there somehow. The images accompanying them unreachable when the music stopped. It was an almost hynoptic trance that one is in and having some memories which you never consciously knew were there.

Between the songs during the concert, i slipped in and out of having been somewhere else, being another child during my childhood. Where did i remember these songs? Why do i know how to sing them? Why do i feel this way about them? Why do i remember and not recall? Has it been the tv? The radio?

I remember the first time i've seen Fei Yu Qing. It must have been before i was 6, when i was still living in JB. It was a theatre. I think it must have been. A younger man, a smaller space and no dancers but everything else remained the same. The same songs, the same act... except he had one a long strip of pink toilet paper draped round his neck, pretending that it was a scarf while imitating Gao Ling Feng. Another memory intruded: red semi-circular velvet lounge chairs, dance floor, running and gliding and feeling the velvet chairs. My dad in a safari suit and a chinese restaurant. Was i wearing pink? So many songs playing at the same time. I felt like singing. There was just me and one other brother. The two of us running amongst loud people chatting over drinks.

Childhood has always come to me in bits and pieces. But never as clear as when i listen to the music of that era. Never with such clarity and vibrance. It is a sense of being cocoon and wrapped in my old baby blanket and hugging my smelly bolster again. To feel contented and surrounded by something safe and comforting. To remember and to recall finally at that moment where everything stood still.

I don't think anything else could have brought me back that close to my childhood.

My mom told my brother after the concert that i behaved pretty much like a excited child during the show, clapping and singing the songs. "Just like a kid" she said fondly. Perhaps she didn't know how close she was to the truth when she said that.