Episode 27: The Taiwanese Wave Dramas
A look back at the Taiwanese Wave dramas of the 2000s, featuring music from F4, Fahrenheit, Kaneshiro Takeshi, Teresa Teng, Judy Ongg, the L.A. Boyz, the Tigers Boys from Taiwan, the Tiger Boys from Hong Kong, and Joanna Wang!
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Welcome to Filmi Girl’s Idol Cast. Hit it!
Our opening song today was a cover of Taiwanese singer Julie Su’s famous 80s hit 跟着感觉走 Gēnzhe gǎnjué zǒu or “Follow Your Feeling” sung as a duet by the Untamed’s Xiao Zhan and veteran Chinese singer Na Ying on the variety show Our Song on November 17, 2019. A translation of the lyrics (not by me) goes, “Follow my heart and let me go the right way one day I'll make dreams come true.” The song circulated on bootleg copies through mainland China, adopted by the young generation as something of an anthem as the 1980s turned to the 1990s and still beloved today judging by the reaction of the Our Song audience. I highly recommend watching the video, not just for Xiao Zhan’s bright smile and Na Ying’s dazzling stage presence but also for the giddy reactions of the audience, aunties and youth alike singing along. Their heart eyes are my heart eyes. Genzhe Gan Jue Zou…
In episode 26 I went down memory lane looking at idol dramas--or what I think of as idol dramas, that is, dramas starring idols. I had so much fun looking back at the Taiwanese Wave dramas of the early to mid 2000s that I thought I’d do a full episode on the era. But before I begin, I need to make clear that I do not speak or read any of the Chinese languages and I relied on academic articles and books in English, as well as a few Japanese sources. Luckily because I can read kanji I was able to parse enough Chinese words and names to dig for sources and songs but if you have concerns or think I’ve gotten something wrong or misinterpreted something, please feel free to get in touch. I may be a librarian but I’m not infallible. I would also like to apologize for my horrific pronunciation of basically every Chinese name that is to follow. And on that note, let’s get into it!
So, like I said, I had an absolute blast going down memory lane while writing up episode 26 but imagine my surprise when one of the first things I came across in my research for this episode is that the phrase “idol dramas” means something completely different to Chinese-speaking markets. Namely it refers to dramas in the style of Japan’s “post-trendy” dramas, of which SMAP’s Kimura Takuya’s Long Vacation, which I introduced in episode 26, is a prime example. These 1990s dramas focused on the romantic problems of young adults in a contemporary urban setting, making good use of the hottest pop music and stylish clothes of the bubble era “trendy dramas” but infused with more real emotion and touching on the problems facing young people--especially young women. What relationships should I have with work? How should I interact with potential male partners? Is it okay to want to be swept off my feet but also treated with respect as a human being? And, make no mistake, the female gaze was key here. Writer/Producer Kitagawa Eriko, the genius behind Long Vacation, really set the standard for a lot of what would become common tropes of the genre… including the use of handsome male idols in leading romantic roles. She would go on to work with SMAP’s Nakai Masahiro, KAT-TUN’s Kamenashi Kazuya, and TVXQ’s Jaejoong among others. So I guess I answered my own question from the previous episode in that Long Vacation is an idol drama by my standard… and by the standard of the Chinese-speaking market.
In a way, the tag of “idol drama” makes sense for these dramas because even if the romantic hero wasn’t a literal idol in an idol group, these actors still had personas they carried with them into the roles. They had larger-than-life images that bled over into things like magazine interviews, television variety show appearances, commercial endorsements, and so on. And quite a few were singers as well. Projecting idol charisma is a different skill than naturalistic acting but, as I said in episode 26, it’s still a valuable one.
I began with Long Vacation because I love SMAP’s Kimura Takuya but the drama widely considered to be the first “post-trendy” drama was 1991’s Tokyo Love Story, based on a popular romance manga by Saimon Fumi. The drama starred Suzuki Honami in a career-making role as the bright-eyed Rika and Arimori Narimi as Satomi, a girl-next-door type, who moved to the big city from waaaay out in inaka, and who was childhood friends with two dudes who both love her and were extremely handsome, as played by young singer-actors Eguchi Yosuke and Oda Yuji. The four must not only navigate complicated matters of the heart but also the ways of the big city and new cultural conventions around work, romance, and family. The drama--and the theme song from Oda Kazumasa--were smash hits. Oda’s theme song, the perky ラブ・ストーリーは突然に sold almost 3 million copies and remains beloved by the Japanese public. Covers of the song uploaded on youtube have views in the millions… millions.
The key point here is that the reach of these post-trendy dramas extended well beyond Japanese borders thanks to the combination of technological advances and a public looking for modern Asian stories in the newly opened markets in the region. These post-trendy dramas spread like wildfire, especially in Chinese-speaking markets, through both brand new cable television channels hungry for content and pirated VCDs--that would be “Compact Disc Digital Video”--manufactured in the two big VCD hubs: Taiwan and Hong Kong. But while the technology and the dramas were new, these VCDs traced an old path of cultural transmission between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan, as well as between those hubs in Taiwan and Hong Kong to the broader Chinese-speaking world in Southeast Asia and further east to the diaspora in Canada, America, Australia, and beyond.
Okay, so, because this is my podcast, this means we’re going to have to rewind back to the 1960s to talk about Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng before we can get into the F4 and Jerry Yan’s Doumyouji perm. Taiwan, like Korea, has a complicated modern history. It was a Japanese colony until the end of World War II, and then immediately after the war ended, the island became an outpost for the mainland Chinese dissidents who fled the communist takeover of China.
There are many thorny political issues lurking that I am not qualified to comment on regarding the independent status of Taiwan. If you’re interested, please feel free to read further and make your own decisions. What’s important to note for this story is that Taiwan at the end of World War II was in the middle of complex political relationships and the tensions--and friendships--spilled over into the cultural realm. China and Taiwan, China and Japan, and Japan and Taiwan, not to mention the dealmaker role of the United States. What all of this means for our purposes is that young people growing up in Taipei in the 50s and 60s would have been exposed to a mix of all sorts of genres and styles from the different regions of China thanks to the massive influx of immigrants, as well as to the enka songs of the lingering Japanese cultural influence--Taiwan’s legacy of post-colonialism is far less fraught than say that of Korea and Japanese ties remain fairly strong to this day--as well as to the domestic Taiwanese min-ge, and, of course, American/Western sounds.
The young Teresa Teng, the daughter of dissents who had fled to Taiwan, absorbed all of it. She started singing lessons as a child, won a talent competition, signed a record deal, and dropped out of high school. Before she’d even turned 18 she was well on her way to becoming the queen of pan-Asian music. It’s important to note that Teresa Tang sang in Mandarin--the language of the northern city of Beijing and now the official language of Taiwan--rather than the Cantonese of nearby Hong Kong, which had been the old language of show business in China, or even the local Taiwanese dialect which would have been spoken in most homes and on the streets of Taiwan. Mandarin was a language that could travel a long distance, across the Taiwan Strait and even across the Pacific Ocean.
After dropping out of high school, Teresa moved to the show business hub of Hong Kong in 1970--another melting pot of cultures--where she worked with a local producer who encouraged her to lean into a more grown-up style of song and to develop what would become her signature sound, a soft, breathy singing style that set her apart from the other singers of the day. And it’s here in Hong Kong that she was scouted by Japan’s Polydor label who were looking to bring an exotic pan-Asian sound back to Japan. They were convinced that she was going to be the next Misora Hibari. Spoiler alert: she was.
In Japan, the second biggest music market in the world even back then, Teresa was able to perform on bigger stages, in bigger venues than she had before. And while it was a steep learning curve for the girl from Taipei, she went on to have great success in the Japan in the mid-70s and was able to leverage that Japanese cachet with a return to Hong Kong and to Mandarin pop with what would be a career defining song: 1977’s “The Moon Represents My Heart.” Things got a little tricky for Teresa as she fell victim to the tangled politics of the China-Taiwan relationship as the 1970s ended. She was arrested in Japan for using a fake Indonesian passport in order to get around travel restrictions and she was deported. Teresa laid low in California for a couple of years but as the 1980s began, she bounced back and worked steadily--with much love and support from audiences across Asia--until her death in 1995 at the far too young age of 42. But she is still remembered as a legend.
It’s important to know Teresa Teng for this story because her career boom tracked closely with the opening of media markets and liberalization that was happening across the region. There were two other Taiwanese singers who found success in Japan in the 1970s and into the 1980s: Judy Ongg and Ouyang Fei Fei. But unlike Teresa Tang, who kept her strong ties to Taiwan and to Chinese speaking regions, both Judy Ongg and Ouyang Fei Fei ended up making their homes in Japan and I think have much more of a domestic Japanese image than Teresa did. Judy Ongg, in particular, in her spectacular 70s-era white winged 魅せられて dress is a permanent fixture of Japanese mass culture and even today you can find knockoff Halloween costume versions retailing for about 3500 yen on shopping website Rakuten. I know because I just checked.
As the 1980s became the 1990s, Teresa Teng’s music with it’s romantic, personal lyrics so very different from the stark political art from mainland China, became something of an avatar for Taiwan. As did the work of prolific Taiwanese romance novelist Qiong Yao, whose novels and the filmed adaptations--also made--were eagerly watched across the greater Chinese speaking community from mainland China to Malaysia to the western diaspora. And although Qiong Yao’s works were wildly popular and deeply loved by many fans across Asia, very little has been translated into English and her name is essentially unknown in the West thanks to the gatekeeping of quote unquote experts who did not consider her family melodramas and romances to be serious work. And as an aside, this is exactly the kind of soft censorship you’ll often see in Asian pop culture studies. Imagine trying to understand American pop culture without mention of Stephen King. Often we, as English speakers, don’t even know what we don’t know. Well, luckily you have me!
Anyways, Qiong Yao, another of the many refugees who had fled to Taiwan with her family as a small child after World War II, published her first book in 1963, “Outside the Window, an autobiographical novel detailing her unhappy young adulthood--an affair with a high school teacher, two failed university entrance exams, a failed suicide attempt, and an unhappy marriage. Something in Qiong Yao’s writing on her own troubled life connected with readers and the book became a success. It changed her life--and not just professionally. Qiong Yao’s publisher also became her second husband. More than just a novelist, Qiong Yao was also heavily involved in the production of the films made from her stories, even writing the lyrics to the theme songs. In early 1979, very shortly after the United States announced it would recognize the communist government of mainland China, the Chinese ban was lifted on Taiwanese literature and one of the authors who was published was Qiong Yao. Her novels--packed full of romance, melodrama, and intrigue rather than uplifting tributes to the communist project--were smash hits. One of the articles I read for this episode said after the mass burning of literature during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people hand copied novels and stories to share. Imagine going from carefully savoring a limited supply of hand-copied stories to having 40 volumes of dashing heroes and tragic heroines dropped in your lap. The 1980s around the region were also a time of renegotiating family life and romance but this was especially true in China and Qiong Yao’s sentimental stories of young people navigating domestic conflict struck a chord.
But perhaps even more titillating for mainland Chinese readers were Qiong Yao’s detailed descriptions of characters’ outfits and all the other trappings of a middle class life. Honestly, the few translated passages I came across, make me wish we had access to these too. This is from an article called “Reception of Taiwanese Literature in 1980s Mainland” where the author has translated a passage from one of Qiong Yao’s novels describing a girl with a weak personality and simply no taste, darling: “She never dares to speak with strangers, and if she had to, she would inevitably embarrass herself with inappropriate wording…Furthermore she is almost a [imbecile] in choosing matching color for her clothes. Just now she wears a grassgreen winter jacket on top, but a pair of pants in eggplant-purple, and a floral scarf around her neck. When she appears all of a sudden, one would think that she were a character from Peking opera.”
I mean come on!! That’s quality stuff!
Qiong Yao’s Taiwanese dramas of the 1980s--which followed very much in the spirit of her previous novels, telling stories of Taiwanese life--also made their way over to mainland China thanks to the lifting of previous restrictions. But then in 1989 after another massive round of loosening restrictions regarding Taiwan, she picks up and moves her drama production to mainland China and through the 90s proceeds to write a series of Tawainese-Chinese co-produced historical dramas set in a shared, if idealized past, featuring very modern, plucky heroines, including 1998’s blockbuster drama My Fair Princess, the story of a poor, orphaned girl who becomes a princess, set during the 18th century Qing Dynasty. These dramas would go on to launch the careers of a number of household names, including Vicky Zhao, Ruby Lin, and Fan Bing Bing.
But these historical dramas, popular as they were, were still competing with the Japanese post-trendy drama tales of modern life. While Xiao Yanzi was navigating 18th century court life with an upbeat attitude in My Fair Princess, Japan’s 1998 IT heroine was Fukada Kyoko, playing a girl dying of AIDS, which she got selling her body because she wanted money to go see her fave musician who then FALLS IN LOVE WITH HER BUT SHE’S DYING SO THEY CAN NEVER BE ToGEThER in the hit tearjerker drama 神様、もう少しだけ so juicy it had almost ¼ of the country tuning in to watch.
And the unearthly gorgeous hero of that drama was an actor named Kaneshiro Takeshi--a half-Japanese, half-Taiwanese model/actor/idol so handsome that he was scouted in his Taipei high school and swept right into Taiwanese teen idol life. He was one of the four little kings of 1990s Taiwanese entertainment, along with Jimmy Lin, Nicky Wu, and, of course, Alex Su who starred in, yes, My Fair Princess.
Back to Kaneshiro Takeshi, star of 神様. His debut single 1992’s 分手的夜裡 Fēnshǒu de yèlǐ, is an earnest break-up song, accompanied by a music video showing the hunky young Takeshi posing artfully on a beach in a damp white t-shirt and shorts, too thrilled to be singing in front of the camera to be convincingly sad. He is devastatingly charming. But Kaneshiro Takeishi was soon swept out of the domestic scene, landing a role in Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express in Hong Kong and from there going on to Tokyo where he conquered the Japanese market too with his role in 神様, before putting a final bow on 1998 by becoming the first Asian face of international fashion brand Prada.
This is what the media landscape looked like before production began on Meteor Garden. You had a pan-Asian popularity of Japanese “post-trendy” dramas filtered through the Taiwanese-Chinese pipelines--remember the bootleg VCD market that helped distribute these dramas--as well as something of a surging Taiwanese entertainment scene between Qiong Yao’s works and actors like the four little kings but bigger success meant moving abroad--to mainland China, Hong Kong, or Japan. The timing could not have been better for a contemporary, youthful, “post-trendy” Taiwanese drama set in Taipei and starring four Taiwanese hunks as well as a plucky Taiwanese heroine… and the one who stepped up to grab the opportunity was an ambitious television producer named Angie Chai.
Angie, who would have been in her late 30s in the late 1990s, had been working in television producing variety shows for years and she would have been well aware of both the popularity of Japan’s modern dramas as well as the lack of anything similar produced domestically. And--most importantly for this podcast--she was also aware that there was a massive gap in the domestic boy group market.
Here’s the situation that Angie would have seen. So, two of the four little kings: Nicky Wu and Alex Su, had been part of a super popular boy group called Xiao Hu Dui or the Little Tigers along with third member Julian Chen. The teen trio is considered to be Taiwan’s first boy group and they were active from 1988 to about 1992 when they went on hiatus for the members to perform their mandatory military service. They briefly reunited in 1994 and before going on their separate ways.
The Little Tigers—not to be confused with Hong Kong’s little Tigers who were active from 1984-85 and sang in Cantonese—Taiwan’s Little Tigers were modeled on Japan’s hugely popular Shonentai (who I’ve talked about in previous episodes) and their first single Little Green Apples 青蘋果樂園 was even a cover of Shonentai’s “What’s Your Name”. The video is an amazing journey through 1980s digital video effects as the youthful trio cavort in matching outfits through what I’m assuming is Taipei in one part of the screen as in other part of the screen their faces drift by in a high-tech neon laser beam outer space fever dream. It is incredible.
The Taiwanese pop scene by the late 80s was undergoing a huge transformation and professionalization. Just like Korea around the same time, both the economy and society were undergoing liberalization. The scene came to be dominated by two main companies--Rock Records and UFO Records. Rock Records focused on singer-songwriters and had an artsier image. UFO Records on the other hand, adopted a more Japanese-style pop system with a pipeline of in house producers working with… yes idols. Guess which company the Little Tigers were under?
Musically, the Little Tigers were under the care of a stable of producers whose names come up again and again. The core group seems to have come up through the campus rock-slash-folk scene as well as working in various capacities with the big singers of the day, such as Julie Su (remember her from the intro?). The result is a charming hodge podge of pan-Asian pop, campus folk, and 1980s razzle dazzle.
And then just as the Little Tigers were fading in 1992 came… the L.A. Boyz, that’s b-o-y-Z, a trio of hip-hopping young Taiwanese-American boys from… yes, L.A. While the Little Tigers had a Japanese influenced sound, the LA Boyz represented the exotic influence of the American diaspora returning home. The group was two brothers, Jeffrey and Stan Huang, and their cousin Steven Lin. They may have looked like the (extremely cute) boys next door but the LA Boyz were… from LA. Rather than the regional lingua franca of Mandarin, they rapped in English mixed with their parents’ Taiwanese dialect. As Jeffrey was quoted in a 1993 LA Times piece, “They don’t understand what we’re saying,” Jeffrey Huang said. Besides, “when it comes to Asians, there’s really not that much to rap about.” In other words, their nonsensical English lyrics gave Taiwanese youth a blank slate to project whatever image they wanted on the group. The group of doofy teens from Orange County also presented something of a blank slate to the Taiwanese music industry as well. And it’s worth singling out two men in particular here. Songwriters and producers Jerry Lo and Wang Zhi Ping. Jerry Lo aka DJ Jerry was another California transplant who, according to a 1994 Billboard article was discovered quote “performing original works on two keyboards on the sidewalk outside a Taipei record store” and swiftly made his way into the Taiwanese music scene with his American feel and appreciation for hip-hop. Wang Zhi Ping, was an industry songwriter and producer, a decade older than Jerry Lo. He was a guitar-head from childhood and a huge enthusiast of American classic rock.
Jerry Lo, with his interest in hip-hop, and Wang Zhi Ping with his ear for a commercial hit, brought their strengths together for the first two LA Boyz albums. The first was a hit but the second album, an album I had never heard before working on this episode and have since listened to at least a dozen times all the way through, was a masterpiece and a blockbuster hit selling something like 200,000 copies. Along with the catchy title track the album cycles through an invigorating blend of wild beats tempered by the smooth commercial ear of Wang Zhi Ping and topped with endearingly clumsy lyrics. There’s the new jack swing of “Head over heels”, the winking over-the-top kitsch of Oriental Mystery, The standout track, for me, is the unexpectedly beautiful Raining Night which features a vocal arrangement right out of John Phillips Laurel Canyon and a flute solo.
Jerry Lo moved on to acts like hip-hop themed boy group The Party and Wang Zhi Ping would go on to produce the rest of the run of L.A. Boyz albums which by 1997--the year they disbanded--the sound smoothing out into something far more commercial than their earlier manic albums.
And then… well, if you were a teen girl at the tail end of the 1990s in Taiwan, most of your domestic hunks were either rapidly aging out of the teen hunk market or were drifting into more aggressive hip hop you had no interest in or like L.A. Boy Steve Lin moving back to California to become an orthopedic surgeon and there were no replacements on the horizon. Sure, there were your imported hunks from Japan--Johnny’s & Associates in the late 1990s was very popular with the 哈日族 or Japanaphile fangirls. Duo Kinki Kids performed a concert in Taipei in February of 2000. The response was so good that 2001 saw them return, along with V6 (who were so popular they returned again later that year).
But imported hunks will never be as good as ones produced at home. And Angie Chai must have understood this as she began assembling the pieces for what would become Meteor Garden. One foot in the Japanese-influenced post-trendy drama world and one in the plucky-heroine-led domestic stories of drama queen Qiong Yao.
Meteor Garden is based on the girl’s manga series Hana Yori Dango--Boys Over Flowers--written by Kamio Yoko. The series ran for 51 volumes between 1992 and 2008 which meant the story was incomplete when Meteor Garden was being scripted and the drama necessarily has to invent some plot. The basic outline is this: Shan Cai, played by Barbie Hsu, is a lower middle class girl whose parents have strong armed her into attending a prestigious college where all the rich kids go to make connections but where not much learning takes place. The college is dominated by a pack of four rich guys, the F4, who bully their way into getting everything they want. Well, almost everything. One day they push too far and Shan Cai reaches the end of her patience with the rich kids and brand names and bullying and stands up to the F4 ringlinger, hot tempered Dào Míng Sì played by Jerry Yan. And he is floored. Nobody has ever spoken to him like this before. And after trying and failing to get Shan Cai to bend to his will, Dao Ming Si falls in love. It is not mutual…. At first. But Barbie Hsu and Jerry Yan generate some great chemistry and the series explores their blossoming romantic relationship as well as the friendships between the other members of the F4 and their friendships with Shan Cai, especially the soft spoken Huā Zé Lèi, played by Vic Zhou.
Probably the most meta scene in the entire series is in episode 11 when Dao Ming Si sends the other three F4 members to keep an eye on Shan Cai while he’s forced to go to New York City and they visit her at her part time job at a bakery where she’s angrily complaining that she wants to leave and wallow in her personal angst about whether or not she likes Dao Ming Si and her dumb parents and could somebody just buy all these cakes already!!! So, up roll the rest of the F4--played by Vic Zhou, who I mentioned already, plus Ken Chu and Vanness Wu. And Shan Cai, huffing adorably, is like, “ugh what do you dumb rich guys know about selling cakes anyways” and Vic Zhou is like, “just leave it to those two” and then cut to the next scene and Ken Chu and Vanness Wu are giving away kisses with cake purchase and there is this line of women stretching happily down the block. Two words, my friends: female gaze.
The drama was a hit in Taiwan and then as it spread around the region through VCD and cable TV, it was a hit everywhere else too. Jerry Yan got to ditch his Dao Ming Si perm and F4 signed on to become a real idol group. History was made. Their first album--Meteor Rain--was one of the best selling Mandarin pop albums of 2002 and the title track--“Meteor Rain”--was a hit in Taiwan.
F4 and Meteor Garden kick started what came to be known as the Taiwanese Wave, the precursor in many, many ways to the Hallyu Wave of Korean entertainment that would come later. The Taiwanese Tourism Board would even go on to use F4 as brand ambassadors in tourism ads aimed at female tourists, especially the wealthier Japanese tourists. And it worked. Not just the F4 ads but the Taiwanese Wave. The somewhat romantic, female-friend trip travel destination image of Taiwan, former colony, remains to this day. There are Japanese travel guidebooks for Taiwan specifically meant for female friends, Johnny’s & Associates groups still do ~exotic and romantic~ photo shoots there.
But back to F4.
Just like idols, the four novice actors let their personalities feed into the roles. There was Jerry Yan, drop dead gorgeous and extremely charming, he got his start in show business by winning a modeling competition and had already been working part time professionally when Meteor Garden came along. Vic Zhou, a few years younger, apparently accompanied a friend to the audition for Meteor Garden but was cast instead. As he explained in a 2006 CNN interview, “I had accompanied a friend to the audition and was waiting for him in the corridor of the office. The light was very dim and I hid in a corner against the wall. And when the director was going into his office, he saw me sitting there and thought, "Why is this person here?" And then he looked again and said, "This person's manners really seems like the character of Hua Ze Lei!" So he invited me to the audition.”
Ken Chu, born in Taiwan but educated in Singapore, was working as a cook when he was scouted by the production team. He remained a reluctant celebrity throughout his career saying in a 2009 interview that if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t. And then there was Van Ness Wu, born and raised in America, who had been working a dead-end telemarketing gig before deciding to try his luck in the entertainment business back in Taiwan.
They became overnight stars in Taiwan and as the drama slowly spread to other corners of the Chinese language market, and out through Southeast Asia, they became stars there too. While looking up information for this episode, I saw blog post after blog post talking fondly about the drama and how inescapable Meteor Garden was in places like the Philippines. And this is also where the first threads of what would become western fandom also enter the picture. My impression is that for many young second generation Asian immigrants in places like Canada and the United States, Meteor Garden was a real breath of fresh air. It was… relatable. Cool, even. I mean Barbie Hsu even had tattoos. Here was a drama they could enjoy unironically and feel connected to their heritage. It wasn’t just Japanese lady tourists who began traveling to Taiwan in search of some show business glamor.
But it did take a few years for Meteor Garden’s influence to fully bloom. VCDs were passed around. Regional cable channels picked it up. Many areas, including Japan, didn’t air it until 2003. And then, coincidentally or not, F4 debuted as a musical act in Japan just as the Japanese version of Boys Over Flowers was breaking big. F4 didn’t reach Arashi levels of fame but they rode a decent sized wave of popularity through the mid-to-late 2000s in Japan, even performing at Yokohama Arena. As an auntie caught in newsreel footage outside YokoAri in 2008 said about why she liked them, “they’re all tall and have good faces.” Yes. Yes, they are.
F4 remained more a marriage of convenience for the members than anything else--with even their albums containing more solo cuts than group songs--and they all pursued fairly successful solo careers independent of their work with F4 but that doesn’t lessen the impact they had as a unit. F4, like Meteor Garden, like Teresa Teng, had a real pan-Asian appeal. Their first single “Meteor Rain”, was a cover of Japanese singer Hirai Ken’s “Gaining Through Losing” and their second was with… Wáng Zhì Píng. Yes, the same guy who worked with the L.A. Boyz was now going to guide the careers of the next generation of idol songs. Wang Zhi Ping, always with an ear to commercial magic, gave F4 a light R&B touch… although he did manage to squeeze in, yes, a guitar solo.
Meteor Garden was so successful that it spawned a boom of Japanese girls manga adaptations. Worth mentioning in 2002 was Peach Girl, with F4’s Van Ness Wu and Marmalade Boy with Ken Chu. 2004 gave us the classic manga adaptation Mars reuniting Barbie Hsu with Vic Zhou as star crossed lovers--a pairing so powerful that the couple would go on to become irl lovers too. Then came the 2005 manga adaptation called It Started with a Kiss starring cute as a button Ariel Lin, tall, cool drink of water Joe Cheng, and the handsome scene stealer, secondary hero Jiro Wang.
Not only were these manga adaptations all well received in the target market of middle class youth in Asia, there was an unexpected--and unlooked for--crossover with western anime fans who spread word of the live action dramas through their online networks and eventually ended up reaching female-dominated subculture spaces like LiveJournal where fans traded subtitled files and links to dodgy streaming sites so that they could see the real LIVE ACTION version of the stories they loved from the Japanese manga. What’s fascinating looking back at these communities was how the sharp divides of language and culture were simply… side-stepped. If you couldn’t speak any of the Asian languages, what difference did it make if your content was in Mandarin or Japanese? Rain’s delightful 2004 Korean Language drama Full House was on equal footing with the aforementioned 2004 Mandarin-language Mars which was on equal footing with Kimura Takuya’s 2004 Japanese language drama Pride. I have vivid memories of watching all three of these on VCD at my friend’s house. She had come over from the Soviet Union as a young teen and--like me--didn’t particularly connect with American pop culture. So we sat around eating take-out, swooning at the romantic bits, crying at the sad parts, and just getting way too invested in these fairy tale narratives.
This was years before legal drama streaming sites like Viki and if my friend didn’t have a copy on VCD, we’d get her laptop out. She showed me how to find all the good stuff and if I couldn’t wait for one of our evening dates, I’d dig up the episode on my own--maybe part 3 of 7 would be missing or there were no subtitles and I’d have to try and figure out what was happening through context clues--but it was worth it for that emotional payoff when the main couple finally--FINALLY--got together.
There was only one thing that ended up separating out K-dramas and K-pop among western fans: the Korean product actively sought us out. But even now you can tell the fans who got into Asian pop culture before this Korean culture push and those who got into it after. Earlier fans are much more likely to pick up on regional trends and watch, for example, a popular anime like Yuri On Ice or a popular mainland Chinese drama like the Untamed. English-language Arashi fans and SHINee fans used to travel in the same circles. Now, you’re more likely to find K-pop fans have separated themselves into a Kpop culture bubble, with certain fandoms going further to limit themselves to just one group. I do hope this podcast helps break down those artificial barriers.
It started with a Kiss was a drama I watched in pieces, usually early in the morning before I went to work. Ariel Lin plays a sweet, everygirl shojo heroine who has a crush on an impossibly cold but drop dead gorgeous guy, played by Joe Cheng. Well, Ariel Lin decides to throw caution to the wind and confess her giant crush which… does not go over well. She is humiliated and then to top it all off, she and her father just have to move in with Joe Cheng’s family after their house is destroyed and… well, can she win him over? Will she just pine away? Why is Jiro Wang’s secondary hero character so sunshiney and cute? The drama had family values, messages about working hard for your dreams, and a massively charming cast.
Lead actor Joe Cheng would go on to do a bit of singing but he wasn’t an idol. He was a model-turned actor. The idol in the It Started With a Kiss cast was Jiro Wang. Even if he didn’t know it yet.
The story, from what I remember from old gossip forums and what my internet searching in English was able to dig up, is that Jiro Wang’s parents were older when they had him and his father, a war veteran, had a chronic illness and passed away when Jiro was a teenager leaving the family in massive debt. Jiro hustled working as many part time jobs as he could, including construction work, dish washer, handing out flyers, and some part time modeling. Well, the kid had star potential and ended up being picked for a new idol group by BMG--one of the international companies attracted to Taiwan in the wake of the professionalization of the music business I mentioned before. But then BMG’s stock crashed after the terror attacks of September 11 and the project was scrapped. He tried again with another company but was rejected. Jiro then went to do his mandatory military service to get it out of the way and came back in 2003 to work behind-the-scenes as a modeling assistant. But he couldn’t hide that charm under a basket forever he was approached by Comic Productions for a role as the secondary male lead in the drama It Started with a Kiss and Jiro, despite some misgivings about never having acted before… said yes.
The drama, as I said before was a smash hit, and Jiro Wang, 23 years old at the time, was swept up and directly into a brand new boy group called Fahrenheit. The other members were Calvin Chen, then 24, who was one of the 8 lucky winners of the annual Chinese-language Vancouver-based talent competition called Sunshine Nation. What he won was a ticket to Taiwan and a chance at the career he really wanted. Calvin had been studying to get his masters degree in economics in Vancouver but his heart was on the stage. Then there was Wu Chun, then 25, a Brunei born model from a wealthy family, described as a jade-like beauty in at least one fan translated article I found, he was scouted by Comic Productions for the lead in the drama Tokyo Juliet opposite It Started With A Kiss’s heroine Ariel Lin while on a visit to Taipei--despite the fact that he couldn’t speak Mandarin and had to be dubbed in his first leading role. Finally, there is Aaron Yan, then just 19, who apparently ran a popular blog when he was approached by Comic Productions to audition for a drama role.
While the grown-up Wu Chun was set to break hearts in Tokyo Juliet, the other more boyish three--Jiro, Calvin, and Aaron--were tapped for one of those high school dramas starring a million and one young talents competing for screen time Battle Royale-style that I love so much and talked about a bit in episode 26. This drama was called K.O. One and it was exactly as campy and silly as its Japanese cousins like Gokusen. So, K.O. One takes place at a high school for juvenile delinquents where everybody is ranked according to their “Knock Out” or “KO” ability. Jiro Wang plays the leader of this class and through a series of mishaps and hijinx becomes BFF with Calvin’s and Aaron’s characters and then the three take on enemies together while also attempting to get their lives back on track.
To say that K.O. One was a hit is to put it lightly. K.O. One was a cultural phenomenon inside and outside of Taiwan, spawning spin-offs and sequels… as well as rocketing the newly formed Fahrenheit into the spotlight.
They didn’t make an album debut until the end of 2006 but had already participated in drama OSTs and fan girls from Taipei to Vancouver were ready and waiting. One of my favorite tracks from that first Fahrenheit album is the song from Wu Chun’s Tokyo Juliet OST--which was yet another Japanese manga adaptation, this one set in the fashion world. The song “Only Have Feelings For You” is a light, very groovy pop tune written by singer JJ Lin with lyrics by a young female lyricist named Zhang Jia Wei. The arrangement has the four members of Fahrenheit paired up with powerhouse vocalist Hee-bee Tien for a very charming four vs 1, uh, duet. The melody is simple enough for the four members of Fahrenheit--none of whom had real professional training as a vocalist--to master as well as giving Hee-bee, a solid foundation to let her voice soar. Despite only have known each other for a short time, Fahrenheit--and Hee-Bee--sound good together.
It would not be the boys last collaboration with Hee bee either. They would link back up with Hee-bee’s group S.H.E. for their second album, which came out in 2008 and featured another classic song “New Home” the theme song to the drama Romantic Princess starring Wu Chun and Calvin Chen. As well as a song from the OST for Wu Chun and Jiro Wang’s drama Hana Kimi which starred S.h.e.’s Ella.
In case you haven’t gotten the picture, Fahrenheit--like F4--was an idol group intimately tied up with the world of television dramas. And the cross-promotion worked both ways. Fans of a drama would become fans of one of the members and seek out the group. Fans of the group would tune in to the dramas to see their favorite member. Both sets of fans would buy the OST. In the second half of the 2000s Fahrenheit was hot all across Asia as well as with fans in the West like me. Taiwan even tapped them to replace F4 as brand ambassadors for the nation’s tourism industry.
What could go wrong?
Well… a lot. Actually. The group would disband in 2012 with a lot of sour feelings.
So, the biggest problem with Fahrenheit is that they were thrown together as fully formed adults with lives and histories and, in Wu Chun’s case--a secret wife. There were personality clashes as well as clashes in values and lifestyle. The age gap between a 19 year old blogger and a 25 year old husband and father is huge. And imagine the difference in mindset that Jiro’s difficult upbringing with the debt hanging over his head versus members that had comfortable upper middle class or even very wealthy backgrounds.
And then there were the gay rumors that dogged young Aaron for years. Rumors that exploded in 2018 when an ex-boyfriend leaked photos to the press and claimed that Aaron had cheated on him. Thanks to detective work from gossip cops, the cheating part was revealed to be false but Aaron’s sexuality had been forcibly revealed. Still, Aaron’s fans have remained loyal and he remains as outspoken--and busy with acting and television work--as ever.
Wu Chun is out there being a dad and posting thirst trap gym selfies on Instagram. At 40 he’s making the pivot from handsome leading man roles to character roles and doing it with grace and style… and no shirt.
Calvin Chen is out there working and living his best life. He just got married this year to popular actress Joanne Tseng, who featured in the 2014 video for his song “How Has Love Been”.
And Jiro Wang… he tried his hand with production and fashion over the years with varying results but he’s also still active in show business and the latest news in English I found had him on a television variety show in March 2020 giving a tour of his house--where he’d turned his kitchen into a store room for fan gifts and had installed a squat toilet. Stars: they’re just like us.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this march down memory lane as much as I did. The Fahrenheit discography is still very listenable in my opinion, full of sweet ballads and that catchy creole Taiwanese musical sense. But coincidentally or not, Fahrenheit’s demise overlapped with an aggressive push of export Kpop/Kdramas, especially in the West where the barrier for entry for Korean products dropped dramatically and a new crop of Korean-culture bubble fans began to spring up. My impression is that domestic idol group fan culture had never been terribly strong and while there are still domestic idol groups like SpeXial put together by Comic Productions--there hasn’t been another Fahrenheit or F4 and fans who want to participate in idol group culture are more likely to pick a Johnny’s group or a Kpop group to stan.
There are still plenty of singer-actors in Taiwanese dramas. Very popular ones. But domestic idol culture is fairly quiet.
And on that note, I’ll play us out with a song called “Forget him” by Joanna Wang, daughter of LA Boyz producer Wang Zhi Ping, whose work I found while looking up articles on him and after listening, immediately fell in love.
Stay safe everyone!