Korean Popular Culture

The Textbook-in-progress of the Ivy League's first class on the Korean Wave. This blog is the work of University of Pennsylvania EALC 198/598 students (Spring 2006 & 2007). Please apply proper citation when using any part of this blog. For details on citing this site see: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite5.html#1

Friday, March 16, 2007

Sappy chinese ballads

After last week's discussion of tragic korean ballads with music that doesn't relate to the music videos and sad stories on the videos I remembered seeing this music video on youtube by a Tawainese all girls band called: S.H.E. and they have done a music video called "I love you" where the song's lyric is irrelevant but the story is very emotional (it's based on a real story) however, the story is kind of told with words too in the music video. I loved this and wished that I could have played it in class last monday. I'd bet that this would be popular with korean audiences.



Below is the translation done by a commentor named on one of the pages:
Story starts in Shanghai 1949. The KMT (the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party) lost the civil war to the Communists and were forced to flee to Taiwan. The girl's family was probably high ranking KMT government/military officials. As they fled, she promised her bf that she'll return and all her "love" was kept in that box for him. He promised that he'll spend an entire lifetime waiting for her, many lifetimes if needed. 40 years later she has a family with many children and grandchildren. One day her son told her that he found her long lost boyfriend. Like promised, he waited for her all these years at the same place, never marrying, even that box was never opened in fear of losing her forever. After an intense emotional struggle, she decided to pack up and spend the rest of her days with him back in Shanghai. Her husband in Taiwan bought a house for them as a wedding present.

2 Comments:

At 11:35 AM, Blogger xiaokang said...

sorry, sometimes when I'm not so busy I will do a line by line translation of the dialogue in this song because it was so touching, I cried when I first saw it and again when I heard this was based on a real story.

 
At 12:37 AM, Blogger Teresa Dong (董泰利) said...

The fact that this is based on a real story is possibly true. My grandparents were all KMT from China and many of my grandfather's generation (ie. soldiers in the KMT army) had wives or girlfriends left back in China while they started new families in Taiwan. I would imagine the same thing could happen the other way around. S.H.E. is one of the most popular girl groups in Taiwan and the greater China area if not the most popular and I was a really big fan back in high school.

 

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