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发帖数: 29576 | 9 “The Most Handsome Chinese Man I’ve Ever Seen”
Posted by Jiayang Fan
Fei-Xiang.jpg
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/01/fei-xiang
In 1987, a young man walked onto a vast, lantern-festooned stage and, in
less than three minutes, won the hearts of a billion. The stage was the
Spring Festival Gala, a nationally broadcast variety show that makes the
Radio City Christmas Spectacular look homespun. But Fei Xiang, who soon
became the Gala’s main attraction, was no mere Rockette. Fei stood a
statuesque six foot three, and had chiseled features, a voluminous pompadour
, and miraculous gray-blue eyes. “The most handsome Chinese man I’ve ever
seen,” my thirty-six-year-old mother exclaimed at the time. Which wasn’t
quite true.
Kris Phillips, as he is known by his given English name, is only half
Chinese, born in Taiwan to a Chinese mother and American father. The
performance that anointed him as the King of Pop in China, which he later
referred to as “the show (that) established everything overnight,” was
delivered in a shiny red single-breasted tux. After pecking his maternal
grandmother on the cheek, a gesture as familiar to Americans as it must have
been alien to his live, primly seated Chinese audience, the Stanford-
educated twenty-six-year-old, in accentless Mandarin, heartily embraced the
communist mainland as his longed-for motherland.
In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine a more unlikely star. At a time when
Taiwan was denied acknowledgement and America was still largely the model of
“capitalistic roader,” a face and voice that so embodied both places had
managed to cross the strait and perform, to deafening applause, on a state-
sanctioned platform. In the next two years, Fei would make five albums,
deliver sixty-three sold-out solo concerts in one tour, and sell more
cassette tapes than any singer in Chinese history.
Before Fei, the Spring Festival Gala was accustomed to hosting conservative
acts along the lines of dragon dance, folk songs, and the Beijing opera.
Following their heavy brocaded costumes and paint-saturated faces, the
handsome star was just a svelte swivel away from Michael Jackson, but with
the earnest, brimming eyes of John Lennon—and he also happened to croon in
mellifluously flawless Mandarin.
No doubt, the best of the West—with Chinese characteristics. A young man,
upon attending one of his concerts, commented with a note of sourness (
perhaps in appraisal of his own romantic prospects) that “to Chinese women
he’s the picture-perfect prince riding up on a white horse.” And then,
just as suddenly as he rode into their lives and land, Phillips was off
again—this time, to New York. In 1990, Phillips made his début in,
fittingly, “Miss Saigon.” For a vocalist who had bested Pearl Jam, Celine
Dion, and Whitney Houston in record sales, his chorus roles went unremarked.
In recent years, he has been spotted only sporadically: in a telecast gala
commemorating the Hong Kong handover; performing the works of Andrew Lloyd
Webber four years later; and in 2005, as part of an Asia comeback tour
performing Broadway classics sung in Mandarin. One could hear sighs
lamenting the meandering path of an aging has-been. As one online-forum
poster summed up, Fei Xiang “had China, failed Broadway.”
Despite the dispiriting evidence, one wonders at the fairness of this
assessment to a man who freely declared that he “didn’t even know how to
sing” at the height of his stardom. In Phillips’s own words, it was only
when he gained a “better understanding of life and love,” away from China
and largely under the tutelage of Broadway composers and directors, that he
fully enriched his music.
In a 2007 interview with CCTV 9, the state-controlled English-language
channel, the singer emphasized the importance of professional pursuit and
playfully distanced himself from both whispers about his personal life (
artfully dodging a pointed question about his sexuality, a subject that has
been under speculation for years) and the claustrophobic fame he had once
both enjoyed and endured.
Speaking to the press, he focussed on the need to maintain for his audience
“a zone of imagination” so that celebrities do not become “prostitutes”
for the media. Imagination. Hmm. Isn’t imagining precisely what we all did?
Hadn’t he, Kris Fei Xiang Phillips, at China’s tumultuous moment of
change, offered himself as the consummate canvas onto which a generation of
Chinese could imagine the forbidden glamour of the West in the familiar
melody of murmured Mandarin tunes? Put in today’s parlance of culture war,
hasn’t the dually fluent Eurasian become the victor-turned-casualty who, in
the end, reveals himself to be gilded pawn?
”When it counts, I am considered a foreign guest, but the audience doesn’t
treat me as someone from outside,” the young star said quite presciently
in a 1989 interview. True, but hadn’t his gemstone eyes always barred him
from the ranks of the insider as well? In 1987, he inhabited the ample moat
of mystery between China and America, inside and outside. In 2012, in the
age of Lady Gaga and Twitter, has the disintegration of this space also
demystified his allure and caused his dismissal from the communal Chinese
imagination?
None of this occurred to me as I saw a middle-aged man emerge in dark pants
and a black sequined jacket. I was on the phone with mom, fast-forwarding
through the Gala which I’d watched with her for as many Chinese New Years
as I can remember, this year courtesy of YouTube.
Mom was undoubtedly rapt in front of her live-streaming screen, but I spent
much of the four hours gchatting with friends, dragging the slider button
through various costume changes (close to a hundred) and the dance-song
calisthenics (imagine a dozen smaller-scale though no less elaborate
renditions of the Beijing opening ceremony).
Incidentally, I had forwarded past Fei’s introduction, mistaking him for a
Uighur singer (of the variety the state likes to trot out on an annual basis
to affirm national solidarity), before my mother “Ai-ya”ed us to a halt.
“Fei Xiang!”
As soon as she said his name, I recognized the glittering eyes, the “
extravagant emotionality,” as one critic had memorably put it, of his hand
gesture. His features, still vivid if tired, were laden with a thick impasto
of makeup, as if armored to deliver the song with which he had so
effortlessly wooed the nation twenty-five years ago.
“The clouds and wind of my home, they call to me still,” he sang amid an
army of dancing girls. The camera panned to an elderly man in a Maoist coat
dabbing at his eyes with liver-spotted hands.
From my Manhattan studio, I remarked to my mother how tacky it was, how
ridiculously kitschy the fifty-year old looked donning the costume of a much
younger man and belting out a has-been power ballad. But I was met with
silence. From the other end of the line, I heard only Fei Xiang and his
refrain.
After a moment, my sixty-year-old mother cleared her throat. “He’s still
handsome, she said. “As handsome as ever.”
And for once, I didn’t contradict her. |
