In her column “Nostalgic Thoughts,” Alaina Zhang ’27 reminisces on the past and reflects on why we miss it at all.

My parents tell me if I walked on the streets of China in the ’80s and ’90s, I would hear shops blasting the same songs over and over again. In the evenings, sitting behind the screen doors on a rocking chair, people would listen to the radio station and request a song for someone they loved, hoping that person is tuned in too. Zhou Hua Jian’s “Peng You” (Friend) and Ye Qian Wen’s “Zhu Fu” (Blessing) are often cued, and I think of those songs as beautiful, vulnerable mediums for expressing your emotions publicly across the radio waves to a special person.

I only started listening to Chinese songs after I moved to Canada. In grade three, my obsession with them grew to a ridiculous degree and I made my parents print out the lyrics so I could bring physical copies of them to school and memorize them. Having them in my pocket was comforting and reminded me of a past that would never change even as realities shifted around me. From Xiao Hu Dui’s “Qing Ping Guo Le Yuan” (Green Apple Playground) to Qi Qin’s “Wang Shi Sui Feng” (Let the Past Follow the Wind), these tunes helped me feel Chinese and experience the sentiments of a past era in a distant country. I paid the price by sacrificing my knowledge of American and Canadian pop songs and choosing to live in a world constructed by old Chinese pop.

The beauty of the Chinese language is its complex history, nuanced meanings and subtle sentiments. A few characters alone can encapsulate the vast spectrum of human feelings. Unlike the kind of physical, open descriptions about desire that are so common in English songs nowadays, these older Chinese songs tend to emphasize metaphor and emotion. Those subtle confessions hidden in every line is what gets me: 

天青色等烟雨

而我在等你

The azure sky is waiting for the misty rain 

yet I am waiting for you

黄昏的地平线 划出一句离别

爱情进入永夜

The horizon of twilight draws out a single farewell 

As love enters eternal night 

I’m convinced the restrained expression of love in these songs is rooted in the nature of romantic feelings as a luxury in older Chinese culture, where survival and necessity are so deeply rooted. Nowadays, surfing the Chinese web, I often see what people call “Kuan Can Shi Lian Ai” (“Fast-food Dating”), where two strangers meet and somehow end up together, go through the superficial stages of a relationship, then break up and reset. 

This is not to say that I know the type of old-fashioned love, which I imagine to have been prevalent in the old days, really existed. However, I’ve partially brainwashed myself into thinking that they did.

Maybe the high levels of abstraction and metaphors in the songs make me feel that this kind of love is unattainable in the material world I live in today; all the same, I’m envisioning my own romance as long walks of intermittent conversation by a river and small stone bridges, shy smiles, knowing glances and unsaid but heartfelt emotions. I seem to have trapped myself in an in-between space constructed by these old Chinese songs and my idealistic view of romance, a vision that remains ingrained in my mind but never realized. 

It’s painful to admit that this may be one of the reasons I find it difficult to find romance myself; the definition of love from a bygone era has so deeply shaped part of my worldview. Living anachronistically hardly ever treats anyone kindly, but it’s something I cannot change. Even though I’ve grown as distant as ever from that era and place, from the very time I listened to these classic, lyrical tones of love and restraint, I’ve been chasing after a time and a type of relationship I may never quite attain in the current age. Going about my ordinary days with these songs playing in my head, I’m never quite here nor there, living in the present through the lens of the past. Maybe I’ve gone out-of-date, though willingly so.