月亮代表我的心 (The Moon Represents My Heart)

The melody was nearly thrown away. Composer Weng Ching-hsi sketched ideas in the parks around Boston while studying at Berklee, and back in Taiwan he judged this one not good enough and put it on a pile meant for disposal. His friend, the lyricist Sun Yi, found it there, thought it was a fine song and wrote words for it. The two sold it to Li Ge Records in 1972, and Chen Fen-lan and then Liu Guan-lin recorded it in 1973. It was Teresa Teng's version, released by Polydor Hong Kong in December 1977, that made it famous. It is a simple love ballad with a waltz-like lilt, using the moon, an image Chinese poetry has long tied to separation and reunion. Its real story began across the border. For decades foreign music had been kept out of mainland China, and romantic songs were dismissed as bourgeois and decadent. When the country opened up from 1978, Teng's soft, restrained voice became one of the first popular songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan to sweep the mainland, even as the authorities tried to suppress her. People joked that Deng Xiaoping ruled by day and Deng Lijun, Teng's Chinese name, ruled by night. Director Jia Zhangke recalled that it brought his generation a personal world after years when everything was collective. In 2010 critics at the Chinese Music Awards ranked it the greatest Chinese song of the previous 30 years. A tune its own composer nearly discarded became the love song of the Chinese-speaking world.