The women characters in Growing Up Wild are doing exactly what the title suggests, said Zhong, as they must find a way to exist on the fringes of both family and society. They aren’t expected to be a “person of society” in the same way as men, who must uphold the family honor, handle business and legal matters, or be a “person of culture.”
But can a male viewpoint portray the experience of Hakka women with enough authenticity? This was one question Lin and producer Chung Shefong (鍾適芳) asked Zhong when they started working on the album.
He felt he could, by drawing from personal experience as the only son in a family with four sisters. “[When I was younger] I would look at, from my mother’s perspective, her relationships with my father and his father,” he said.
In the lullaby-like Back Home Again (轉妹家), Zhong frames the unhappiness of a woman within patrilineal family values. “Auntie” has returned to the home of her blood relatives and lays on her deathbed as her family recalls an unhappy life. She was a first-born daughter, married off at the age of 18 to a family with “razor-sharp tongues” and brothers-in-law who “were all talk and got nothing done.”
“Why does a woman after 50 or 60 years desire to return to her parents’ home?” said Zhong. “I think this is because there’s a different conception of one’s origin and where one comes from — it’s probably not what [traditional men] think. It’s not the so-called idea of ‘going back home’ or ‘returning to one’s native soil.’ It’s not that simple.”
The album’s final three songs are both tributes and laments for southern Taiwan.
In Ask the South (問南方), Zhong portrays southern Taiwan as a place of hope and then abandonment: “Industrial parks patched your hopes, chemical factories produced your dreams/In middle age your brothers and sisters looked elsewhere if they had the means.”
With this song, Zhong said he had in mind the economic divide between northern and southern Taiwan. He sees parallels with the “global north-south divide,” which refers to economic inequality between the industrialized north and the less developed countries of the south.
Also in the backdrop are the empty promises of industrial development in Zhong’s home of Kaohsiung County. “So many farmers go to Kaohsiung City with so many industries there, but it’s the same — they go to Kaohsiung only to endure the same hardship,” he said.
In comparison to past albums, Growing Up Wild dwells more upon on the sentiment and emotions of its characters.
Zhong says the shift in direction has been both a pleasure and challenge as a lyricist. “To write more about the internal, more of what’s inside the mind, more philosophical things, I think it only gets more difficult.”
* When this article was first published, it incorrectly stated that Lin Sheng-xiang's (林生祥) first band was Labor Exchange (交工樂隊). Lin's first band was Guanzi Yinyuekeng (觀子音樂坑). The Taipei Times regrets the error.
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