Finding Faye
In 1994, Cantopop darling Wang Jingyun (王靖雯, Shirley Wong), dropped her stage name. With the release of Random Thoughts (胡思亂想) came the return of her birth name — Wang Fei (王菲, Faye Wong) a name that now reverberates across both Chinese and English-speaking worlds.
Shortly after Faye moved from Beijing to Hong Kong, she was given the name Wang Jingyun by Cinepoly, the first record label that she signed with in 1989. Two-character names were unusual at that time in Hong Kong. The name Wang Fei was weird, the label thought, it would immediately cast her as an outsider from mainland China. In their eyes, Wang Fei was less commercially viable, so Wang Jingyun she was. In just five years, she released six albums to commercial success, but often they were sonically safe, excessively “traditional” in their regurgitation of Cantopop formulas. For once Pitchfork expressed a decent take, with Michael Hong describing her early albums as “uninspired renditions of Japanese and American hits” sandwiched “between treacly adult-contemporary ballads.” In other words, Shirley Wong was made to be a Hong Kong popstar.
But anybody who is familiar with Faye’s oeuvre understands that Shirley and Faye are remarkably different artists, with Random Thoughts marking a radical shift from the “mainstream pop” which had largely characterised her musical career thus far. Even Wang Jingyun — a name so polite, almost guarded (with the character 靖 jing explicitly meaning quiet) — fails to capture the audaciousness of Faye Wong’s musicality. In this way, Random Thoughts can be seen as our introduction to who she is as an artist, or at least who she strove to be without the constraints of the corporatised record label.
Random Thoughts was also my formal gateway to the world of Faye Wong. She was already a household name in my family, but Shirley more so than Faye. Naively, then, I never paid much attention to her music, relegating her artistry to the ever-growing collection of Cantopop that my parents loved before me. Fresh out of high school, I launched into the obligatory cliché of lost-arts-loving-teenager-discovers-Wong-Kar-wai-and-thinks-his-films-are-the-coolest-thing-ever. I devoured it all, admittedly with an obsessive desperation to impress my pretentious Jean-Luc Godard loving crush at the time. But I kept returning to Chungking Express. The way that Faye’s character sways side to side to “California Dreamin”, both completely oblivious and glaringly performative; the way she charmingly competes for Tony Leung’s gaze; the softness and singularity of her Cantonese cover of “Dreams”, now immortalised in Random Thoughts. How could you not be utterly transfixed?
With the Royel Otis TikTok-fuelled resurgence of the Cranberries, I’ve found myself thinking about the ingenious covers of Faye Wong. In Random Thoughts, she dares to cover two Cocteau Twins songs, “Bluebeard” and “Know Who You Are At Every Age” from their 1993 album Four-Calendar Cafe, interpreting lead singer Elizabeth Fraser’s beautiful but notoriously specific glossolalia. The lyrics of “Know Who You Are At Every Age”, the opening track of the album, are less decipherable than “Bluebeard”, but its cascading guitars immediately demand your attention. I won’t heal unless I cry, Elizabeth sings, I can’t grieve, so I won’t grow / I won’t heal ‘til I let it go. I drown in her voice, surrendering to the feeling. Cry cry cry ‘til you know why / I lost myself, identify.
In Faye’s cover of “Know Who You Are At Every Age”, which can be translated to “Know Oneself and Know One Another” (知己知彼), she similarly grieves the loss of a loved one, although her lyrics are more deliberately nostalgic or sentimental:
不知不覺愛已死（愛已死）
Without any of us even realising, our love is dead (love is dead)
共你知彼知己 何必逃避
Together, we’ve come to know one another and know ourselves; why would we escape [that reality]?
當初講過愛到死（愛到死）
In the beginning, we spoke about loving each other until the day we die (love until death)
就算今非昔比 仍一起（仍一起）
Even if it’s completely different now, we’re still together (still together)
When I listen to Faye yearn for her past/present lover, I can’t help but romanticise the early stages of any relationship; nothing mattered other than surrendering to the feeling. Watching her move seamlessly atop scenes of clouds, water, and trees in the music video, I feel almost powerless, thinking about the entanglement of two lovers. No one evokes this feeling for me more intensely than Faye. This is partly due to the efforts of her longtime collaborator Lin Xi (林夕, Albert Leung), who also worked with Hong Kong pop stars Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui throughout his career, writing the words for “Know Oneself and Know One Another” as well as one of my personal favourites, “If You’re Happy, Then I’m Happy” (你快樂 所以我快樂). In this song, Lin articulates the pure, intuitive feeling of falling in love; the feeling of fleeting control, when one becomes subject to the other. Your eyes redden (你眼睛紅了) / My day darkens (我的天灰了) / You’re tired (你覺得累了) / I go to sleep (所以我睡了). And isn’t that lovely? To know our feelings are always mediated by others — whether it be through romance, friendship, or family.
Of course, the English language fails to reflect the poetic simplicity of Leung’s prose. Translation issues aside, however, the straightforwardness of Albert and Faye’s approach to songwriting mirror that of Elizabeth in that they follow feeling first, rather than meaning. To quote a 1994 interview with 1FM Radio where she spoke about her writing process:
“The lyrics are words that I’ve found by going through books and dictionaries written in languages I don’t understand. The words don’t have any meaning at all until I sing them… The music and the singing and the words created a feeling, and I had a freedom [in] doing this.”
For decades, Cocteau Twins fans have still attempted to dissect Elizabeth’s lyrics where they are cryptic and essentially undecipherable. A relentless obsession with the artist’s process, where Elizabeth has openly discussed her aversion to writing English language lyrics. It is a futile and unimaginative effort, just follow the “sound and the joy”, as Elizabeth said in a 2009 interview with music writer Dave Simpson. Thankfully, these efforts to figure out exactly what the Cocteau Twins were trying to say have never bothered Faye; she has always made the covers her own. Nonetheless, after 1994, we see that Faye increasingly shares Elizabeth’s ethos of songwriting. Of course she never dispenses with language entirely, but particularly in her 1997 album Fuzao (浮躁), we hear words blur and fuse. Faye experiments with her voice as instrument, her voice as rhyme, and as melody. Again, this is in no doubt thanks to the influence of the Scottish band, having written and produced the melancholic Fenlie (分裂) from their song “Tranquil Eye” and the haunting Saoxing (掃興) from “Touch Upon Touch” a song best heard alone.
Although Faye is often remembered in the Western imaginary for her role in Chungking Express, she led a prolific musical career in her own right. In the seven years following Random Thoughts, she released 12 albums — an inconceivable number even at a time when Hong Kong record labels expected artists to release a new album every year. She continued to be unapologetic in her affection for formidable female artists such as Teresa Teng, whose soft, mellow voice continues to hypnotise listeners across Asia and Chinese diasporas in particular. Teng’s music is reimagined in Decadent Sound of Faye (菲靡靡之音), the title being a playful subversion of the Chinese government’s criticisms of Teng’s music in the 1980s as “decadent” bourgeois music, or mimizhiyin (靡靡之音). She continued to experiment throughout the 90s, her popular 1998 release Sing and Play (唱遊) playing with sounds of the Cocteau Twins in “Whimsical” (小聰明), KTV-friendly Mandopop in “Red Beans” (紅豆), and Electronica in “Child” (童). And because doing too much never fazed Faye, she even starred in a couple films in the early 2000s.
Since then, she has more or less retreated from the public eye. But Faye Wong’s influence lives on — in the immortalised memories of her sound, her fashion, and her films. For me, Faye has always been a uniquely singular artist; in the same way that people talk about Prince, Beyoncé, or even Blood Orange — it is difficult to put Faye’s music in a box, and at the same time, she pulls influences from everywhere. Within her discography contains an homage of different degrees to the Cocteau Twins, to Teresa Teng, and the Black Panthers (黑豹) among a slew of artists, and yet, Faye has always expressed a singular sensibility to the changing form of pop music.
