An explanation of Dao Lang, "Demons and Mirages," the unmarketable against the market, and return of a relic
▣ Before I could sing any of what followed, I used to howl the opening lines, "Two thousand and two, the first snow has come…" The song was already dated by the time I found it. It was never fashionable, anyway. As a critic wrote about Misora Hibari in the postwar years, Dao Lang gave off the aroma of the farm, of trainloads of men transported to the city to work. I kept howling that line because it would provoke groans or laughter. It was unsophisticated and crude. Stoic tears, butterflies, and snow. I learned the rest of the lyrics when I left the city. I heard people singing it on slow trains to Shanghai and Guangzhou, humming it while they smoked in the space between cars. I could still sing it now. The first snow of the year was later than usual. The Number Two from Balou Station carried away the last yellow leaves of the season. He longs for a woman of Ürümqi. There is not much more. ▣ ▣
▣ Popular music flowed in another direction. His records sold, but he was never going to be a darling of the industry. His peers came out to criticize him. ▣ ▣ Dao Lang was a relic of the past. He was from a tradition built by Wang Luobin, the musicologist that collected songs while breaking bricks in Xinjiang labor camps from 1949 to 1979, who launched “The Girl from Dabancheng” as an ethnically-flavored pop hit in the ‘80s. Dao Lang sang those songs, drawing on the borderlands for authenticity. He was born in Sichuan but was identified with the mythology of the restless western wastes and the hard, romantic people that lived there.1 ▣ ▣ ▣ He was from a tradition of the Reform and Opening troubadour, the urban cowboy, selling songs in Beijing but tied to boozy dives. His struggle and the struggle of the men on the slow trains was similar enough. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ He was a patriot when that became countercultural. He sang red songs for the aging 1950s generation with whom he had sojourned on Hainan in the years when it boomed. He sang songs about cultural unity under the Communist Party even as bloody riots swept Xinjiang. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ It’s not that popular music had no room for an artist like Dao Lang. Even if the last decade has seen the rise of the talent show and the coarsening of tastes, platforms have accommodated the fringes and nurtured unique talents. He was bucked off. He following was built through VCDs and radio and state broadcasting and men on trains. He wasn’t online. He disappeared. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣
▣ His return is unexpected. "Demons and Mirages" is the name of the song that has returned him to the public eye. It’s from an album that draw on Pu Songling's Qing dynasty collection, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. ▣ ▣ "The Lo-ch'a Country and the Sea Market" is how Herbert A. Giles' renders the title of the original story.2 It begins like this:
Once upon a time there was a young man, named Ma Chün, who was also known as Lung-mei. He was the son of a trader, and a youth of unsurpassing beauty. His manners were courteous, and he loved nothing better than singing and playing. He used to associate with actors, and with an embroidered handkerchief round his head the effect was that of a beautiful woman. Hence he acquired the sobriquet of the Beauty. At fourteen years of age he graduated and began to make a name for himself; but his father, who was growing old and wished to retire from business, said to him, "My boy, book-learning will never fill your belly or put a coat on your back; you had much better stick to the old thing." Accordingly, Ma from that time occupied himself with scales and weights, with principal and interest, and such matters.
Lung-mei takes a voyage by sea and finds himself swept to a strange land. They are ugly and poor. When he asks the reason, one of them answers:
"You see, in our country everything depends, not on literary talent, but on beauty. The most beautiful are made ministers of state; the next handsomest are made judges and magistrates; and the third class in looks are employed in the palace of the king. Thus they are enabled out of their pay to provide for their wives and families. But we, from our very birth, are regarded by our parents as inauspicious, and are left to perish, some of us being occasionally preserved by more humane parents to prevent the extinction of the country."
When Lung-mei finally arrives in the city that houses the beautiful people, he finds them grotesque. They are demons, essentially, a colony of the Raksha of Indian mythology. ▣ ▣ ▣ The story might be an attack on the intellectual elite that commanded the Chinese bureaucracy in imperial times, but it has been read by critics as an attack by Dao Lang on entertainment circles. The lyrics tell the story of a young man from China that voyages to the land of the Raksha. There, he lingers in a place called the Gougou Fortress which is run by two local tyrants called Ma Hu and You Niao. The nature of this place is unclear to me, but it seems to be a brothel and entertainment venue. The hypocrisy and ugliness of Ma Hu and You Niao are catalogued. Despite the intervention of the Chinese adventurer, they support each other and elevate their most hideous charges. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ All of this has been thoroughly dissected. Na Ying is You Niao, perhaps. She criticized him. It’s likely that Ma Hu is Yang Kun.3 He dismissed Dao Lang’s music. These are grudges that have been simmering for two decades. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ Dao Lang’s song fits perfectly with the mood of these years, when the music industry is undergoing official and popular criticism. He has returned at the time right. His unfashionable music, coming from an archaic counterculture even twenty years ago, is an antidote to the control of talent shows and the algorithms. This is my explanation. His identification with Xinjiang and folk traditions made him unmarketable a decade ago but perfect for a time of increased suspicion of the global. And there must be some nostalgia involved, too. ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣ ▣
I owe it to you to say a bit more about this and point out some of the problems with this mythology. The vast expanse of West China was seen as a frontier to be settled by people from the interior, and Dao Lang attaches himself to that idea. Xinjiang has long occupied that place in the mind of Chinese popular culture. It was true even in the 1970s and 1980s, when Dao Lang was coming of age. He goes a step further than other writers that began to explore the frontiers and also to delve into new cultural landscapes in the period after Reform and Opening, looking for alternatives to the monolithic Chinese civilization, since he identifies closely with the peoples of Xinjiang. Dao Lang’s stage name is taken from the Dao Lang or Dolan people of Xinjiang. This is not dissimilar to, say, an American folk or country artist adapting a tribal name or gesturing at some indigenous identity. You can imagine that. You can imagine, too, the criticisms that would be directed at them. Similar criticism has been routinely directed at Dao Lang.
“Demons and Mirages” is a less direct translation. The original title is luóchà hǎishì 罗刹海市, or, more literally, “Rakshas and sea market,” referring to the demons of Indian mythology and a sea market that the adventurer visits. Giles says in a note attached to his translation of the title: "The term 'sea-market' is generally understood in the sense of mirage, or some similar phenomenon."
It’s hard to confirm some of the statements about Dao Lang attributed to Na Ying and Yang Kun. I believe they have been misread, anyway. Both singers, frequent judges on talent shows, have supported earthy singer-songwriters and ethnic minority performers. I am a great fan of Sing My Song, a short-lived talent program on CCTV, on which Yang Kun was routinely moved to tears by mumbling, hard-luck men with guitars. He also selected the Yi singer Moxi Zishi as the winner. I think any statements they made against Dao Lang were focused mostly on how he was a sentimental, inauthentic hack. Over the past week, many other statements by industry heavyweights have been dug up against Dao Lang. The themes are the same. The social media commentariat can play all of this to their advantage, however, twisting the remarks to make them appear as if they hate the Chinese folk tradition, if they’re interested in striking against those people.