News | Taiwan Chronicle #3: Karaoke Radio |

You're making your first trip to the island of Taiwan, located off the east coast of China. You've studied a bit of Mandarin Chinese, the official language, and it serves you nicely in the cosmopolitan capital city, Taipei. After several days there, you board a bus and head south. As you travel for a couple hours through the seemingly endless sprawl of high-rise tenements and factories that cut across lush hills and mountains, you slowly notice that you don’t understand a word spoken by most of the passengers around you. Their words sound a bit like Mandarin, but more nasal. The tongue is Taiwanese, the dialect of settlers who began arriving from China’s southern Fukien province as far back as the 1400s. If Mandarin is the intellectual language of Taiwan, Taiwanese is the language of its heart.

After a quick stop in the city of Taichung, your bus begins winding its way east toward the geographic center of the island, the little town of Puli. You ascend bolder, more beautiful swathes of green still free from the clutches of concrete tentacles, and finally see the Isla Formosa (beautiful island) the Portuguese so named. Here and there, groves of betel nut palms sway in the mountain breeze. Betel nut: a national addiction of the working class, a chewed stimulant that creates a copious flow of blood-red spittle that stains teeth and sidewalks across the island. Along the roadside you notice little see-through booths just big enough for a young woman in a little see-through top and her stimulant stash. These are the betel nut beauties who, in an effort to attract their all-male clientele, have competed for years in an escalating arms race of exposure, settling finally on a near-naked détente.

When you get off the bus, the town of Puli looks dingy. It’s almost as crowded as Taipei itself, only much smaller. You find a place to stay and, resting on the bed, decide to see what’s on the radio. Cut off from the big cities by distance and mountains, the town has a mere handful of AM and FM stations, each one broadcasting in Taiwanese and, you slowly realize, using the same strange format.

The radio host talks awhile, cracking jokes you can’t understand and chuckling. Then he takes a call. Host and caller shoot the breeze for a bit [Puli FM-1], then music starts and—incredibly—the caller begins to sing. [Puli FM-2] The host is playing a karaoke track and the caller is singing along. For the rest of your stay in Puli, every time you turn on the radio it’s the same thing on every station: chit-chat and singing. Sometimes the host him- or herself will sing [Puli FM-3], but mostly it’s the ghostly phone line voice of an old Taiwanese grandma or grandpa singing an old Taiwanese song about love and the yearning for love. You can’t understand the words, but you can understand what they say. This is the country music of this foreign place and--like all the world’s country music--it is deeply sentimental. They may chew betel nut instead of Beechnut here, but the grannies and grandpas in the heart of Taiwan are singing of old times, good times, heartbreak and sorrow just the same.

The music is known as nakashi, the local version of Japanese enka. Itself influenced by Western song structure and instrumentation back in the 1930s, enka came to Taiwan during Japan’s fifty-year colonization of the island. Some of the older folks speak only Taiwanese and Japanese. This is their music, albeit updated by contemporary digital technology.

At one point, host and caller sing a duet together. [Puli FM-4]

After your travels to the south, you head back to Taipei. Now that your ear is tuned for it, you hear a lot of Taiwanese here too. You even see some betel nut chewing truck drivers. But in general, these are sophisticated city folk. You mention your newfound interest in nakashi to some young Taipei-ers. It’s the funniest thing they’ve heard all day. What would you want to listen to that for?

Yet you’ve got a yearning to hear some more karaoke radio. You dial through a multitude of stations playing everything from Mandarin pop to Western classical, but there’s not a singing grandpa to be found. [Puli FM-5]