Born with Taiwan canto-pop, bred on American arts and letters, Lee-hom Wang is now made famous on mainland water. But the serious musician in him can’t get over being just another pop star. Formal training in college once provided substance that doesn’t quite translate to the masses, as fellow alumnus Val Wang tells us.
It’s hot in Beijing, damn hot, and you’re on the street looking for relief. The quandary is as epic as Coke vs. Pepsi: Robust or Wahaha bottled water? Or, more clearly put: a bottle plastered with the face of some bland pop star unscrewing the top of a Robust bottle, or some other guy in a white T-shirt and a, shall we say, flamboyant pose with his arm over his head holding a Wahaha bottle? You reach for the Wahaha and, even if you couldn’t care less, you wonder briefly: Who is this guy? And why that pose?
He’s Lee-hom Wang, best known as a Taiwanese pop star and less well-known as a graduate of Williams College (1998), an elite liberal arts university of 2,000 students tucked away in a self-proclaimed "Village Beautiful" of 10,000 people located in scenic New England called Williamstown (Massachusetts). It was far away from the maddening crowds of Taipei.
Williams was also my alma matter. I graduated a year earlier than Lee-hom and came to China shortly afterwards. I’d heard that Lee-hom was a pop star in Taipei, but how big of a star he was didn’t hit home until one thirsty day earlier this year. With every bottle of Wahaha I imbibed, my question grew: how did I end up as a struggling freelance writer in Beijing while he ended up a pop idol in Taipei with four Sony Music albums to his name and billions of water bottles splashed with his visage?
I caught up with him in Shanghai, where he is currently taping a kung fu movie directed by Stanley Tong and starring some Hollywood stars too big to even tell me about. Also riding high off of his recent album, "Forever’s First Day," he was only too happy to indulge my curiosity.
Prodigy
Lee-hom’s career started one Winter Study, a month-long term at Williams designed to give flight to creative independent projects or, alternately, to invoke existential despair in those left behind on campus to cope with the New England winter.
So while I was drinking my brains out trying to forget that it was the dead of winter, he was in Taipei on a project to study the demographics of the pop music phenomenon and produce the first album that would turn himself into a pop music phenomenon.
He did have a head start, of course. He’d trained in violin at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York since age six and by the time he got to Williams at age 18, he somehow had already landed a recording contract with Sony Music.
At Williams, he helped to found the folk music club Williams Grassroots Music, sang in the a cappella group the Springstreeters, got into the small jazz scene and, his senior year, wrote and directed the yearly musical entitled "The Bite that Burns," a vampire musical that he admits was somewhat "frivolous." Me? I can barely recall what I did through most of college.
Summer vacations were spent in Taiwan cutting records and Williamstown provided a contrast to that lifestyle. He welcomed the tranquility of Williamstown that some of the rest of us resented so much. "I was so overexposed in Asia, so social. You meet a thousand people every day," he says. "But back at Williams it was quiet, so peaceful. You could walk around Spring Street and no one would ask you for an autograph."
Being a huge pop star was a new twist on the old hybrid identity issue. "It was a way to strike a balance of my two identities: being born an American kid used to having a private life and being a public figure [in Taiwan]," he says, without a trace of angst. "That’s what fate has dealt me."
What it seems fate has also dealt him is a nice niche market. After he graduated from Williams with his music degree, he went to the Berklee Institute of Music in Boston and spent time laying down tracks for his third album. With the music theory he learned in college, he has produced and arranged all of his own albums. "A lot of my friends who are great musicians have become lawyers and I-bankers," he says. "I realized that success is not about how great you are on the piano. In pop music, it’s about bringing new stuff in, a unique perspective as a composer."
Though raised in the States with little formal education in Chinese, he sings most of his songs in Mandarin, supplying one of the most satisfying ironies of his story. He had to begin with the Chinese 101 class at Williams and work his way through four years with the famed textbook couple Gubo and Palanka before he had the reading and writing skills it took to pen pop songs. Now he speaks English sprinkled with Chinese phrases delivered in a dulcet Taiwanese accent.
Probing Pop
His tender sound and juvenile following might conjure comparisons to Backstreet Boys, but whatever criticisms might be lobbed at the vacuity of pop music, Lee-hom doesn’t consider it a fall from his upbringing in classical and jazz music. "It’s what you can say in the music that’s important," he says. "I don’t feel like my creativity has been stifled."
His latest album has funkier beats and more rockin’ songs than his earlier work, crafting a harder image for Lee-hom than the usual fare of winsome love songs. It also reflects his ambition to make music with "dongfang yinsu" (Eastern elements) but with "international arrangement and production techniques," music that’s universally appealing but with "established Chinese cliches" so you know it’s "Chinese music." On this note, he delivers a remake of "Descendants of the Dragon" (Long de Chuanren), a patriotic song from the early 1980’s written by Taiwanese singer He Dejian and popularized by his uncle, Li Jianfu. The lyrics are simple and passionate ("The distant East has one great river; its name is the Yangtze River./ The distant East has one river; its name is the Yellow River./ The ancient East has one dragon; its name is China./ The ancient East has one people; they are descendents of the dragon.")
He evens adds his own flourish at the end with a rap about two immigrants from Taiwan who go to the States with "no money no job no speak English nobody gonna give ‘em the time of day."
When I ask Lee-hom how Williams College fell short in preparing him for the life he lives now, he says, without a trace of irony that "nothing can prepare you for the real world." His tumble from the ivory tower led to pop stardom and its own particular phantasmagoria–sold-out stadium concerts, sides of Taipei buses plastered with his mug for an American Cotton endorsement, tabloid stories about his love life.
When it comes to transmitting more than music to the masses, his Williams education is useless. "If I say in an interview how Gustav Mahler influenced this one song on my pop album, they’re not going to care, not going to know what I’m talking about," he says.
Thank goodness for the internet. Lee-hom writes to his fans every week on the Sony Music Taiwan website. He uses it as a forum to talk about those things "a classical composer at a concert of a premiere of their work would," like the chords, scales, and keys his songs are in, his inspirations and concepts.
The Wahaha endorsement is all part of the China campaign, a natural corollary to being a pop star in Taiwan. The match was made when the Hangzhou-based Wahaha went looking for a young singer and found Lee-hom looking towards the mainland. Some combination of his popularity, his image and his singing "expressed the inner spirit" of the drink, said Ms. Yang of the Wahaha Advertising Department.
However, at this point, 97% of his albums that are sold in the mainland are pirated. While it will take years to fix the problem, Lee-hom isn’t worried. Fame on the mainland "won’t go away for the rest of your life. It’s not like in Taiwan where people’s tastes are always changing."
And about that pose, let’s just say that it was the last of hundreds they asked him to do. "I didn’t want to do it, but I’m a nice guy, so I did," he says, though he had a bad feeling about it. "I just knew it [was the one they were going to use.]"
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