![tong hua guang liang karaoke tong hua guang liang karaoke](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ccbiNfqebbQ/hqdefault.jpg)
TONG HUA GUANG LIANG KARAOKE PROFESSIONAL
It rewards tradition and responsibility and community and certainty, reflected in educational and professional hierarchies where your potential is calcified.
![tong hua guang liang karaoke tong hua guang liang karaoke](https://ukutabs.com/artistimg/Guang%20Liang.jpg)
Chinese culture is as rowdy as it is cruel, blazingly warm but just as furiously unyielding. There’s little room for flights of fancy if you carry the weight of your family’s honor. In China, as in much of Asia, your life is not just your own. The common Chinese phrase for “suffer” is “受苦,” which literally translates to “receive/endure bitterness.” It’s fitting for a culture whose traditional medicines and favored liquor taste generously noxious, whose nationalism is both revolutionary and crushing, whose expansionist vision of and growing power over the future seems more and more likely to define the coming era. There is no subtext to “童话.” The fairy tale in question isn’t about a hero or a journey or a monster to slay, but about convincing someone who’s lost faith in the world to hold on to hope. Filtered through translation, the English lyrics could be captions for brooding screenshots from a Wong Kar-Wai film. The Chinese lyrics are direct, and poignant in the same way as a willow tree whose leaves brush against the trembling surface of a burbling stream. This is a song so uncool that your parents love it. This is a song that practically vibrates with UWU energy.
![tong hua guang liang karaoke tong hua guang liang karaoke](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iYPMjNEhwtM/maxresdefault.jpg)
“童话” is a song you learn on piano to impress your middle school crush from weekend Chinese school. 光良 (pronounced Guang Liang), whose English name is Michael Wong, sings like the kind of guy who writes secret long love letters to the popular girls at school who don’t know his name, the nebbish counterpart to more obvious brooding heartthrob hybrids like Jay Chou. Lyrically and based on the tempo, it is the spiritual opposite of a banger, a syrupy ballad whose music video ticks off the common tropes of Asian dramas-specifically, a playfully bratty girl gets taken down by a sudden illness whose first symptom is a dramatic fainting spell-with an almost mercenary melancholy. But I know “童话,” pronounced “Tong Hua” and translated as “Fairy Tale,” the way I know what brand of vermicelli noodles my mother prefers to buy at the Asian grocery the way I can instantly invoke the smells of Temple of Heaven balm or various mystery green oils or dried mushrooms or chrysanthemum tea the way I cook variations of my mother’s recipes as she’d cooked variations of her mother’s recipes, passed down by visual and scent memory alone. I never got into East Asian pop music the way so many kids of my generation-my particular slice of Chinese American middle-class diaspora-did. They’d always be right I’d always be wrong for insisting I could change-that this time, the dream would stick, and they’d have to admit that maybe their wayward child could amount to someone they could be proud of after all. Had any of the time I’d spent reading all those books, experimenting with so many creative forms, daydreaming and wandering, amounted to anything? Didn’t I have a different dream the last time we had this conversation? And every time I tried to justify my dreams to my parents, they pulled out a mirror and forced me to look at my earnest reflection and account for all of my wishing and wanting. I wrote a lot of beginnings, but not one ending. I wrote a lot of verses, but they never became songs.
TONG HUA GUANG LIANG KARAOKE FREE
It no longer made sense for me to have free rein over my desires, since none of them manifested as precursors of genius. My passion, once free to pool in the impressions left by whatever stones I’d overturned on my own, had to be slipped into a narrow barrel and focused on my future: A target my parents had lovingly prepared, like a bridal dowry, from the moment I was born.
![tong hua guang liang karaoke tong hua guang liang karaoke](http://showcaseredled.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/4/2/124242771/618364572.jpg)
Then suddenly, or so it felt, my big imagination had to go. I was a wild kid in the natural sense of “wild,” content to spend hours at the basketball court picking honeysuckle from the fences or holed up at the library, and my parents let me run feral and precocious and fantastic. I daydreamed a lot, imagining myself as an Animorph or a rock star or, my most precious wish, a writer whose shelves were filled with their own work. My mother’s most cutting comment about me is that I have “a big imagination.” This wasn’t a problem when I was a kid: I regularly went all-in on school art projects and could chatter for hours about whatever nonsense I was fixated on at the time. This is Formation Jukebox, a column by Lio Min on being in transition and the music that helps them make sense of it all.