"I didn't expect that the songs I sang would represent my whole life."
This article was first published in Southern People Weekly
Text | Peppa Chang
Edit | Yang Jingru
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Yao Li (1922–2019)
Compared with the songs she has sung, the popular name of Yao Li has been difficult to attract the attention of young people - even when the news of her death came on July 19, 2019, many people's first reaction was that the singer who sang "Rose Rose I Love You" was actually alive. In the 1940s, there were seven major singers in Shanghai, the most famous "golden voice" Zhou Xuan died in 1957, and Li Xianglan, who lived the longest life outside of Yao Li, also drove to the west in 2014. Yao Li was the longest-lived of them.
Born in Shanghai in 1922, Yao Li joined EMI Records at the age of 13 with extraordinary talent. At that time, Shanghai was the most prosperous era, Paramount, Lido, Cindolas... Fifty or sixty dance halls gathered near Nanjing West Road. They are a place for the leisure and entertainment of the upper class, and they are also the soil for the incubation of popular music. Yao Li sang at the Yangtze Hotel for five years, until she married the son of the deputy manager of the hotel. Her singing voice is robust and mature, accompanied by saxophones and piano, with a kind of black blues casualness and sensuality.
In 1940, Yao Li sang her masterpiece "Rose Rose I Love You". The song is bright-paced, simple and warm, and in the words of composer Chen Gexin, it is "so gorgeous that people want to dance.". Yao Li said that the song "sang off my half life", but this half life showed the greatest energy that a song can explode - it has been covered by countless singers at home and abroad, and it has become a symbol of the times. In later film and television works, whenever the creators want to tell the audience that "the story takes place in the Republic of China" or want to show the drunken fans of old Shanghai, they will choose this song as the background music, and when this familiar melody sounds, the audience will naturally be brought into that situation. The advantage of this "natural" is that Yao Li's singing voice will always be remembered, and the disadvantage is that people will only remember Yao Li during the Republic of China.
The year 1949 was a huge divide for China, and the memories of the past were all relegated to the old times. Just like Zhang Ailing, when people remember her, they always think that this is a Republic of China woman living in an apartment in Changde, and after the founding of the People's Republic of China, she continued to create and wrote a lot of works after going to the United States, but she has never been able to reverse this impression.
Yao Li moved to Hong Kong in 1950 and has lived there ever since. She cared about her family and reduced her performances, but still insisted on recording records. In cooperation with her composer brother Yao Min, she released songs such as "Lover's Tears" and "Spring Breeze Kissing My Face" in the 1950s, which were also regarded as idols by Teresa Teng, Xu Xiaofeng and others. In 1967, her brother Yao Min died of a sudden heart attack, and Yao Li was deeply devastated. In a later interview, she said she didn't dare to turn on the radio or sing for three years. She gradually moved behind the scenes, acting as a behind-the-scenes singer for films and as a record producer for EMI. After retiring after 7 years, she basically said goodbye to the music scene.
In 1985, Yao Li returned to Shanghai. She went to meet Bai Hong, one of the seven singers. Bai Hong did not know Yao Li at that time, and when Yao Li reported her name, the two hugged each other and cried bitterly. After 1949, only Zhou Xuan and Bai Hong remained on the mainland, except for the Japanese Li Xianglan, who returned to China to develop, and the other four went to Hong Kong.
In her later years, Yao Li lived in a nursing home and rarely appeared in public. In 2012, Malaysian musician Yang Weihan produced a "Yao Li Rose Legend Musical" for Yao Li. At that time, Yao Li was 90 years old, but still flew to Kuala Lumpur to watch the performance. She said: "I didn't expect that the songs I sang represented my whole life. ”
In 2014, Yao Li fell at home and her health deteriorated. A week before her death, she coughed, had a fever and caused respiratory infections. Shao Yinyin, a former friend, described Yao Li's last moments this way: "After she was admitted to the hospital, she was chaotic all the way, did not open her eyes, and left. ”
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