Tangy dream
My gf mentioned Li Yiyun’s essay in the NYT Magazine, about her childhood and Tang, the oranged-flavored drink, in China. The mere mention of Tang triggered a flashflood of my own memories growing up in post-Mao China. Nostalgic, I proceeded to read Li’s essay and be disappointed. Her description of the craze surrounding Tang was wonderful and right on, but her conclusion left me scratching my head. Tang “lost its gloss because, alas, it was neither expensive nor trendy” now that she is in America? Or was it because neither her father nor boyfriend spoiled her by buying Tang when she was young? I had thought the essay was going to be about how we treasure our childhood memories, and thus, remain nostalgic about those items from our formative years even after we are grown and become jaded. Instead, I get someone either indicting the materialism behind the popularity of Tang in 80’s China or bemoaning the tragedy of love and marriage.
My own take on Tang is two-fold. I would bet a lot of Chinese people around my age, maybe even older, have a special place in their hearts for Tang. (Getting them to admit it, or buying it now is another story.) What Li seemed to have forgotten is that Tang was popular, not because it was expensive, but because it was from America. Yes, expensive and American are often synonymous in China, but not always inter-changeable. In fact, I can name, off the top of my head, a list of firsts from America that post-Mao China had found irresistible. Nescafe coffee. Hunter the detective drama. Full House the sitcom. Falcon Crest the soap opera. Marlboro the cigarettes. Yes, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But we loved it all. I would love to do a fMRI study on myself to see which parts of my brain are lit up while the old ad for Nescafe is played. The popularity of this first wave of American products introduced in the Chinese market was not based purely on materialistic greed. The flashy TV shows and the innovative, glamorous commercials were a window into an undiscovered country for us. America was a symbol of freedom, opportunity and plentiful—yes that sounds sappy now, but true. We craved information about this too-good-to-be true land, and to certain extend, the images and feelings projected by the drinks, the TV shows and Marlboro met our expectations and helped to launch the life-path of a daring generation who saw their future and the future of their children in the country across the ocean. The beautiful smiling nuclear family, sure I want that. Go to the best university and become an astronaut, why not my son or daughter. Even the cowboys Marlboro commercials gave us a glance of the spacious wild American west that seemed like heaven to those of us crammed in an apartment shared by four generations of relatives. To Li, Tang may have represented empty vanity and rash wastefulness, but to me, Tang reminded me of a time when the Chineses had finally begun to peak their heads above the wall after 30 years to look around.
That is not to say without Tang and Nescafe and American TV China today would look like North Korea. The opening of the country was inevitable. I think wistfully of Tang of the early 80’s for another reason. That was a time when only a few had TV, let alone colored ones. So when a show like Hunter or Falcon Crest came on, EVERYBODY watched. It was normal to have neighbors from all three floors to be packed into our study/living/bed ROOM to watch the show on our TV. The Magnificent Seven theme song used by the Maralboro ads would signify the beginning of the broadcast, and the neighbors, old and young, would gallop into your room. We snickered everytime Fred Dryer (“Hunter”), 6’9” towering over a bike, negotiated a sharp with his leg, and wondered what life would be like when cars would out-number bikes on our streets. What happened on the show would be discussed the next day. Description of the next show would be printed in newspaper and followed intendedly. Of course, that era is long gone. One would be hard pressed to find an equivalent event today to the amount of attention paid to those shows. Today, competition is fierce in China, whether you are selling soap or cell phone. Everyone has TV, one in every room, and one bigger than the next. TV is flooded with teary soap operas from Korea and Japan, and anyone in Shanghai is lying if he does not admit having at least 100 DVDs of foreign movies at home. Alas, Tang represented the “golden age” when a TV set becomes a community property for 50 minutes every night, and everyone you grew up with watched the same thing on TV. Is this what the baby boomers in America miss whenever they come across “pimp my ride” on MTV?
My memory of Tang is a simpler time, perhaps a more comfortable time than Li’s. I had a color TV. My mother could afford Tang. America seemed closer to me than to most others. But that does not mean it was an easier time. All these comfort was possible mostly because my father was one of the daring ones that left China alone, dreaming a better future for his family in the land of Tang, Marlboro and Nescafe. Maybe that is why Li’s essay irked me the most. To her, “every dream ended with this bland, ordinary existence, where a prince would one day become a man who boiled orange peels for his family.” What is left of ourselves without dreams? Did she not realize that her father also had dreams of his own? Whose dream is it that one day she would be standing in an American store rejecting Tang, and made that possible? I, on the other hand, am left to wonder what the orange peel drink made by my father would have tasted like had he stayed. Perhaps I am too harsh on the essay, or more likely, do not get author’s subtlety. Either way, I would raise an imaginary toast of Tang thanking her for bring up some fond memories of a distant China.
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