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Remember the time - you discovered the King of Pop

By Xiao Hao (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-02 13:17

Back in the early 1980s, my friends and I, in junior high, were still listening to cheesy ballads and synthetic disco from Taiwan, considered as outlandish then as wearing jeans. We longed for American pop, but had to wait until high school to get our hands on a tape called American Pop that included John Denver, The Carpenters, and Doris Day's Que Sera Sera.

Even though we doubted the tape's pop-ness, we worshipped the songs. In chorus competition, my class did serious rounds of Puff The Magic Dragon. Every guitar afficionado in school could pluck Take Me Home, Country Road. In English class we learned to sing Yesterday Once More.

But it was Michael we wanted to hear most. The '80s was a time when China's youth was unabashedly pro-American. Many in the big cities may have had their ideological reasons; but for high schoolers in Chengdu, America simply represented progress, freedom and above all, hip-swinging ecstatic pop! We devoured news tidbits about the Western pop world - what an exciting pantheon of gods with Jackson as the King!

Gradually, we got pirated tapes of Paul Young, Wham!, The Miami Sound Machine, and eventually, Madonna. But Jackson arrived last. In 1987, our school received our first American teachers and exchange students from our sister school in Seattle. I gathered my courage and asked to borrow a Jackson tape from one of the students. The night she lent us the tape, we settled down in the tiny dorm room and reverently put the tape in the small cassette player.

And what a disappointment! Jackson's voice was an androgynous screech, and the beats were not danceable for those of us just getting used to disco. How could pop have this man as its King?

I had to wait until university to rekindle my love for Jackson. Many of us, after 1989, spent our time studying for TOEFL and GRE to get out of China. The campus, and the city of Hefei in Anhui province, were pretty dead. Then one day at the rundown movie theater before the film began, the operator showed two music videos of Jackson in concert. I was instantly mesmerized - the moonwalk, the glove, and the dancing.

People all around me cheered. Jackson was there dancing for us, his anger erupting, his body aching to break free. Soon after, Bad was released officially in China. I listened to it repeatedly, until no music could move my body any more.

During my early years in the US, Jackson's name and voice were among the few that I recognized on the radio. At parties and clubs, I would jump onto the dance floor whenever a DJ played his song - it was one of the rare occasions where I would not feel a complete stranger in the United States.

Then there were increasing rumors of Jackson's bizarre lifestyle, his whitening skin and his plastic surgery. Soon after, the child molestation charge against him exploded. Like many of his ardent fans, I believed every word he said - that he had vitiligo, that he was completely innocent, and that he was not weird, just different.

Time went by. I watched as my king failed to regain his former glory, his face losing its color and shape, and he was swallowed up by tabloid scandals. Time went by and I began to accept that he was not merely different, but weird. Millions of albums sold and billions of dollar made, and all he wanted was to regress into childhood - that was a bit sad.

Yet his music remained. In New York, Michigan, Paris, San Francisco, Lima and Beijing, whenever his music played, everyone would dance - American, French, Peruvian, Chinese, and me. He used to be the fairytale king for all of us. His music used to speak uniquely to each of us. Even though eventually we outgrew his pop fairytale, he still connected with us, the childish parts of us; so now that he has passed away, we are shocked but still want to dance to his music.

Let's dance, to our individual memories of the King of Pop.