4 versions of When Will You Return?

When the opening song came up in Crazy Rich Asians, I was overwhelmed by nostalgia. It was When Will You Return? (何日君再来) a song introduced by Chinese singer Zhou Xuan in a 1937 film. She was Shanghai based, an immensely popular singer and actress, perhaps the most of that era, and her songs were well known throughout Asia. When I was a kid this song was often heard and my father had an album of her songs. Her early death at 39 in 1957 may have inspired another wave of fandom when I was growing up.

The opening lines translate as:

Lovely flowers don't bloom often
Beautiful scenes aren't always there
Worries dissolve smiles
Memories of love bring back tears
After you leave tonight
When will you come back?

Zhou Xuan's version is in tango rhythm, the martial pace suggesting the dark days of the Japanese occupation of China. One imagines the singer addressing a lover who must leave imminently. The question may be rhetorical. After the PRC was established the song was censored for being too decadent.

Four decades later, Teresa Teng, a Taiwanese singer hugely popular throughout Asia, sang this version. She too had a troubled love life and died early at 40, which makes her interpretation poignant.

Lisa Ono, a Japanese singer who spent her childhood in Brazil, did a bossa nova flavoured cover in 2010 on an album featuring songs of Asia. Her throaty rendition conjures up a band performing in a cozy jazz venue.

Finally, for the Crazy Rich Asians soundtrack, Jasmine Chen has brought the song back to Shanghai, which is decadent again, in an ebullient jazz flavoured cover. The title has been changed to Waiting For Your Return, suggesting anticipation rather than resignation. It abounds in optimism and energy, matching the groundbreaking film.

The film it first appeared in, Three Stars by the Moon, was one of the last silent Chinese films, and the song track provided by a synchronised gramophone which is odd as that version is over 5 minutes. 78 RPM records held just over 3 minutes per side, which explains the normal length of a pop song. Perhaps in the middle the operator restarted the side from the beginning. There are spoken lines, by a male voice, proposing toasts to the singer. In later versions the singer speaks lines urging the lover to drink up.

The translated lyrics (scroll to bottom) illustrate how compact Chinese sentences are, and Chinese poetry more so, the reason being that Chinese usually elides pronouns and articles. The key line is 10 syllables:

今宵离别后，何日君再来?

Grammatical translation:

After you leave tonight, when will you come back?

Literal translation:

This night parting after, what day gentleman again come?

君 translates to gentleman but is a polite you.

Introduction to music and scanning 126 negatives

Musician at wedding dinner
The restaurant is Mak Yee
the site of which has
been sold off decades ago

I owned an Instamatic camera, probably my second camera, between my first 120 roll film camera and using a 35mm camera. I seem to remember that my father bought it for me after some pestering from a store in Singapore called CCC Junk Store, which sold goods disposed of by returning expatriates. My father would religiously visit this shop for bargains whenever we visited Singapore. The biggest haul was several crates of 78 rpm records. Most records were classical music. As you can imagine, a long work would be split across many records and this is where the autochanger came in. Of course there were series with missing records and duplicates. All the more fun. The family listened to them for years. It was the basis of my musical education. I remember reading a label and asking my brother What's a Beet-ho-ven? Then: What's a composer? It was only when I was older that I understood that music had composers.

A baptism ceremony
Colours were terribly faded,
it's been 50 years, after all

Anyway I was not looking forward to scanning these negatives as my flatbed scanner software has no setting for 126 film. Also unlike 35 mm strips, which has unexposed film between frames, 126 strips had not just pre-exposed numbers (normal for other formats) and but also pre-exposed frame lines, probably to assist the printing process. The camera could advance accurately between frames because there was only one registration hole per frame for the sensing pin to fall into. Which meant that the frame detection feature of the software wouldn't work. But it turned out to be easy. Following a tip on a forum, I scanned in the whole strip in one go, resulting in 200MB image files, then cut out the various frames with GIMP.