That Olive Tree in my Dreams

Intersecting with Eternity

夢中的橄欖樹

 

Intersecting with Eternity is a mini-anthology of literary and artistic works, past and present, selected from the unbroken stream of human creativity and poetic self-reflection. It is a companion to The Tower of Reading and an extension of The Other China section of China Heritage.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
8 August 2024

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The Olive Tree

橄欖樹

Lyrics (English and Chinese): San Mao 三毛

Music and arrangement: Li Tai-hsiang 李泰祥

Recording artist: Chyi Yu 齊豫

 

不要問我從哪裡來 / Do not ask me where I’m from
我的故鄉在遠方 / My hometown is far away
為什麼流浪 / Why do I wander around
流浪遠方 流浪 / Wandering afar, wandering

為了天空飛翔的小鳥 / For the little birds that soar through the sky
為了山間輕流的小溪 / For the creeks that rush between the mountains
為了寬闊的草原 / For the endless grasslands
流浪遠方 流浪 / Wandering afar, wandering

還有還有 / Also, also
為了夢中的橄欖樹 橄欖樹 / For that olive tree in my dreams, that olive tree
不要問我從哪裡來 / Do not ask me where I’m from
我的故鄉在遠方 / My hometown is far away

為什麼流浪 / Why do I wander around
為什麼流浪遠方 / Why do I wander to distant lands?

為了我夢中的橄欖樹 / For the olive tree in my dreams
不要問我從哪裡來 / Don’t ask me where I come from
我的故鄉在遠方 / My hometown is far away

為什麼流浪 / Why do I wander around
流浪遠方 流浪 / Wandering afar, wandering

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Released in 1979, ‘The Olive Tree’ was a hit in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Forty years after its release, Chelsea Cheng featured it as her Friday Song in The China Project, where she wrote:

“The Olive Tree” was released in July 1979 on an album of the same name, and remains one of Chyi Yu’s representative works and a timeless folk classic. The song was composed by Li Tai-Hsiang 李泰祥, with lyrics written by acclaimed Taiwanese writer and traveler San Mao 三毛 Li’s vision to popularize the classic folk genre can be seen through his masterful combination of traditional instrumentation with Chyi’s gentle and limpid vocals.

Li invited San Mao to write the lyrics for “The Olive Tree,” which was originally titled “Wandering for a Little Donkey” (为了小毛驴流浪 wèile xiǎo máolǘ liúlàng). Li found the essence of the song to be strange and too Western-leaning; he later changed the title to “The Olive Tree” and removed lyrical references to donkeys and Spanish girls — elements that reflected San Mao’s memories of living in Spain and paid tribute to her husband’s hometown. Originally composed in English, the song was translated into Chinese by folksinger Yang Zujun 杨祖珺. The song conveys a romantic aimlessness and unaffected earthiness that embody both San Mao’s abiding love for freedom and Li’s attachment to the traditional folk sound. The bona fide emotions and imageries of unadorned simplicity in life are characteristic of San Mao’s other literary works. Li’s arrangements and Chyi’s vocal deliverance have brought out the beautiful, melancholic essence in San Mao’s yearning for nature.

Interestingly, “The Olive Tree” did not pass the examinations of Taiwan’s Radio and Television Administration before its release, and subsequently could not be played on TV or radio stations. The administration at the time feared that lyrics about a “faraway hometown” would provoke sensitive cross-strait relations, and that lyrics romanticizing roving would encourage teenagers to run away from home.

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Source:

A Note on 1979

Geremie R. Barmé

In 1979, the lilting cadences of ‘The Olive Tree’ played on what seemed like an endless loop in Cosmos Books, the bookstore and publishing house run by The Seventies Monthly in a large basement on Johnston Road in Wanchai, a bustling business district in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

[Note: 香港灣仔莊士敦道30 號地庫天地圖書。]

Lee Yee 李怡, editor of The Seventies, had offered me a job two years earlier when I was fresh out of my studies at Maoist universities on the Chinese Mainland. Bennett Lee, a Canadian who had recently graduated from Peking University, and I were the makeshift English translation department of Lee Yee’s operation. Our main task was to translate the think pieces on contemporary Chinese politics published by Ch’i Hsin 齊辛, the pen name of the husband-wife editorial team behind the magazine.

San Mao had written the lyrics for ‘The Olive Tree’ in 1974, the year I started my studies in the mainland at the age of twenty. When the song was released five years later, I was particularly susceptible to its message and it became the soundtrack of my search in the shelves of Cosmos Books for writers who would become a mainstay of my ‘Chinese life’. (‘The Olive Tree’ also revived memories of Harvest, Neil Young’s 1972 album, the songs of which had been drowned out by a Maoist cacophony.)

San Mao was a romantic free spirit who inspired young people in far-flung parts of global China world in ways that would only resonate on the mainland years, if not decades later. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cloying songs of Teresa Teng, also from Taiwan, were far more in sync with the popular mood of the PRC. San Mao’s restlessness, her obsessive quest for escape and self-fulfilment reflected a Me Generation ethos that was familiar to young people who had grown up in the hippy era. It also rhymed with the latent bohemian spirit of Chinese culture.

In Sanmao, ‘Wandering Writer’ Who Found Her Voice in the Desert, a belated obituary published by The New York Times in its ‘Overlooked No More’ series, the authors note that:

Her prose, which oscillates between memoir and fiction, has a laconic elegance that echoes the Beat poets. It can also be breezy, a remarkable quality at a time when her homeland, Taiwan, was under martial law in an era known as the “White Terror,” in which many opponents of the government were imprisoned or executed.

“She established a different and exotic place, a castle in the sand, for readers to enjoy,” said Carole Ho, a professor of literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “At a time when materialistic enjoyments were pretty limited in Taiwan, she yearned for something different, and showed younger girls that it’s O.K. to be unique.”

‘The Olive Tree’ continues to haunt me not only because it is part of my nostalgic reveries, but also because you could hear it on the streets and in the restaurants and shops of Hong Kong at a time that the colony’s future was being foreclosed.

Readers of China Heritage will be aware that, for me, March 1979, was a pivotal moment in the history of post-Mao China, as well as in my own life. During that month, Wei Jingsheng, who had warned of Deng Xiaoping’s autocratic ambitions in an essay posted on the Xidan Democracy Wall, was arrested; Beijing initiated a process that would lead to the take over of Hong Kong; and, Deng Xiaoping publicly formulated the Four Cardinal Principles that have underpinned China’s one-party state ever since. These three events adumbrated a dark future and I took note.

In 1981, Lee Yee fell foul of Beijing and The Seventies, renamed The Nineties Monthly, was cast out of the charmed circle of patriotic fellow-travellers in Hong Kong. (For details, see Lee Yee’s essays in Hong Kong Apostasy.)

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The obituary in The Times notes that My Treasures, one of San Mao’s last books, was

… a collection of 86 short essays that celebrate clothing, jewelry, hand-decorated bowls and other objects that she had purchased during her travels.

In one essay, Sanmao pauses to analyze her own wardrobe, and lands on a metaphor.

“The jeans I was wearing were bought in Shilin, my boots were from Spain, my bag was from Costa Rica, and my jacket was from Paris,” she writes. “An international smorgasbord; and you could say they all united harmoniously and peacefully — and that’s exactly me.”

San Mao is part of The Other China featured in China Heritage. The haunting message of ‘The Olive Tree’ is also an invitation to these ‘intersections with eternity’.

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Further Reading:

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流浪的浪字。Source: a dictionary of calligraphic styles