A Single Guitar Can Protest Bombs:

Yesterday was the birthday of Mayday’s singer Ashin.  Reviewing all the posts on my social media wishing him happy birthday, I realize that he is already forty-three—makeup can’t cover up the more and more obvious wrinkles appearing on his face. All his black outfits can’t hide the fact that his figure is getting out of shape. I also realize that it’s my sixth year appreciating the music of Mayday, a Taiwan rock ’n roll band that was founded in 1998 and is still active today. My music taste changed from Justin Bieber to Rihanna to One Ok Rock in these six years. But for some reason, I never lost my passion for Ashin. 

When I was in middle school, I saw Mayday for the first time on TV in a grocery store. They were advertising for a beef fried rice lunch box and all five of them were wearing identical cooking outfits together. The first person I paid attention to was the tallest among the five— brown hair, thick eyebrows, tall nose, and slightly tilted lips. His facial features told me that he wasn’t young, but his eyes magically reminded me of the freshness and naughtiness of a teenager. I could imagine the owner of this pair of eyes to be a college boy in a white T-shirt playing guitar in the warm breeze near a beach.

Several days later, I saw Mayday on TV again, performing a song from their most recent album, Jump! Leaving the Earth’s Surface:

Throw away your watch, throw off your coat, throw away your backpack, and throw off your chatter. 

Throw away your television, throw out your computer, throw away your big brain, and throw out your troubles. 

Ashin, holding a round silver microphone, shook the whole stage. He didn’t put on makeup so I could see some signs of dark circles under his eyes. He didn’t style his hair much so the sweat on his brown hair made it look sticky. But all these minor defects just made his live show more lively. The veins on his arms were jumping. The sweat thrown off his forehead was jumping. The stars in his eyes were jumping. When he hit a high note and held the microphone intensely, I didn’t feel like he was only hitting that note. “Hate so much, love so little, just want to jump crazier and crazier, jump higher and higher, abandon the earth.” He was actually inviting all of us to  throw away all the problems in life with him. From that moment, this big boy buried a seed in my heart. 

Mayday entered my life. Ashin entered my life. “We are Mayday. I am Ashin” became the sentence that I heard often. At that time, I had just left my elementary school, which was in a rural area, and entered my middle school, which was located in Shanghai—near an area like Times Square. Everybody in school seemed to be cooler than me. They had the newest Nike shoes. They had the Apple smartphone soon after it was released. That made me feel very insecure deep in my heart since I thought not owning these was a sign that I wouldn’t be welcomed. They would laugh at the phone I was using, the outfit I was wearing, and the jewelry I wasn’t wearing. Feeling unsafe and confused, I chose to immerse myself in the world of music.

Surprisingly, Ashin, through his music, not only embraced me and told me it’s ok to feel scared, but also encouraged me to stand up and find my own shining points—aside from the material things. Ashin didn't earn his reputation by showing his iphone and Nike shoes on stage. He drew attention because of his talent, innovation, and hard work. From mid 2017 to the end of 2018, Mayday performed 200 concerts on a world tour after releasing their latest album. People went crazy for Ashin because he could rock the audience easily; many didn’t realize that these beautiful performances were flowers blooming from Ashin’s sweats and tears. 

In my second year of middle school, I realized that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was in elementary school. When I tried hard to get on the list of Top 20 in a class of 300 people during standardized midterms and finals, the same students’ names occupied the spot of Top 4 all the time. At that time, I had already started to think about studying in the US. I worked hard, but I still consistently got so-so grades in certain subjects, especially English. My academic status  disappointed me. When I felt useless, I heard a song called “Almost Famous,” with lyrics and melody by Ashin:

There was no applause, nor spotlights on the stage back then

Only a stubborn refusal to give up, verging on the edge of an abyss

Countless days and nights spent in the studio debating agitatedly

Using sheer volume to overpower helplessness

Is there light at the end of darkness?

Will the sun rise at the end of nighttime?

Is the brink of being famous a hope or naïve arrogance?

Even then, so what? Does it really matter?

I thought  I was born without the diligence and talent of Ashin. I wished I were naturally smart and could get good results whenever I made an effort like he did. But “Almost Famous” told me all the indifference, pain, and helplessness he had gone through. He also got scared like I and other people did. He was afraid of not getting famous, of not seeing any lights in the future, of being an underground band singer forever. 

Before he got famous, the six-foot-tall Ashin needed to curl up in a tiny bus seat for five or more hours every day when Mayday travelled around Taiwan to give performances. However, the band didn’t develop very well at the beginning.When they did their first fan club meeting, only ten people came. But when Ashin talked about that experience, he said it was an entertaining one—in order to make it less awkward, he did the slowest handshake with the fans to make the whole meeting half an hour. “You can’t think of how funny it was,”  Ashin said on a TV show. “When I was signing my name on the album a fan gave me, Monster, the guitar player in Mayday, told me ‘write your name as complicated as possible! Also write your English and Japanese names on it!’” When I first heard about this, I was in my first year in middle school, and I laughed. But when I saw the same video again recently, my eyes were wet. 

Then, after Mayday got famous, they were called the “light of Taiwan.” People all over Asia looked up to them as idols that empowered others and expected them to create more and more good and powerful songs. Ashin, that boy who had starry eyes, always had good intentions and kept on working extremely hard not to let down his fans. He wrote more than 200 songs and published twelve albums, won best band five times and best songwriter three times on Golden Melody Award. When I first saw that almost all Mayday songs were “lyrics and melody by Ashin,” I imagined him to be naturally gifted, happily playing guitar on a sunny afternoon and all the inspiration about love, friendship, courage and dreams coming to him naturally. 

The fact is that when he was making the seventh album, Born to Love,  in Japan, he slept only one hour a day for three days. It was winter time, and he just lay on the floor to rest without a blanket and woke up when he felt frozen and started working again. But he never used this as an advertisement for how hard he worked—if he had, I was sure that more fans would like him. That effort was definitely necessary for him to earn a lot of money as a singer. But he did it and talked about it as if it were an experience he appreciated having. He truly loves to create music, no matter if it’s 4 a.m. in a chilly Japan recording studio or on a sunny afternoon. 

After knowing all this, when seeing Ashin on stage again, I almost wanted to burst into tears—he was tall and strong, but he was still human and got tired and frustrated. Ashin made the middle school me realize that material cool is not the real kind of cool at all. I wanted to be someone who was cool like Ashin. 

After I got into high school, I felt very lost again. Up until that time, I always thought that the way to success was to study, get As, get into selective colleges, get a stable job, and earn a lot of money. That’s how I was educated when I was in Chinese middle school. But when I heard news about Asian students getting depressed or even committing suicide in the Ivies, I started to realize that getting into a highly selective college was not a guarantee for a good life. A lot of others who went to lesser-known schools but had time and space in which to explore were able to become awesome politicians, authors, and songwriters. I wanted to abandon my previous mindset that attending an Ivy meant a happy life—but it was not easy to give up something that had stuck with me for so long. I didn’t know where to go. Thus, I chose to seek some peace in Mayday’s music again:

Why did you give me a beating heart

And drop me down in this lonely battlefield

However vast this world is, that’s how far I want to pace

Is there even a little hope, let me go charge, heaven’s boundaries and ocean’s corners,  

let me go charge

This song, called “Charged,” was written by Ashin in 2002 and was a real reflection of himself during his teenage years. I kept listening to this song for three hours when I first heard it since I could sympathize with the restlessness he expressed. When my earphones were plugged in, I could see the high school Ashin in uniform standing in front of me, telling me that I wasn’t alone. He was as lost as I was when he was a teenager. All of the members of Mayday came from the same Taiwan high school but Ashin was a year older than all of the others. Since he didn’t pass the high school math entrance test, he was required to repeat a grade. Although he started playing guitar when he was in high school, Ashin didn’t get to become the president of the guitar club since the future guitar player in Mayday, Monster, played better and was more popular than him. Different from Monster, who was the son of a lawyer and the top student in school, Ashin wasn’t appreciated by teachers since he didn’t put in effort to study subjects he hated. In his song about high school life “Motor Rock,” he wrote:

My motor’s technology is first class, no one can beat me

Why is it that this school’s teachers don’t love me

Is it because I don’t understand A B C D, so they think I’m too stupid to bother teaching

When Monster got first prize on the school-wide math test, Ashin failed the test and had to repeat his second year in high school. When Monster got into Taiwan University, one of the best universities in Taiwan, to study math, Ashin got into a not-so-selective college to study design.

In my previous viewpoint, Ashin wouldn’t have a successful and happy life. But was that the case? Monster, who should have represented the typical elite, was the first one saying no. He quit Taiwan University to found Mayday with Ashin and nearly got kicked out of his home by his dad. When his dad asked him, “What is good about Ashin? You are forming a band with a design student who has no future,” Monster said, “Ashin is special, I know he is special. When we practise, the brilliance in his eyes is so bright.” It was proven in the future that Ashin scored low on tests, but he never scored low in life. 

The year after Mayday was formed, they had some luck— Jonathan Lee, who was a well-known music producer, called them and asked to meet. What caught Lee’s attention was a demo they sent him, including seven original songs all written by Ashin. These seven songs were all included on Mayday’s First Album later, and they were a big part of their concert in 1999, which drew 10,000 people. It was called “Number 168 Concert” because it was the 168th performance they gave since they were officially formed. 

Although Ashin scored poorly in math, he did have talent and sensitivity in music and literature. His score was low just because his approach didn’t fit in the Taiwan standardized testing educational environment. Thus, I decided to abandon my view that conventional success would lead me to a good life.  When I filled out my course selection form for senior year in high school, I, for the first time, didn’t think much about how many APs would appear on my transcript, but instead applied for the creative writing and political science classes that I had been wanting to take. 

From my middle school to high school time, Ashin was always there and burned himself like a candle to light my life and the lives of hundreds and thousands of his fans. When Mayday was formed, they said they wanted to be the Asian Beatles. Ashin wrote a song called “John Lennon”: 

How is it that a red bean wants to single-handedly shoulder the weight of the universe; 

it’s all your fault, you sowed these seeds in my heart

Take up one guitar and use it to protest countless bombs

He did successfully use that guitar to protest bombs; he also protected the space in my heart. I used to wonder if Ashin could be ranked as high as John Lennon, who was on another level. But when I watched the recording of his 1999 concert, when I heard him shouting out, “We made it! Ten thousand people! May I ask for a little wish? Can you guys shout out ‘Mayday’ loudly? ” I knew he was not a substitute for anyone. Why would Ashin need to be an Asian John Lennon? He is the Taiwan boy who can’t do math. He is the college student majoring in design. He is the singer of Mayday, Ashin Chen.