Sarah Chen the Champion

Analysis of Red Dust 滚滚红尘 (陈淑桦/陳淑樺)

Sarah Chen singing the line "The heart that should have belonged to you..." in Red Dust

Background.

The 1990 film Red Dust, starring Brigitte Lin, depicted a tragic tale of lovers separated by the political turmoil of 1940s China. The theme song of the same name emerged midway through the movie when the two lovers had one of their last moments together dancing on a balcony, with their heads covered by a red scarf. The song was short, just over 3 minutes, but contained many layers of emotions. The songwriter, renowned musician Lo Ta-Yu, had sought Sarah Chen out. By then, Chen had an established reputation as a theme song artist. She also had just performed a song Lo wrote ("The Silent Expression") in her record-breaking 1989 album. Lo's original plan was to sing a duet with Sarah Chen. They recorded two versions, a Chen-Lo duet where they alternated lines, and a Sarah Chen solo. The solo version was played in the movie and is the dominant version online. The movie Red Dust won multiple awards at the 27th Golden Horse Awards, including the Original Cinematic Music Award, in a nod to Sarah Chen's performance. 

Popularity

YouTube has 25M views of Chen's "Red Dust," most of which came from the solo MV. Spotify has 3.5M replays, and bilibili has approximately 3M views (most videos were under 3-years old). As of Spring 2024, the song "Red Dust" has been viewed or played for about 32M times in the past decade across different platforms. Again, had YouTube and Spotify been accessible in China (98% of the world's Chinese-speaking population), the song likely would have accumulated 50 times more play counts - for about 1.5 billion times.

Lyrics

Lo composed the song based on adapted script from Sanmao, who herself adapted the story from Eileen Chang. The song has deep roots in Chinese culture, literature, and history.  The approximate English translation goes like this:

The careless you in the beginning, and the youthful inexperienced me;  The love in the mortal world, only came because of life's silent and hurried entanglement.    Perhaps it's a mistake in this life, or the karma passed down from a previous life; All that we have, we are willing to trade for a moment of love.    Easy to come, hard to go, decades of wandering in this world; Easy to part, hard to reunite, the ancient sorrows of love and hate.   The heart that should belong to you still guards my chest. For only the aged faces of the mortal world can maniuplate the clouds and rain. Easy to come, hard to go, decades of wandering in this world. Easy to part, hard to reunite, the ancient sorrows of love and hate.   So the you who did not want to leave, now have to part with the me who's no longer here. Till now, faint whispers in the world still follow the legend of us. In the rolling red dust are faint whispers that follow the legend of us.

Why So Popular?

There's no doubt that the popularity of the song was based, in part, on the success of the movie. But it's hard for a 34-year-old movie, even one that was successful, to have sustained viewership. Someone uploaded the movie on YouTube a year ago, receiving 9.5K views, a far cry from the song's popularity in recent years. Online comments by viewers of the song suggest that, for many, the song "Red Dust" is an independent entity from the movie. 

People like the song, and specifically, they like Sarah Chen's solo version. Years later, on live TV, Lo said that he was "being stupid trying to sing duet of Red Dust" with Sarah Chen. "Sarah was absolutely a first-rate singer. She was too good for me," Lo said. Indeed, it is unusual for the solo to outshine the duet. After all, Lo composed the song, likely with singing the duet in mind, and nobody else could have had a deeper understanding of the poetic lyrics than the composer himself. Except for Sarah Chen. And only Sarah Chen, the intellectual and philosopher. She was the only one who could have successfully performed this poetic song. There are no competing renditions of "Red Dust."

Sarah Chen was not a therapist in "Red Dust." She was not singing to comfort anyone or solving any problems. She was, however, the magician that gave life and feelings to every sound coming out of her; and she did so without drawing attention to herself. Sarah Chen the performer was gone, in fact, only her emotions were left in the gentle sounds you hear. So gentle, yet you feel the heaviness of her heart. So calm, yet you sense the agitation of her mind. So quiet, yet you hear the irrepressible screaming. She shed no tears, but you want to weep for her. You understand the pain, the loss, the helplessness, the emptiness she's going through, against the youth, happiness, and love she once had. And there was no crying. For that's what life is, one irreversible path, and we are gone, leaving whispers following the trail that we may not have wanted to have taken. 

Sarah Chen won the Golden Melody Best Female Singer Award in 1992 for her performance of "Red Dust." This was a year after she missed out on the award for "Dream Awakening," a shocking miss. Some people say the win was to compensate for the miss from the previous year. But if you listen to "Red Dust", you'll understand why Sarah deserves to win that award every time she's nominated for "Red Dust." 

Sarah Chen the Champion

"Red Dust" shows that, for certain types of music, Sarah Chen is the champion of female singers, the best that has graced the Chinese language music scene.