1: Legacy, Agency, and the Voice(s) of Teresa Teng

Much scholarship addressing the legacy of Taiwan-born pop superstar Teresa Teng (Teng Li-chun, Deng Lijun) emphasizes the politics of her reception by PRC-based and global Sinophone listeners, and affirms her potency as a symbol of pan-Chineseness. While such assessments provide important insights into formative processes of diasporic identity that are articulated through popular music, they elide the specificities of the historical moments audible in many of her musical performances, shaped as they were within the constraints of her celebrity under Kuomintang hegemony. This paper stages a musicological intervention in this historiography, listening closely to Teng for insight into the ways the singer negotiated these constraints musically. Drawing on Katherine Meizel’s notion of “multivocality” (2020), it charts Teng’s development of multiple musical competencies and her sonic shapeshifting through multiple markets. The chapter argues that by turning down the volume on Teng’s posthumous legacy, we might hear in her performance of multivocality tensions arising from her status as a Taiwan-born “mainlander” (waishengren), between claims to Chinese subjectivity on one hand and attachments to Taiwanese life on the other. We might also come to appreciate her corpus of recordings as documenting the disciplines she developed to walk the tightrope of these and other tensions.