Tokyo Dreaming: The Hidden Canto-pop Gem by Hong Kong's Filipina Icon

It is impossible to untangle the history of Hong Kong pop from its Filipino roots. Younger listeners will think first of Janice Vidal (衛蘭) and AGA (江海迦). But to find the Filipino-heritage trailblazers of Cantopop, you have to go back to Teresa Carpio (杜麗莎) and the lesser-known Rowena Ellen Cortes (露雲娜).

Both were born in 1956 and grew up in musical households, and their paths ran pretty parallel. Surrounded by working musicians from birth, they were singing before they knew what the words meant. Both won talent contests shockingly young – Carpio at 6, Cortes at just 5. By the time she was 6, Cortes had released her debut single, Very Very, on EMI.

Before Cantopop took hold in the 1970s, English-language covers dominated the Hong Kong music scene. Both singers cut their teeth on that scene and found success in singing English songs. Eventually Cortes released two major Cantonese albums, which also leaned heavily on adaptations of foreign songs rather than original material. Amongst music fans in Hong Kong, she is mostly remembered through Cass Pang’s acclaimed version of her track 情像外衣 – itself, fittingly, a cover. Her best-known original recording came decades later, when she sang as a guest on Eason Chan’s hit He Says She Says (講男講女).

Before the Cantonese boom took off, both women also tried their luck in Japan. Cortes released a handful of Japanese singles and the 1977 album Oh, My Love. Carpio’s ties to Japan ran deeper. She had spent part of her teens there, and in 1971, aged just 14 or 15, she became the first Hong Kong singer to release a Japanese single, 混血児マリー. A second, ふたりはいつも, followed the same year.

Carpio eventually turned her English covers and regular television slots into a decent career, before stepping away to marry, move to the US and have a daughter. By the time she returned to Hong Kong in the early 1980s, the music scene had been transformed. Cantopop was exploding, and she moved with it. Her 1981 self-titled Cantonese debut included what would become one of her best-loved songs: 眉頭不再猛皺, a cover of the Japanese hit Sukiyaki.

Yet her Cantonese career soon struggled. In 1983 she paid for her own concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum. It made her the first female singer to play the venue, but tickets sold poorly. The losses left her heavily in debt and played a part in her divorce.

She could have retreated. Instead she called her 1985 comeback album No Reason to Give Up (何必放棄), and meant it. The following year she went back to Japan and made her best record. Tokyo Dreaming was produced there by Takeshi Kobayashi (小林武史) and Katsuhisa Hattori (服部克久). It came with a Cantonese twin, 杜麗莎 Teresa Carpio, in a different track order. It is sophisticated, soulfully layered pop. Steeped in funk, soul and jazz, it recalls the best of Japanese city pop and the atmospheric art-rock of acts such as Roxy Music. It proved Carpio was ahead of her time.

Unfortunately, being ahead of the curve often means being overlooked. One of the finest albums Hong Kong has produced, it was largely ignored by local listeners and remains little known. But its influence on the industry was huge: Tokyo Dreaming is said to have inspired the producer Clarence Hui to create Sandy Lam’s R&B-tinged City Rhythm (都市觸覺) series.

Why did Carpio’s Cantonese records never catch on with the mainstream? The answer probably lies in her mixed heritage. In the 1980s Hong Kong was booming and going through a cultural awakening in the last years of colonial rule. After decades of a colonial pecking order that prized English-language music and dismissed Cantonese culture as low-brow, the public desperately  wanted homegrown idols they could see themselves in. With her cosmopolitan background and mixed ethnicity, Carpio stood out as an outsider in a Cantopop industry that was busily defining what “local” meant.

The same otherness followed her on screen. In her few film and television roles she was typecast as a mean-spirited woman, an aloof posh lady or a foreigner, most memorably the strict nun in the comedy Happy Ghost (開心鬼).

Her career hurdles reflected something wider. Everyday racism has long been normalised in Hong Kong, and bias against south-east Asian communities is often brazen. Much of it comes from their association with low incomes and the city’s heavy reliance on migrant domestic workers. Because Filipinas have long made up most of that workforce, they are casually called by slurs such as 賓妹 (roughly “Pino girl”) or 賓賓 (“bun bun”, a diminutive).

Colourism makes it worse. In a culture that has long equated pale skin with beauty, these terms were once casually hurled at local girls with darker complexions.

To see how Hong Kong views south-east Asia, you need only look at Marianna (賓妹), a 1982 film about a “deranged” tribe in the rural Philippines.

Fortunately, things began to change in the 2000s. A new generation of Hong Kong musicians with Filipino heritage found a much warmer welcome. Pop stars such as Janice Vidal and AGA have reached the mainstream heights that eluded Carpio and Cortes, while the rapper Alconaba Wilfredo Jr has built a solid career in the local hip-hop scene. There is still progress to be made, but their success suggests Hong Kong is slowly becoming a more open city.

Reference:

Fond/Sound: Teresa Carpio (杜麗莎): 心己许 (Tokyo Dreaming) (1986)