The last time I talked to my parents (before tonight), it was on Zoom the night before yesterday. It was mostly my mother and I talking because my father is not all there these days. His dementia is getting worse by the day, and it’s really sad to see.
Side note: No matter how bad our relationship was in the past, it’s painful to see him like this. Dementia is so very cruel, and no one deserves it.
At one point, he started singing. I don’t remember if my mom suggested it or not, but he was happy to sing. He used to be a great singer, and he enjoyed it very much. Now, it’s more like a tuneless monotone that barely resembles song. But if he enjoys it, then so be it. It’s good that there’s something he likes to do. According to my mother, he spends most of his time sleeping.
I patiently listened to him sing song after song. I didn’t mind that much, even though it hurt my heart. And it wasn’t pleasant on my ears. But if it made him happy, then I was ok with it.
At some point, my mother and I talked about a Taiwanese song I really liked. It was a duet, and I could hear snippets of the music in my head, but that was it. I thought it had something to do with blood and a dead soldier and lost love, but I wasn’t sure.
Part of the problem was that I don’t know how to read, write, or speak Chinese. I can understand some basic common phrases, but that’s it.
To back it up a bit, my mother sent me a CD decades ago of a very popular Taiwanese female singer. Well, two CDs of two different popular female singers (or maybe two from the same one?), and there was a song I really liked on it. A duet that was very moody in sound and, I presumed, in lyrics.
I tried to find it on YouTube maybe a decade after that, and I finally found it after much searching. My parents and I have sang it several times together. This is the backstory for what happened in these last few days.
My mother told me the name of the female singer. We then spent the next hour trying to find the song. My father had long since left and went back to bed. My mother and I were separately trying to find this song and not having much success.
My mom said if I could come up with any of the lyrics, that would really help. I thought about it and could not come up with anything. I found other songs by the singer that I liked, including another duet. But not the one I was thinking of.
My mother joked that after we hung up the phone, she would think of the song. I said that I would as well because that’s how brains work for whatever reason.
This was about an hour after we had fruitlessly searched for the song. After, I did some more research myself, but I couldn’t find it. It was doubly frustrating because I knew I had found a video of it once before.
I used as many search terms as I could think of, and different combinations thereof. It was to no avail, and I reluctantly gave up. I didn’t even know why I was trying so hard to find it. I had gotten impatient during the hour my mother and I were looking for it because it didn’t seem worth it. And while I love the song, I didn’t need to find it.
The next night, my mother emailed me to say that a phrase of the music had come to her. By that point, I had remembered the first line to the song, plus a few others sprinkled throughout the song. And I could remember most of the melody, but it was still spotty.
At some point, I wondered if it was even the singer we had thought it was. I had found the album with the other duet I liked, and that was the only duet on the album. That’s what led me to think that maybe it wasn’t her who sang the song.
I mentioned that to my mother in another email, and she said she colud not think of another female singer it could be. But she acknowledged that it might not be the singer we had been thinking.
That shook me up because I had been googling predicated on the idea that it was a specific female singer. If that wasn’t the case, then I had to start over. I didn’t even know how I would do that, though, because, again, I did not know Chinese.
Fortunately, as I was thinking of it, I actually came up with a bunch more of the lyrics (as I sang them) and the melody. My mother called me tonight, and I sang the parts I knew for her. And she found it. Apparently, the title in English is something close to Red in Snow, which isn’t far from what I thought of it. Oh, my mother also remembered that the song had something to do with the night, and she was right about that, too.
I have included the version above that is closest to how I remember it in my head. I’m not sure who the singers are, but they are almost perfect in their delivery. My mother and I discussed before finding the song how hard it was to sing. Once we figured out the song, we were able to discuss it more throroughly. It’s in a minor key, not a major one. The cut-ins are at weird times, and the song goes both high and low.
It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, though, that I like difficult music. I tend to like things that are complex and weird (said in a positive way), so why should it be any different when it comes to music? My mother had mentioned several times that it probably wasn’t a popular song because of the difficulties, which is one reason it was so hard to find. The other duet I liked was very popular, in part because it’s much easier to sing (and therefore, listen to).
I want to give myself a pat on the back for getting the lyircs to the song I like clrose to what they actually are, except for how tehy are accented, of course. But it wasn’t bad! And my mom was able to find the song from my warbling.
I bring it up because I realized why my mother was so focused on finding the song. One, because of something she mentioned. She knew I really liked it, and she wanted to find it for me. Which was sweet, even though I had let it go about half an hour into the search.
The second reason was that it gave her a break from dealing with my father and with a traumatic event in her personal life. And if I could give that to her, then I was happy to do it.
Look. At this point in my life, I’ll take what I can get from our relationship. If it’s bonding over a song I love in a language I don’t know, then so be it.