So I was rooting through YouTube looking for old skool shit, and found all kinds of cool stuff I never thought I’d ever see again. All the old music videos I used to watch on U68 or Channel 55 during the pre-MTV days. I’m talking about stuff before cable tv was a common thing. Those of us in NY used to tune our tv’s to channels like the fuzzy UHF channel U68 which would play the same set of maybe 30 videos in repetition over and over. Videos like John Parr’s “Naughty Naughty” or Willie and The Poor Boys’ “Baby Please Don’t Go”. All these ancient videos are amazingly available on YouTube now. I even searched for one of my favorite long lost rap tunes “You Can’t Play With My Yo-Yo” by Yo-Yo featuring Ice Cube and lo and behold it was there. That was one of the best female rap songs of all time, and it has resurfaced on YouTube. Amazing.

Then I decided to really reach and did a search for Shanghai Beach aka “The Bund” which was an old 80’s Hong Kong tv series that just about every single Asian American household with a VCR would have known. And shockingly, I actually found the video for the theme song. Before Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, before The Replacement Killers, and even before all the John Woo stuff, this tv series was the kind of material that Chow Yun Fat built his early career upon. If you were raised in a Chinese American household during the 80’s, the odds are that your mom was deep into trading VHS (or Beta) tapes with friends. These tapes were tv series recorded from Hong Kong’s TVB. These “serials” were of indeterminate length, but I remember many to be more than 10 tapes long at 6 hours per tape. As a kid wanting to grow up Americanized, all this stuff my mom would hog the tv to watch was an annoyance and something I really wanted to have nothing to do with. Admittedly though, every once in a while she’d bring home some videos that were martial arts flicks instead of boring dramas so I did occasionally get sucked into those. It was like watching a kung fu flick that would last a week!

Anyway these serials consisted of one hour episodes, so every waking hour in my house for several days a week, and weeks at a time, I’d hear the theme song for for whatever series my mom happened to be watching that week. As much as I clung to my American ways and tried to repress the embarrassing chinky stuff, it’s undeniable that these songs comprised a huge part of the soundtrack of my childhood. So when I hit that Shanghai Beach video and those first few bars played along with the image of a very young looking Chow Yun Fat, my first reaction was “Oh my fucking god, I cannot believe this is on YouTube!!!” I realize many of you are thinking “so you found an old video, so what?” But for those of you who are Chinese American and did grow up during the 80’s I’m certain you know what I’m talking about. It’s an odd rush I got, seeing and hearing something that triggered not only a wave of memories and feelings from a different decade, but also a realization that this was a giant part of my childhood that I had somehow buried and forgotten about. What’s more, all this stuff that I was once annoyed and embarrassed by, I actually think is pretty funny and cool. I grew up thinking it was just another weird thing that we chinks are into, not the legitimate genre of entertainment which in retrospect, it clearly was.