Journal • Nov 1, 2026 ｜ Past Issues 前期

Sitting at the airport, anxiously awaiting a phone call from my teen, who was traveling alone, I received a message from Sister M. “A moving song,” she wrote, attaching a video of Sarah Chen singing “Red Dust” over scenes of Brigitte Lin and Maggie Cheung. Her message surprised me. Just the night before, I had rewatched Red Dust, listening intently to the one-minute excerpt of the song as Lin’s character and her lover danced on the balcony, their time together about to end. Sister M likes classical music and rarely listens to pop, and she knew nothing of my work on Sarah Chen. What drew her to this song, and why now, just as I was preparing to write about it?

“The song makes me miss them,” she said.

“Me too,” I replied. 

Loosely based on the life of writer Eileen Chang³, Red Dust premiered in November 1990. It was one of Sanmao’s final works⁴. The film won eight Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan’s top film honors, including Best Film¹. Set in the 1940s, it tells the tragic love story of Shen Shao-hua (沈韶华; Brigitte Lin), a writer, and Zhang Neng-Cai (章能才; Chin Han), a Chinese official working for the Japanese occupiers. His collaboration makes their relationship untenable, and they separate. After Shao-hua’s closest friend and her fiancé are killed during an anti-government protest, the lovers meet one last time. Shao-hua gives Zhang her ticket to escape China by ship. He returns decades later, after her death, to find the novel she wrote during their time together.

When I first watched Red Dust in the early 1990s, I was a student of modern Chinese history and an avid reader of Sanmao and Eileen Chang. I knew the outline of the plot and wanted to experience the emotions Sanmao expressed through Eileen Chang’s life. As a fan of both writers, I was an easy audience, yet I came away underwhelmed. The only scene that stayed with me was the lovers’ final dance on the balcony as the theme song played.

The problem was not the acting or the plot – the film was captivating from Shao-hua’s early home confinement to Zhang’s return. Rather, perhaps because I was studying history, I felt that the story barely engaged with the complexities of the era, despite its historically important setting. Absorbed in their own feelings, the lead characters lacked depth: Shao-hua could have been more than a psychologically damaged woman writing love stories, and Zhang more than a morally compromised, unfaithful man who admired a writer. The supporting characters, too, were thinly drawn, with women whose lives revolved around the activists they loved. More disappointing still, the film left blank the hardest years of Shao-hua’s life: the decades between Zhang’s departure and his return, when she would have lived under a new government hostile to intellectuals like her.

I found richer emotions and untold stories in the film’s theme song, which I have treasured for three decades, even though I did not know until recently who sang it.

When Sarah Chen was approached to sing “Red Dust,” she had just released her record-breaking, million-selling 1989 album, Talk to You, Listen to You⁵. The album featured her first solo recording of a Lo Ta-yu song, “Silent Statement.” Recalling the history of “Red Dust” on a 1995 episode of Rose’s Night⁶, Chen said that her manager stopped her on the street during a busy day and gave her a rough outline of the film’s story. She hesitated, uncertain whether she could interpret the song accurately. But when she learned that Lo had composed it, she agreed to try.

Days before the film’s November 1990 premiere, Chen wrote about her experience recording the song7 (Figure 1). She went to Lo’s Hong Kong studio in September for her first recording. Dissatisfied with the result, she learned more about the story behind the song and recorded it again the next day. Both Lo and the film’s director liked the second take. In October, Chen watched a preview screening with her mother and was deeply moved. She carried those feelings into a third recording in November.

Two full-length versions are widely available today: a Chen-Lo duet in which the two alternate lines, and a Chen solo on her album A Lifetime of Waiting2. Yet Chen’s account describes three recordings7. A close listen to Chen’s one-minute excerpt in the balcony scene suggests that the film preserves a distinct take, with different phrasing in the chorus. It remains unclear which solo recording appears in the film and which on Chen’s album. Most likely, the film contains Chen’s second September recording, the take the director approved. Chen’s emphasis on the November recording suggests it was her personal favorite and therefore the likelier choice for her album.

“Red Dust” is one of the most enduring Mandopop songs, and it is difficult to perform. Lasting just three minutes, it begins with the singer recalling how she fell in love when she was inexperienced and he was careless. It moves through decades of wandering the mortal world, unable to reunite with her love, leaving only traces of their lives and whispers of their story. It is a song of irreversible regret and lament, but also of love and acceptance. Such complex, subtle emotions demand a great deal of a singer. Sarah Chen brought two decades of experience singing theme songs, from the film song she recorded at age eleven to her then-recent theme for a Singapore television drama Samsui Women. Her soothing, warm voice carries decades of life and emotions that the film itself did not fully express.

Although both released versions were notable, Lo famously mocked his own performance years later, calling himself foolish for attempting a duet with Sarah Chen⁸. “Sarah is a first-rate singer,” he explained, adding that singing was not his own strength. His appreciation for Chen contrasted with the way her label had often positioned her – chiefly as the voice serving visionary producers⁹⁻¹¹. Yet their collaborations were regrettably few¹²; Chen performed just one more Lo Ta-yu song, “Hello, Taipei,” a gift to Taiwan from two of its proudest musicians.

Decades later, with both Sanmao and Eileen Chang gone, I rewatched Red Dust to revive my memories. It struck me much harder this time, not because the characters had gained depth, but because of the film’s dark themes. Thirty years ago, I was not prepared to confront the subjects permeating the film – suicide, war crimes, sexual violence, and death. They belonged to stories, films, faraway lands, and history books. Today, they feel painfully real: a man-made reality, suffering inflicted by people on others. The film may not be firmly grounded in the social realities of 1940s China, but it reflects the tragedies of human life. Thirty years ago, I faulted it for lacking historical depth; now, at about the age Sanmao was when she wrote it, I feel the weight of the subjects she was wrestling with. The story, only loosely based on Eileen Chang’s life, came partly from Sanmao’s imagination. But she did not invent the implausible; she gave psychological force to reality.

Sanmao leaves no spark of hope in the film. When Zhang finally returns to find his love, she has died. And we know where hope ends – in death. But the hope, absent from the film, lives on in the song. “Till today, there are still whispers following our stories.” Shao-hua has died, but her life has left a trace in this world: in the whispers, in the lives of the people she touched.

Red Dust ends where the heroine’s untold story would have begun: in the decades after the lovers’ separation, when she would have lived through the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, periods of systematic persecution of intellectuals in China13,14. Those missing years live in Chen’s song: “You who did not want to leave came to say good-bye to me who’s no longer here.” She is gone, but she left behind a book and traces of her life.

Neither Eileen Chang nor Sanmao spent those decades living under China’s new government, leaving the heroine’s unfinished story to the imagination. But the fate of people like her was written in history: the political persecution she would face as an intellectual; the public humiliation, beatings, and starvation of her family for being branded anti-communists; the relentless indignity of writing self-criticisms and expressing gratitude to those who had ruined her life. She would be sent to teach in one of China’s poorest regions, separated from her love; then eventually give up waiting, start a new family, only to become so poor that she would abandon a child she could not afford to raise, and live with the guilt of that decision.

The real tragedy lay in the mundane, the endless, hopeless trek through a world that suppressed her voice.

But she was also a survivor, finding a spark of hope where there was none. She taught her students and shielded them from political persecution; she gave to the poor, even when she herself had little to eat; and she raised her children to be as bold and knowledgeable as she was. The love of her youth slowly died with their separation, but in its place grew a love she bestowed upon everyone who entered her life, day after day – a love that endured after her death.

I thought about writing that story, but I couldn’t keep my heart from being shattered to pieces. Chen’s song tells the story that neither Sister M nor I could bring ourselves to write.