Kong recalls that life in the mainland was already burdened with more than enough heavy symbolism. "Under that kind of stress, people lost sight of and then completely forgot many ordinary feelings--things like appreciating nature, missing one's home, treasuring one's family and friends, experiencing the change of seasons, and coming to some understanding of life just by living it, not to mention something as forbidden as love between the sexes." For everything from the "greater love" of one's nation to the "smaller love" and emotional lives of ordinary people, a billion mainland Chinese found an outlet for their pent-up feelings in Teresa Teng.

Teresa Teng rules!
But mainland authorities found Teng's gentle, charming, and girlish voice and her mushy ballads to be the worst kind of bourgeois sentimentalism. At the most extreme, "When Will You Come Back Again?" was condemned as "reactionary ideology" and "a betrayal of the nation." Is the song hinting that the Kuomintang will return to recover China? Who exactly is the one who will "come back again"? What is the implication of "coming back"?

Although the authorities at that time issued frequent orders to ban the music of "Little Teng," after the first large-scale shipment of Japanese tape recorders into the mainland a decade ago, it became very common to retape Teresa's albums. Overnight they spread across the mainland, until Teng's fame approached that of the "engineer of reform," Deng Xiaoping. Later on, as Old Deng's popularity waned, people said things like "we'd rather have Little Teng than Old Deng." (Teresa's surname is the same as Xiaoping's, though she used a different romanized form.) One expression even had it, "By day, Deng Xiaoping rules mainland China. But by night, Teresa Teng rules!"

As Zhang Shouyi has described the mainland at that time, per capita income was less than RMB40 per month, and a Teresa Teng tape was going for RMB10 to RMB20. But still working people willingly laid out half a month's salary to buy a cassette on the black market. And at little stalls where palm-sized pictures of Teng sold for the extortionate price of RMB2, supply couldn't keep up with demand.

At that time, at the peak of her popularity, Teng was involved in a scandal over holding a fake passport, and she dropped out of public view. But she restored her reputation during the 1981 "You Are at the Front" shows for soldiers. In 1984 she held an Asian concert tour to celebrate her 15th year as a popular singer, and all the shows were jam-packed. In 1986, the mainland lifted the ban on her songs, and "When Will You Come Back Again" was recategorized as a "revolutionary patriotic song." In fact, her popularity had never been held back by political interference.

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