How a reunion concert of a popular Taiwanese boyband from the 2000’s transported a generation of Asians back to their youth.
I’m one of the millions of Asian females whose love and obsession for Jerry Yan and F4 were reignited through social media clips of the current F Forever concert series in Asia. Three members of the Taiwanese boy band Flower Four (F4), Jerry Yan, Vic Chou and Vaness Wu, together with Ashin, vocalist of rock band Mayday, are touring Asia in a nostalgic concert that takes screaming millennials back to their pre-teens and teenage years.
Majority of F4’s fans are now in their 30’s and 40’s. The band and their majorly popular TV series Meteor Garden, are part of our generation’s most impressionable years, and shaped some of our ideas of love and relationships. Through this coming-of-age story, we somehow believed that love conquers all – loneliness (hello Hua Ze Lei), incessant infidelity (hmmm Ximen and Meizou), pathological disruptive disorder and the classic economic divide (our beloved love Dao Ming Si). You can change a man and marry your tormentor as long as you are both deeply in love, was the prevailing idea.
Three decades later, we have changed our minds and became wiser, but maybe not all of us.
We now know that love does not change a man, it just mellows down their personality. Infidelity is still not acceptable but many millennials do not believe in monogamy anymore and some have opened their relationship. From the very first date, we now watch out for red flags, and when a man hits you, you run away.
Above all we’ve learned that you can still fall deeply, stupidly in love, but first with yourself then with the other. Otherwise, you’ve not much of yourself to give, and would be continuously asking for confirmation.
Or you can choose not to fall in love at all. Life is big enough for all other drives and emotions.
Members of F4 are now in their late 40’s. They have kept their charm and sexual appeal, and are “aging like fine wine” as the internet describes. Three of them are married. The most popular, Jerry Yan, is turning 50 next year, and his toned body is as much desired as his sympathetic personality. Unmarried, and single, he would be the perfect guy for The Bachelor, despite wearing tops with deeper necklines than mine or better make-up than some beauty influencers.
Being based in the Netherlands, and having an already booked summer holiday, I am not able to fly to Singapore to see the last concert. When I was younger (19) I had all the time in the world but not the money to buy merchandise and concert tickets. Such is life’s irony.
So I contend myself with watching concert reels and old clips on Facebook and Instagram, bawling my eyes out more than I did when I first watched Meteor Garden.
I’ve been trying to analyze how these F4 concert videos and grainy Meteor Garden films could pull such strong emotions from me, (seriously I don’t have this with Backstreet Boys).
The most scientific explanation would be that very strong neurological pathways were created in my hippocampus during the days when we would rush home from school so we wouldn’t miss Meteor Garden on TV at 4:30 in the afternoon. No re-runs kids, this is pre-Youtube. That was our idea of FOMO.
Or maybe because we watched Meteor Garden during the phase of our lives when falling in-love was a slow burn romance – soft kisses, passionate anticipation and built up sexual tensions – not exactly the things we have time for when while caught in the daily grind of adult life. At the same time, we had our first heart breaks and break-ups and realized the relationships could change your future, and not always for the best.
Seeing F4 serenade fans with Meteor Gardens songs, and Meta algorithms fueling the obsession, those brain connections are fired up at this moment. I have not a single day since June 27 that I didn’t get nostalgic and emotional about those years of my life.
Maybe the tears are a quiet acceptance that my youth and those feelings I so vividly associate with it, will not come back anymore because they have all been neutralized by the logical understanding of adult love and life. We grow up and slips into disenchantment, cruising through life with the growing ennui of our life’s choices.
Last night, I binged watched The Forbidden Flower until three in the morning. Jerry Yan returned to romantic series with a slow-burn romance as a reclusive 40-something falling in love with a cancer-stricken 20-year old artist. At first, I was just honestly drawn to the show’s generous exposure of Yan’s upper body and the passionate making out (very far from the innocent Meteor Garden days). But I kept watching because of the amazing cinematography, music, humor, and the surprising love affair between the female lead’s successful mother and her much younger intern.
What stayed with me the most were the mother’s lines that roughly went like “How could you fall in love with me? I am not young anymore, I am short-tempered and I am on anti-depression medicines. My husband killed himself and my daughter is sick. I cannot give in to our love because besides being a woman, I am also a mother.” I think these lines speak to many women across races.
We shed layers of ourselves when we grow up. But we don’t really lose those layers. They stay as memories, and they come back stronger when triggered. We give up something for every role we choose in life, and those roles determined our drives and motivations. And if we look deeper, we don’t really become less happy or less in love, we just look at joy and love with different lenses, not with the rose-colored glasses we once wore when we were younger. And all these are part of being human.
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