活著多好 (Good to be alive, 2001)
I got sick today and became nostalgic. I listened to a lot of Cantopop in bed and thought of an ad campaign in Hong Kong 15 years ago, where a company put up posters with a line or two of Cantopop lyrics everywhere. It left quite an impression on my mind. What happened to that company, I don't know. It disappeared. I wonder if someone else ran the same campaign today, would people still resonate with it? Would I? Maybe not. I personally don't listen to much Cantopop in recent years, especially the new stuff, and maybe that's the part that made me feel nostalgic. Maybe I should listen more, and also talk about it more. So I made the image you see above to replicate the feeling of it 1. I've been thinking about what to post on Bear, and this seems like a good project to exercise with: a slice of life, paired with a Cantopop song.
If I have a funeral playlist, Eason Chan's 活著多好 (Good to be alive, 2001) will definitely be on it.
The lyricist Wyman Wong wrote it from the perspective of someone who just died, telling people who miss him:
如果想哭 可試試對嘉賓滿座
說個笑話 紀念我
(If you want to cry, try telling a joke,
in memory of me, to the room full of guests)
But the real reason this song came to mind today is the line in the image:
仍然在呼吸 都應該要慶賀 (We should celebrate
when we are still breathing)
simply because I can't really breathe with my nose right now... Breathing is something so natural and boring and mundane, one only thinks about it when one can't.
Eason performed it live many times over the years. The one at Get A Life (2006) is good, and the recent one at Fear and Dream (2024) is also not bad. But my personal favourite is the one at Concert YY (2012), he was not in his best condition that day, with a broken leg and a bit of a hoarse voice, but somehow made the song even more perfect.
Somehow I am thinking of the short story 星くずドライブ by 三浦しをん. It's about a girl who died on her way to her boyfriend's apartment one night, but "lived on" as a ghost with him.
Spoiler
It's actually more about the boyfriend struggling with the fact that his girlfriend has died but is still talking and living with him, even though they can't touch each other anymore. On one drive together, he discovers that she starts disappearing when the car exceeds a certain speed (she was killed by a car running at that speed). The story ends with them driving on the highway, him wanting to accelerate to "kill" her again but not doing it, wondering whether her love for him will eventually fade and she'll disappear for good by herself, and not knowing if he wants that or not.The story has nothing to do with the song. But it's a nice story (sadly not yet translated into English). If you can read Japanese, ぜひ読んでください 2.