Hokkien Song Ai Pia Cia E Ya Lyrics
Justina Ky
Hey all,
this entry's calling out to all those who still can remember their army songs... I'm collecting/collating army songs for an upcoming play about NS, so I hope you all can contribute by typing in the comments section lyrics of songs you know.
Actually, collecting the songs is not my job (there's a gal in charge of sound) But I thought I could help out since I remember quite a number. (I was the song I.C. for my platoon during my BMT). Some of this you guys may not heard b4 cos we only sang it in goumantos (commandos). I tried to search online and realise all over the world is recording their army songs or has a website dedicated to remember their army songs but Singapore don't even have one. The only one we have was Mindef website whereby they got pple like Dick Lee and some other musical talents in SIngapore to write new army songs god knows how to sing.
Army songs were a large part of my memories about NS. I still remember how I survived the PTs and route marches just by singing songs with my platoon. Maybe I can come up with a book/website to record the songs if I manage to get a good number. U all support as much as you can, k?
Here are all those I recall:
Purple Light
Purple light
In the valley
That is where
I want to be
With my three
Close companions
With my rifle and my buddy and meeeeee.
For weeks, the media attacks against cheekopeks and ah bengs who visited prostitutes escalated so badly, I'm not sure whether it's become cool for Singaporeans to punch down against their less-educated peers. The only exception is that since heterosexual Chinese men are being attacked, liberals sit this one out, and let everyone bash these poor guys.
Like many Hokkien songs, the song had pathos. The singer laments about not amounting to much in life, missing out on travel opportunities, and seeing peers start successful businesses, marrying and settling down.
One of the things the lyrics say is that if the signer has a million bucks he will travel. He will go to Hawaii, eat sushi in Japan or have a spaghetti meal in Italy. This is not too expensive for a single guy, a trip to Japan may cost about $3,000 pre-covid and Hawaii/Italy may cost slightly more.
After travel, things escalate very quickly, the singer wants to buy a car which means paying for a COE. All expenses for a car should range from $1,500 to $2,000 for the next ten years. The worst thing is that the car is a depreciating asset.
Our cheekopek millionaire should start thinking about driving Grab to offset the costs of having a car, otherwise it will ruin half the investment income arising from the million dollars of invested assets.
As most Singaporeans can afford HDB property, I can only speculate that the singer intends to upgrade to a private condominium. Even in the best case, the current HDB has to be sold to generate the downpayment.
Moving forward, loan repayments can range from $2,500 to $3,500 even for a modest unit which may be unsustainable even with a million dollars . Our cheekopek friend may intend this to be a short project, selling it to earn a profit after MOP period is over and maybe earning some money in the process.
Buying a shop to collect rent is wise but hard. I did a quick check on Property Guru to see whether there are units for sale at Beauty World and many will bust the $1,000,000 budget but loans should cover up to 80% of the value of the property. There is at least one shop in Katong Shopping centre for less than $1,000,000, so this may suit the singer's budget. This will still will likely be cash-flow negative as the mortgage is over $3,000 per month.
I leave this last bit for readers to think whether our cheekopek would be able to find a wife even with a million dollars. I'm personally not optimistic given what I know about Singapore women ( In fact, I married Malaysian ). The cruel reality is that $1,000,000 represents financial capital and not social or cultural capital.
Sadly for everyone, a song like Jipaban has not aged well. It was written in 2001 and inflation has ravaged the value of having a million dollars. Thanks to globalisation, inequality has gotten even worse as $1 million may not be able to bridge the lack of social and cultural capital in Singapore. Finally, there are too many forces conspiring to make our friend part with his money through commissions and sexual favours that will allow him to maintain his millionaire status for very long.
I don't know Hokkien at all, but I want to be able to sing Hokkien songs at karaoke, and the best way to sing songs in a language you don't know is to study the phonology and use a romanization system to know exactly what the sounds you are supposed to say are; this would be much more successful than just... guessing at the lyrics (which is what I do now to various degrees of success).
I realize that Hokkien characters have 10 million different readings and Hokkien lyrics in songs are extra confusing because they seem to me (I'm not sure) to be using random characters to express words that don't have a character, and I guess people are just supposed to know what it's supposed to be. I don't mind if the converter is not fully automatic and will give me a few different readings for each character I put in; I suppose I can and will have to sort through to get the right reading. If indeed Hokkien songs use adhoc characters in lyrics, then I suppose I'd also need my converter to be able to tell me what certain characters are often ad-hoc-ily used as replacements for. This might be hard.
I know I could check up every word in a dictionary or something, but that might take a bit too much time. >_< So... like a converter that could automate the process somewhat would help I guess. Any ideas? (If there really is nothing then, people recommend what you think the best dictionary for this purpose will be.)
For Taiwanese Hokkien, the online resources I knew were confined to dictionaries that go offline from time to time (the 台文/華文線頂辭典 and the 台語線頂字典 are my first stops; thereafter I might consult what I call the 'Holodict': the 臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典).
But as for actual converters, according to the Ti-on L-m-jī Hia̍p-hōe, there is a macro for Microsoft Word and a plug-in for Firefox that converts the tone numbers into real pe̍h-ōe-jī; the link for the plug-in for Google Chrome looks like it's now defunct.
Haha, yea, I know what you mean. Actually Cantonese has a plethora of resources compared to any other Chinese dialect. Cantodict: is pretty good and has most of my needs covered. At least Cantonese has a de-facto standard for colloquial writing; I can't imagine how hard it would be to learn Hokkien because you really can't write it, and as far as I know, you can't really use 閩音 to comprehend Standard Chinese. (I hope someone is going to tell me I'm wrong for this one XD)
I don't know of any converter that will do the trick for you, but I also don't see a need to learn the language or look up every character in a dictionary in order to be able to transcribe song lyrics. I think if you could learn Hokkien phonology well enough to transcribe the syllables (which shouldn't take very long), that would be good enough, right?
I don't trust myself I guess is the main thing. Especially for tones, though I suppose for songs I can just ignore tones and probably live if I sing the melody right. Are tones important in Hokkien songs? I wouldn't know. (Like in Mandarin songs for the most part they aren't thaaat important, but like in Cantonese songs the melody fits with the tone; either way you don't really need to know the tones just to sing if you go along with the melody, but I suppose for Cantonese at least it can help a little.)
Hence this is the reason why I posted this set of lyrics so late. I heard it on a charity show, and I find this lyrics very interesting. I have not seen the movie, nor know the story line that is link to the theme song.
None the less, I am posting this lyrics here, together with the Hanyu Pinyin, for my friends who had problems reading Chinese characters. From the lyrics, the original language used should be in Hokkien (A Dialect from South China).
A person like me, who waited like this
All I am waiting for is for a returning glance from you.
Tossed around because of love, yet ignoring all injuries
Willing to give you my support all my life
Someone like me, Do not laugh at my foolishness
Who foolishly allow you to hurt my heart, by forgetting all hurt
Be it the all winters, be it through all your cruelty
I am still waiting for you to remember me, the worthless person.
Mum loved watching movies, especially the Taiwanese 爱情文艺片 (transliteration: love and culture films) of the 60s and 70s. Even by the time after I came along, her enthusiasm flagged not a bit; I remember many excursions to the movie theaters with Mum and Dad, with me perched on her lap, munching and holding my favourite kacang-puteh (peanuts in a paper cone) in hand. This was the time before twelve-dollar Jumbo Combos of popcorn nachos and soda.
Though you cannot open your mouth and speak a single word
But you know the world and its black and white, real and fraudulent
Though you cannot express how you feel
Yet you have given of your precious life
From afar comes your very familiar sound
Reminding me of your very loving soul
When will you return to my side
And let us sing together again:
Stan Lai did a good play on life in those army villages a couple of years back and I think they just had another run in Singapore again recently. I think Taiwan has a lot of brilliant filmmakers starting with those New Wave folks like the late Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao Hsien.
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