The first pop song I’ve listened to and still had a vivid memory of is Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”.

I was going on to 7^th grad, second semester. I didn’t have many friends in the class. Actually I had 2 friends and that’s all.

Hong was the class representative. To say “a representative” is probably not quite the idea of what it was. At that time, a class representative had more authority and superiority than we perceived nowadays. Maybe it’s still the same in Taiwan now, I have no idea. But usually, a person who became a class representative had always got high scores in exams, well behaved and was the “smartest” in the class. A model student for the rest of the class to look up to. Maybe the direct translation would be more fitting. The way we say it, a class leader. And Hong was exactly like that. He was tall, skinny, good looking and smart. I suppose at that age, he had more experience of certain things than I had. One time I went to his house, he showed me a porn videotape and asked me if I would like to see it. “Let’s see it.” I said. But not long after he started playing it, his parents were home and we had to stop it. It was like maybe 15 seconds of viewing. I couldn’t remember what was on that video anymore. But the next time I had a chance to see a porn video was probably 5 years later.

Yao was exactly the opposite of Hong. He was the black sheep. His scores were probably around the last 10% of the class and he made trouble from time to time. He was not expected to grow up as a successful person in any way. In an environment where people were valued by how you score in exams, unfortunately everybody thinks this way.

As for me, I was a so so student. Of course I had my subjects that I was good at. Sometimes I scored high and sometimes not so well. After learning English for a year, I had no clue that English was a phonetic language, that the way you write it was just the way you pronounce it. That it wasn’t the same system as Chinese. I had trouble understanding it.

It was strange how the three of us would hang together. But we did. Even though the friendship didn’t last long. One evening after school, we were biking home and Hong suggested stopping by a record store. He said hello to the boss and quickly picked out some record tapes. One of them was a compilation of top 20 pop songs put together by a local record company. He told me, pointing to a title on the tape, “You should listen to this one, it’s really good.” And that was “Billie Jean”.

That’s how I started listening American pop music. Year 1983, January. We were like a stripped down version of the Three Musketeers, riding our bikes to visit the record store every week. On Saturday evening, I used to rush home to watch a top 10 music video countdown TV show hosted by Yu Guang, a bolding mid-aged music veteran with a heavy mustache. That’s where I saw “Beat it” and “Thriller”.

Thinking about it, I was lucky to be introduced into this by the king of pop music, Michael Jackson. The timing was nice. I appreciated “Thriller” MV, but I had no idea how revolutionary it was because that was the very beginning of my MV experience.