浮誇意思：誇張只因我很怕

English

The song

《浮誇》 (“Exaggerated”) is on 《U87》, Eason Chan’s 2005 album and his first in Cantonese after joining Cinepoly. The lyric is by Wyman Wong (黃偉文); the music and arrangement are by C.Y. Kong (江志仁). Kong wrote the melody in London on 1 April 2003, after hearing that his friend Leslie Cheung had died, and called the demo “Depression.” Chan tried to write words for it himself, then handed it to Wong, who turned the lament into the cry of an ordinary man nobody notices. It is now a concert encore and a karaoke dare, because of the shouting in its final chorus.

The man and the one he is shouting at

Most explanations get the portrait right. The man in the song has been overlooked all his life. At eighteen he stood at his school dance like a nobody, 「站著如嘍囉」, and swore that one day everyone would have to see him. So now he bursts into song wherever he is, as if every room were a stage in the round. He wears the loudest shirt and poses for anyone with a camera. The usual reading ends in pity mixed with diagnosis. One Hong Kong column wonders whether this counts as pathology, and the song asks the same thing of itself: 「算病態麼」, “is this a sickness?”

This is accurate as far as it goes, but it treats the song as a portrait we look at from outside. He is not describing someone else to us. He is speaking to a “you.” 「你當我是浮誇吧」: “go on, take me for a show-off.” The person who has decided he is a show-off is the person he is addressing. 「一心只想你驚訝」: all he wants is to astonish you. By the end the crowd has fallen away and the plea narrows to one face: 「凝視我 別再只看天花」, “look at me, stop staring at the ceiling.” As in 《K歌之王》, the whole room can hear him except the one person he is singing to.

Heard that way, the hinge, 「誇張只因我很怕」, “I exaggerate only because I am afraid,” is not a confession. It is an explanation, offered to someone who has already stopped listening.

Why is being unseen worse than being laughed at?

The question the song opens does not need the song. Why would a person rather be mocked than ignored? And when we call someone a show-off, what does the word allow us to stop doing?

Smith’s crowd, Weil’s gift

The sharpest answer is older than psychology, and it comes from an unexpected place: Adam Smith, seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he asks what all the toil and bustle of the world is for. Not food or shelter, since the poorest labourer has those. “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it.” It is vanity, he says, not ease or pleasure, that interests us. Then he describes the poor man in a sentence Wong could have set to music: “The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel.”

Wong’s version is 「人潮內愈文靜 愈變得不受理睬」: “in a crowd, the quieter you are, the more you are ignored.” Smith’s point is that this obscurity is not a minor injury. It is the thing ambition exists to escape. If he is right, the man in the song does not have a defect of character. He is doing clumsily and in public what everyone else does more discreetly, with salaries and postcodes.

But Smith has a second thought, and it is the one that hurts. “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely,” he writes later in the book: to be worthy of love, not merely to receive it. Attention and deserving attention are separate goods, and the performance can win only the first. Worse, it pays for the first with the second. The louder he is, the less anyone thinks he is worth hearing, and so he has to be louder still. 「很不安 怎去優雅」: “so anxious, how could I be graceful?” Grace is what would make him worth watching, and grace is exactly what fear makes impossible. The song is built around that trap.

Simone Weil comes at the trap from the other side. In April 1942 she wrote to Joë Bousquet, a poet paralysed by a wound from the First World War, who had read her work with unusual care. “Attention,” she told him, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” (Iris Murdoch, whose kestrel carried the reading of 《富士山下》, took the word attention from Weil.) If attention is generosity, it cannot be taken. It can only be given. Volume can make a head turn; it cannot make anyone attend. Bousquet, who could not leave his bed, let alone perform, had given her the rarest thing there is. The man in the song performs with everything he has, and what he gets back is looks.

Put the two together and the question has an uncomfortable answer. Being ignored is worse than being mocked because mockery is at least a kind of notice. But notice is all that noise can buy, and notice is not what he is hungry for.

The coffee shop in Toa Payoh

Mr Lim is seventy-four and lives alone in a three-room HDB flat in Toa Payoh. Twice a week he goes down to a coffee shop that runs karaoke in the afternoons: a television on a bracket, a binder of song numbers, a microphone wrapped in tape. He sings Sam Hui and Teresa Teng, always a little too loud, always with one arm out, as if there were a crowd beyond the drinks stall. The regulars have heard it all. The young men at the next table laugh into their Tiger.

One afternoon one of them films him. The clip goes round: tens of thousands of views, a caption calling him the most dramatic uncle in Singapore, comments full of laughing faces. For the first time in years Mr Lim is observed by a great many people, and Smith’s other clause applies exactly. They take notice of him, but with scarce any fellow-feeling.

His granddaughter, Hui Min, sees the clip on the bus home from school. She is embarrassed, and then ashamed of being embarrassed. On Saturday she goes to the coffee shop, sits at his table, and stays the whole afternoon. She does not film anything. He sings the same songs, and she notices that he sings them more quietly. At the end of each one he does not look out at the room. He looks at her, to see whether she was listening.

Hearing the fear again

Now the hinge sounds different. What he fears is not silence. It is being settled, having been decided. In the first chorus he sings 「你當我是浮誇吧」, “take me for a show-off.” In the last it has become 「你叫我做浮誇吧」, “call me a show-off.” An opinion has hardened into a name, and once a person has a name you no longer have to look at him. The word 浮誇 is itself a way of staring at the ceiling.

The song’s origin adds a layer the lyric could not say. The melody was written in grief for Leslie Cheung, one of the most watched men in Hong Kong, the kind of man Smith says is “observed by all the world.” Being looked at is not the same as being seen. Here Smith’s account runs out. It explains why the man in the song shouts, but it cannot say what would let him stop. Weil can, and her answer is the one thing that cannot be shouted for.

That is also where this reading reaches its limit. If attention is a gift, no one is owed it. Not every loud person deserves the listener’s patience; some are loud in order to drown out others. The song’s own demand overreaches. 「我非你杯茶 也可盡情地喝吧」: “I am not your cup of tea, but drink me all the same.” The song does not pretend that is reasonable. It asks, of itself, whether this is sickness. What it insists on is smaller: that before you look away you know someone here has shouted himself hoarse for you. 「別遺忘有人在 為你 聲沙」.

The line I keep

The line I love most is almost thrown away in the second verse: 「屋村你住哪一座」, “which block of the estate do you live in?” It is the question Hong Kong people ask to place each other, sometimes out of interest, sometimes to size someone up. Wong drops it into one of the loudest songs Eason Chan has, between a line about the ordinary roads through the world and a line about being overlooked in love and at work. For a moment the shouting stops and someone asks a neighbour’s question. I love it because it is the only line in the song that does not exaggerate. It is a question, waiting for an answer.

Two things stay with me. When did someone last ask where you live and actually want to know? And when the song ends, does the “you” ever bring their eyes down from the ceiling? Wong does not say.