Lately my husband, who’s Chinese-American, has been looking up songs he remembers from his childhood on YouTube. He showed me the following video, of Taiwainese pop star Fei Xiang performing on the 1987 CCTV Chinese New Year Gala, and we couldn’t stop cracking up. Fei Xiang is like the Taiwanese version of A.C. Slater, and his dance moves have to be seen to be believed. He points with his index finger in all directions. He does horizontal jazz hands in front of his face. He bends his knees and flaps his arms, bird-wing style, as he crosses the stage. All this while sporting a poofy black pompadour and a shiny red tuxedo jacket paired with a leopard-print cummerbund.
He throws himself into his dancing with great enthusiasm and no trace of irony whatsoever. It’s pretty awesome. The good stuff starts around 5:20:
So the questionable fashions and “funky” dancing of the 80′s weren’t just limited to the U.S. and Europe — not by a long shot. No, the 80′s left their pastel-and-punk mark even on Red China. 
This performance, my husband tells me, launched Fei Xiang’s career, as pop stars were something of a rarity in China back in the 80′s, especially those who danced. Fei Xiang was quite the heartthrob back in the day, and is still active in the music industry. His Wikipedia page, obviously written by a fan, contains such adorable details as his reunion with his grandmother (“When she met her grandson the first time, she was surely surprised by his looks and his height, however there was instant love between them and they accepted everything of each other.”), the change in his appearance over time (“Fei Xiang has greyish blue eyes which won thousands of his fans’ hearts. Although he was pretty fat as a young boy, he is well-built and muscly now as an adult.”), and his return performance in 1997 (“[W]hen Hong Kong came back and was classified as a part of China again, at the congratulations concert he returned to sing in China in public for the first time since he left and entered Broadway. This caused many mature women to remember their youths and their frantic love for him.”). Though the page doesn’t exactly meet Wikipedia’s standards for objectivity, it’s so cute that I kind of hope they leave it up.
In the 90′s, Fei Xiang hit Broadway, appearing in Miss Saigon and (erp!) The Songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber. There are plenty of clips of his performances up on YouTube, including many in English, and I have to say he’s quite the charismatic performer. I especially like his rendition of “Unexpected Song,” which shines despite the poor sound quality of the video:
