Wang Jieshi and Cherise were two singers familiar to audiences in the 1980s, and they were long regarded as a couple because they always appeared under two names when singing male-female duets. School songs from Taiwan province, such as "Grandma's Penghu Bay" and "Walking on the Country Road," were first heard by mainlanders not through Taiwanese singers but through Wang Jie-shi and Cherise.
They had their heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s, then gradually fell silent. Now both in their 60s and 70s, they rarely perform on stage anymore. Relatively few of Cherise's public performances are related to her patient experience.
Shelis started out as a singer. He worked in the Chinese Film Orchestra at an early age, singing interludes and theme songs for many movies, and I didn't make it big. Wang Jieshi was initially a movie actor, but at one point he realized he was ideally suited to sing in a vocal class, and then he transferred to a movie orchestra, so he met Cherise and soon became a partner.
The first songs they sang were songs like "Why Are the Flowers So Red" and they were instantly accepted by the audience. At the time, men and women sang a song together, in soprano and bass, which many audiences found refreshing. They were young and collaborated with each other, and soon became popular.
Their golden age was in the 1980s, when they introduced school songs from Taiwan province, but most ordinary people still couldn't hear them, so they took the lead in covering a lot of school songs. These songs included "Treading Waves", "Grandma's Penghu Bay" and "Walking on the Country Road". With fresh lyrics and cheerful melodies, these songs brought a breath of fresh air to the music scene. In the last decade or even longer, the audience listened to sample theater and quotations, and were immediately attracted by hearing such songs.
In 1981, Wang Jieshi and Cherise released their first album, "When Will We Meet?" , which sold five million cassettes for a whopping $6.90. It was an amazing sales achievement. The two men's voices also reached millions of homes with those tapes.
Also because their names were always linked, many people took them for granted that they were a couple, and they made many jokes and were misunderstood many times.
Later, as awareness of music copyright grew, they stopped singing so many new works and their popularity gradually declined. By the 1990s, the mainland pop music scene was in full swing, with newcomers emerging. Wang Jieshi's Cherise became a forefather in the music scene and did not make another transition, and was soon forgotten by some young people.
They would still perform, but much of the time it was in the form of nostalgia. In addition, Cherise had health problems in the late 1990s. For a while, he couldn't sing or even take care of himself. Luckily, I recovered slowly enough to return to the stage at one point.
Now, one is in his 70s and the other is almost 70. Even in good health, there are not many opportunities to perform on stage. Around 2008, I saw Wang Jieshi perform in person at a live party. At that time, Cherise should not have been physically able to perform often, so Wang Jieshi sang solo on stage. If I remember correctly, he sang "It's Better to Laugh Than to Cry," which was all the rage in the '80s.
Wang Jieshi and Cherise appeared as singers in a particular era, which was refreshing to the people of the time, so they were warmly welcomed by them. Times have changed, the singers have aged and many people no longer pay attention to them. Young people nowadays don't even know about the new wind they brought to the people.
Here, I would like to pay tribute to two teachers, Wang Jieshi and Cherise, who were in high spirits at the time and are now old.