One Moon: Journey to the East

ONE MOON COLUMN | ISSUE TWELVE | NOSTALGIA

Written by Priscilla Zhang (she/her) | @p.zhangxy

My favourite band is taking a break.

MAYDAY.

They have been my favourite band for years, and they recently confirmed that they will be stepping away from world tour concerts for a while to work on a new album.

The news wasn't entirely unexpected. They have long talked about following in the footsteps of their idols, the Beatles, and making ten albums in total. So when their ninth album came out ten years ago, we fans already knew: there was only one left.

We always knew this day would come. And now, here it is.

It isn’t a breakup. It isn’t even bad news. A new album means new songs, new stories and something new to look forward to. Still, it is strange to watch one chapter close, even when you know another is about to begin.

Perhaps that was partly why, earlier this year, before the break was officially confirmed, I went to Taiwan. I followed ‘The Anywhere Door’ to places I already knew by heart: Ziqiang Tunnel, Park No. 7, and other landmarks from MAYDAY’s early years that had found their way into their songs and stories. There was even the late-night chicken drumstick prepared by Monster’s mother – a story almost every long-time fan knows. She is no longer here, but the story still is.

I had seen these places through screens more times than I could count. None of that stopped me from getting ridiculously excited when I finally saw them with my own eyes.

I was visiting for the first time, yet very little felt entirely new.

Can you feel nostalgic for a place you have never been before?

Maybe you can, when songs have been taking you there for years.

The old songs are better.

Since the pandemic, I have followed MAYDAY less closely and haven’t had many chances to see them live. But just before it, my concert buddy and I made it to a special tour held in only three cities in China, with a setlist made up entirely of songs from their first three albums.

It felt almost tailor-made for nostalgic people like us.

The old songs are better.

At another concert around the release of their ninth album, my concert buddy and I found ourselves strangely out of sync with everyone around us.

We only knew the old songs. The newer fans around us seemed to know all the recent hits and songs from the new album. When a new song came on, they stood up, and we sat down. When an old song came on, we stood up, and they sat down.

Somehow, we had created an entirely accidental human wave. It was funny, but also mildly alarming.

Was I still a proper fan if I couldn’t sing a single song from the new album?

The old songs are better.

Maybe I liked saying that because the old songs gave me a peculiar sense of privilege. They seemed to prove that I had been there earlier, that I carried memories newer fans couldn’t access or share in quite the same way.

Was that arrogance, or gratitude?

I still can’t quite tell.

Perhaps saying the old songs were better proved something else too: that I had stayed.

Perhaps familiar things feel most comforting precisely because everything around them keeps changing.

I met MAYDAY twice.

The first time was in middle school, when a friend tried very hard to convince me to listen to them. At night, I would hide under the covers with my MP3 player, cautiously listening to rock music that I mostly thought was far too loud.

I wasn’t convinced.

The second time was at university, when someone sat down with me and started talking about MAYDAY’s lyrics.

The song that finally got me was ‘Sun Wukong’.

It is difficult to grow up Chinese without knowing Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West, a novel written in the sixteenth century. As a child, what interested me were his seventy-two transformations, his flying cloud and, obviously, his ability to beat up monsters.

Back then, I thought the impressive part was being powerful enough to do almost anything alone. When I returned to the story through the song years later, I noticed something else. For someone so famously wild and free, Sun Wukong eventually spends years travelling beside a small group of people, step by step, all the way west in search of the scriptures.

When you grow older, the hardest part of the story no longer seems to be defeating the monsters. Perhaps it is finding people willing to walk that far with you.

Those old songs contain the girl under the covers with her MP3 player. They contain conversations about lyrics. They contain concert crowds rising and sitting at exactly the wrong times. They contain places I finally stood in this year after songs had been taking me there for much longer.

Maybe old songs just have more of us in them.

Perhaps nostalgia is sometimes just another way of saying: I haven’t forgotten.

There will be a tenth album. There will be new songs I will probably once again fail to learn quickly enough. New fans will arrive and make those songs part of their own lives.

And one day, those will become old songs too.

But one question from Sun Wukong has travelled with me for years:

When the journey west is over, could we meet again in five hundred years and journey east together?