On the speculation of one's love life...

Once I came across a tweet which went:

Wang Leehom is married. JGL is married. Jay Chou is married. Takeshi Kaneshiro, you're my only hope.

To which I replied:

Don't worry, out of all F4 members, only Vanness Wu is married.

Jerry Yan, the oldest member of F4 who was often considered the most handsome, turned 38 last January and is still single. It goes without saying that ever since he started his showbiz career as a model long before "Meteor Garden", his love life has been put under public scrutiny. There may be a lot of possibilities that explain his current state of love life, but I never forget one day in mid-2002 when I watched the special feature of an official "Meteor Garden" DVD. There, the then 24-year-old Jerry Yan talked about his love life. One particular quote, translated into English, caught my attention:

Of course I like girls. When I was a child, my mother taught me to like girls.

Before you have a go at me, please bear in mind that I'm a translator myself. No one in my trade fully trusts any translated script because when we translate, we turn the original text into one that makes sense in the target language. That means we often have to reduce some meanings. Now I wish I still had that DVD so I could show it to any of my Mandarin-speaking friends that special part to know what Yan was actually saying...

The overlooked counterpart...

I came across Andy Lee's Twitter recently. If you're old enough to remember the early 2000s, that name should ring a bell. Yes, he was a member of Tension, a Taiwanese boyband that got their start around the same time as their far more famous counterpart, F4.

What followed was an immediate search for Tension on YouTube hoping to find "Gotta Be Your Man", the song that made me fall in love with them in 2003. Nada. So I randomly clicked on their song "Smart", which was released in 2001, and wouldn't you know it...I fell in love with them all over again. I'd never heard of "Smart" before and that's because Tension albums were not available in Indonesia. I got my first listen of "Gotta Be Your Man" because I happened to have MTV Taiwan on cable and I got their "Gotta Be Your Man" album in Singapore.

Here's "Smart"...


The guy in black that raps is the group's producer, renowned singer-songwriter and former LAPD officer David Tao. He was only 31 when he produced "Smart" and released it in May 2001, which catapulted the boys to instant fame.

EDIT: This entry was originally written sometime in late 2012, when the "Gotta Be Your Man" video was unavailable. Now it's available, and as you can see in the video Tension's dancing had improved by the time the song was released in May 2003.


Obviously young Andy Lee (the long-haired one, duh) is the group's visual.

It's a shame that Tension was greatly overshadowed by F4. Didn't I mention that Tension albums were unavailable in Indonesia? Compare that to the massive popularity that F4's "Meteor Garden" achieved here, which resulted in the group holding a stadium concert attended by legions of screaming girls in 2003 and member Vanness Wu having a mini concert for his solo album "Body Will Sing" a year earlier. I guess it's not too late to introduce the current young generation, which is mostly K-pop crazy yet actually have a good memory of F4, to another Taiwanese boyband who looked just as good and were just as talented - if not more.

Now on to the fun facts!

All five members are Taiwanese-Americans. The youngest member, John Baik, was even born and raised in Argentina. Wait, isn't "Baik" a Korean last name you say. Yes, he's half Korean and there was another half Korean member: Jimmy Hung, son of Hong Kong action star Sammo Hung. Hung was the oldest member of the group, so it was likely that he was the group's leader (although since Tension was a Taiwanese boyband I doubt they had a leader concept.) With the half Korean members as the maknae and leader respectively, I think it should make Tension relevant to today's K-pop loving young generation!

Also: Vanness and Jimmy grew up together in LA and yes, they were childhood buddies (Jimmy actually attended Vaness' LA wedding in November 2013.) Die-hard F4 fans probably have guessed this.