Chen Daru

Chen Daru (Mandarin: 陳達儒; February 10, 1917 - October 24, 1992), born in Bangka, Taipei, was a songwriter.

He wrote about 300 lyrics in his lifetime, and his masterpieces include “White Peony” (Mandarin: 白牡丹) “Youth Ridge” (Mandarin: 青春嶺), “Bitter Heart” (Mandarin: 心酸酸), “Anping Memories” (Mandarin: 安平追想曲) “Youthful Sorrows and Joys” (Mandarin: 青春悲喜曲), “Farewell by the Harbor” (Mandarin: 港邊惜別), and “Nandu Nocturne” (Mandarin: 南都夜曲). In addition, he was awarded the Special Prize of the 1st Golden Melody Awards in 1989.

Early life
Chen Daru was born near the Bangka Qingshui Temple in Bangka, Taipei during the Japanese rule in Taiwan. He was educated in Japanese at a "public school" and his father arranged for him to study Taiwanese Chinese. At that time, public schools required that only Japanese could be used for conversation, and if a Japanese teacher caught him using his mother tongue, he would be reprimanded, and if he contradicted the teacher, he would even be slapped. As a teenager, Chen Daru was deeply aggrieved by the bullying of the Taiwanese, so he made up his mind to study Chinese at night for three years.

Join Victor Records
In Taiwan in the 1930s, under the active promotion and guidance of the Columbia Records, Taiwanese pop songs had gradually achieved good sales results. As a result, other companies, such as Popular (Mandarin: 博友樂), Taihei (Mandarin: 泰平), and JVC, also had ambitions to gain a foothold in the pop music market. In 1935, JVC hired Chang Fook-hsing (Mandarin: 張福興), a graduate of the Ueno School of Music in Tokyo (the predecessor of the present-day Tokyo University of the Arts), to head the literature and art department, and invited Lin Ching-yue (Mandarin: 林清月), a graduate of the medical school at the time and known as the "Songwriter's Physician," to write the lyrics and select the artists for the program. Since the lyrics they solicited were not up-to-date, the recordings they produced and released were not yet comparable to those released by the Columbia Record. When the Arts and Culture Department met to review the situation, Chang Fook-hing recommended Chen Daru, who was living across the street from his house, and frequently recognized Chen Daru's writing.

With Chang Fook-hsing's encouragement, the then 19-year-old Chen Daru wrote the lyrics to about five songs, including “The Daughter's Sutra” (Mandarin: 女兒經) and “Fragrance of the Night” (Mandarin: 夜來香). After careful examination, Lin Ching-yue considered that the young man's lyrics already possessed the style of a master, so he adopted them one by one and assigned them to Su Tong (Mandarin: 蘇桐) and Chen Chiu-lin (Mandarin: 陳秋霖) to compose the music respectively. After the recordings were released, they were well received by the market. By 1936, Chen Daru had composed more than two-thirds of all the songs on Victor Records, making him the pillar of JVC at that time.

Whether it's "White Peony", which describes the heart of a young girl in love, "Youthful Ridge", "Spring Day by Day", or even "Shadow of Two Wild Geese", "Sending Out the Sails", "Sentimental Heart", "The Wine Cup of Sadness", etc., all of these songs created a sensation in Taiwan at that time. Chen Da Ru was just 20 years old at the time.

There were many composers with whom Chen Daru collaborated, besides Su Tong, there were also Wu Chengjia's "Ruan I don't know what's going on", "Heart of the world", "Farewell by the harbor", Chen Chiu Lin's "White Peony", "Spring color in the mountains", "Seven pendulums of the Zhongshan North Road", and Kuo Yulan's "Nandu nocturne", etc. They collaborated in the creation of Taiwan's creative industry. Their collaborations created a glorious landscape of songwriting in Taiwan.

Unemployment and Police Work
In 1938, with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the rule of Taiwan by the Japanese Taiwan Governor's Office became more and more severe. Due to the active promotion of the imperialization movement the Japanese government induced Taiwanese to speak Japanese and wear Japanese clothes. Record producers also went out of business as a result of the war. These people who lived on songwriting had no means of subsistence and had to find their own way out. Su Tong took up the harp and performed with a medicine troupe selling medicine to make a living. Chen Daru evacuated his family to Pinglin and decided to enter the "Governor's Office Police Superintendent's Prisoner's Training School". After graduating from the police academy, Chen Daru was assigned to work as a police officer in the countryside, and only resigned from the police force after the February 28th Incident, never resuming his job again.

Post-War Development
After the end of World War II, all industries were in recession. As a man of letters, it was not easy to find a job, but he could not abandon his family's livelihood, so Chen Daru could only return to his old profession and write lyrics again. At that time, the circulation of songs relied on radio broadcasts and singing with singers in temple towns and squares, Chen Daru published songbooks in the name of the "New Taiwan Song and Ballad Society", and commissioned old friends such as Su Tong and Chen Shui Liu to sing and promote these songbooks by singing with drug troupes and singing troupes all over Taiwan. A total of more than ten books were published, and although their income was limited, they were able to make a good living.

In the 1950s, Taiwanese songs were on the decline. The reason for this was that, on the one hand, the Nationalist government was pushing Beijing dialect, and Chinese songs gradually monopolized the record market. On the other hand, most of the Taiwanese ballads from the Japanese rule era were banned from broadcasting by the government because they were considered to be too melancholy. Seeing that Taiwanese ballads had been suppressed to the point of no return, Chen Daru's output declined sharply after 1954, and he eventually gave up singing to serve in the food industry, serving as a manager of Ajinomoto Foods, a senior consultant for Ajinomoto, and a vice president of Ajinomoto, before retiring as vice president of Jenfeng Refrigeration Company, a subsidiary of Jenfeng Wenxiang Foods (a producer of ZiMa brand baby food). He has been utilizing his other talents in business management.

In 1989, the first Golden Melody Awards, organized by the ROC Press Bureau, presented Chen Da Ru with a "Special Award", giving him the highest respect and recognition for his contributions to the Taiwanese music scene.

In 1992, Chen Daru died of cancer at the age of 75 at the Mackay Memorial Hospital.