In 1917, due to poverty-related problems at home, he was sent away and lived with a married elder sister in the Taitung area, near the east coast, for a time.
During the Great Depression which affected Japan and her colonies severely (and which also triggered the expansionist urges of Japanese capital and the aggressive course that the government embarked on by invading China), Chen Da's survival as a street singer became even more difficult.
But above all, it shows his rootedness in an oral tradition and his illiteracy which made it impossible to refer to and merely reproduce, in a slavishly 'faithful' manner, existing written lyrics.
Jen Shangren remarks that in the eyes of some local citizens, he was just a "beggar" performing in the streets, hoping to get a few mao (cents) in order to survive.
[18] This sly resistance, worthy of The Good Soldier Švejk, a proverbial figure invented by the satirical writer Jaroslav Hašek, is even more likely in a social-cultural setting far from the cities, with an audience that consisted almost exclusively of non-Mainlanders who suffered from considerable discrimination under KMT-rule.
If the regime itself was not becoming more liberal, politically, and the life of peasants and generally the common people in the rural districts turned from bad too worse while folks in the working class quarters of the large cities suffered from low wages, abysmal pollution, and poor housing conditions, then at least many young middle-class people could escape the repressive situation in Taiwan by studying abroad.
Liu Ching-chih notes that Hsü Tsang-Houei (a composer and professor who became very involved in folk music research as an ethnomusicologist) had pursued advanced studies in West Germany in the 1960s.
Presenting the more general context that led to Chen Da's discovery, Liu Ching-chih writes that "(i)n 1976, Shih and Hsu Tsang-houei [had] founded the Research Center for Chinese Ethnomusicology, and started a tide of enthusiasm for the collection of folk songs.
His simple and straightforward voice and lyrics (we)re deeply moving..."[26] Chen Da was valued highly as a musician, both due to the emotional expressivity of his singing style, and the honesty his audience as well as most music scholars discovered in his delivery.
The presence of an urban audience that cared for foreign folk music encouraged Prof. Shih (史惟亮) and Hsu (許常惠) to contact a record company, on behalf of Chen Da, although without his knowledge.
The music critic Yatin Lin later on commented that "Shih Wei-liang (史惟亮) and Hsu Chang-hui (許常惠) ... brought him to the capital city of Taipei to record albums to preserve this 'dying' singing style.
"[31] Shen Shiao-Ying adds that the ballad is heard at the beginning and in the final sequence of a popular Chinese film entitled Farewell China (1990).
Perhaps Chiang Ching-kuo (who had a noteworthy record already, as head of the secret police) read the signs of the time when he began, as prime minister, to make modest overtures directed at those citizens who had been discriminated and intimidated in the past.
The members of the group were guests of a so-called welcome party organized by the mayor of Taipei that was also attended by a high-ranking aide of Premier Chiang Ching-kuo for P.R.
The books of May Fourth authors like Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang張愛玲), Qian Zhongshu(錢鍾書), Xiao Hong(蕭紅), Lao She (老舍), Cao Yu (曹禺), Mao Dun (茅盾) and especially, Lu Xun (魯迅) were banned in Taiwan throughout the martial law period.
By the mid- and late 1970s, the Campus Folk Song movement became commercially successful, though only as segment of the market controlled by the local "music industry."
In a similar vein, the new interest that developed since 1976 in new Taiwan protest songs (xin minge 新民歌) and, likewise, in traditional Taiwanese folk music, was re-enforced by the two parallel and simultaneous phenomena just mentioned: nativist (that is to say, socially critical, realist) literature (乡土文学 xiangtu wenxue) and the new Tangwai movement (subsequently referred to as dangwai (黨外) or pro-democracy movement).
[41] Despite the fact that Chen Da had been able to record his first album in 1971, he had to wait five more years, till 1976, before Prof. Shih Weiliang (史惟亮) and Prof. Hsu (許常惠) were finally able to obtain a chance for him to sing on TV.
Three years later, in late 1979, Wang Tuoh and Yang Ching-chu would be arrested and sentenced to long prison terms for their political commitment to the democracy movement, like many other Dangwai activists.
"[5] When Shih Wei-liang (史惟亮) died in early 1977, Chen Da sang his famous ballad "Sixiang qi" during the memorial union in Taipei.
It had remained so despite a few public performances in North Taiwan and despite the recognition accorded to him by ethno-musicologists like Hsu and by young urban lovers of folk music.
As a consequence, a letter, written by Prof. E. Lin (林二教授 ), appeared in the "United Daily News" that appealed to the public to face the plight of folk artists.
[42] Then, on March 31, 1977, Chen Da participated in the "Night of Chinese folk songs" (Zhongguo minsu geyao zhi ye / 中國民俗歌謠之夜) that took place at Tamkang University.
As Nimrod Baranovich later noted, "[t]he simple technology and low cost in cassette recording made the production and dissemination of alternative, unofficial culture easier than ever before.
It was a love song, ostentatively of the sort sung by fisherfolk, and the singer had managed to artfully weave two, two and eight into the text: obviously a strong accusation of the KMT dictatorship which had outlawed and would punish any talk about the events of February 1947.
[46] In other words, Yatin Lin interprets Legacy and Chen Da's delivery of Sixiang qi as an endorsement of a Taiwan identity that includes the latest wave of immigrants from the mainland.
In the words of the critic, who noted ""Chen Da's verdant and luxuriant singing," the ballad opened "another 'page' in a history of blood and tears (...)" of the island.
Quite a few were artists, writers, in short, intellectuals who saw Chen Da as one of their own, as a "Nativist" – somebody rooted in the native culture of the common people, just like the realist literature that focused on Taiwan and its social problems.
In 1983, for instance, Lu Hsiu-yi (盧修一) – a teacher at the Chinese Cultural College who had studied in France – was arrested and sentenced to prison for "presumption of rebellion."
Even though he was an old man – an illiterate person from a poor peasant family in the South Taiwanese countryside, and yet a poet, as several scholars have emphasized –, he must have understood the situation that Taiwan faced when a policy that had brought limited though reluctant "tolerance" of opposition was reversed in Dec. 1979.