Journal • June 1，2026 ｜ Past Issues 前期

Inside a stamp-like frame stands Sarah Chen in a white bathrobe, her hand on her neck, looking slightly uncomfortable as she gazes into the distance. A garment lies on an ironing board, as if she has been working on it. A large poster covers the wall, with letters partially obstructed by her head1.

Pointing at the letters, I asked my companion, “What does this say?”

“Chinese or English?” He traced the squiggles, “Ess? Jesus? No, just Jess—and these figures are her angels.”

“Sarah Chen is Buddhist.” I reminded him.

“But she could be anything in her art,” he answered, adding, “Have you asked AI about it?”

A day after stumbling into Sarah Chen’s music, I came across her 1988 album Tomorrow, Will You Still Love Me and spent a morning playing the first track, Beauty and Sorrow. The tune was melodic, her singing surprisingly powerful, but the lyrics made no sense. More precisely, every line was meaningful, but the whole thing was incomprehensible.

A vague picture emerges from lines such as “If you inadvertently discover my secret,” “I’ll never truly understand how men feel,” and “Don’t frequently bring up our differences”—it sounds like a complex situation with a boyfriend. But what was her secret? The music video, featuring Sarah Chen and the songwriter Bobby Chen (no relation), shows Bobby sitting at the breakfast table reading a newspaper. At one point, Sarah, hurt and angry, throws the newspaper at him. He storms out, she throws his belongings after him, then weeps behind a closed door. I got it: a fight between lovers, but the lyrics still felt disjointed.

And what does she mean by “The /ai yu/ that I once thought lost now fills my imagination?” She couldn’t have meant "desire/lust" – no, there’s no way that a woman would sing an explicit line in 1980s Mandopop. But did the songwriter know that as a homophone, /ai yu/ might be heard as "desire/lust?" 

Did Sarah know?

I spent the next two years reconstructing Sarah Chen’s musical journey, with a special interest in Tomorrow, Will You Still Love Me, which became my personal favorite for putting Sarah’s versatility, vocal range, and power on full display. In the 2003 documentary A Letter to Sarah,2 Bobby Chen said they wrote songs to reflect Sarah’s experiences in love, though she disclosed little.

Magazine reports from 1988 indicate that the album centered on an urban woman’s love life, creating narrative continuity across the songs3. After Beauty and Sorrow, Tomorrow, Will You Still Love Me tells the story of a boyfriend leaving early in the morning. Boisterous Street finds the singer waiting at dusk for a lover who never appears. Bonjour, Sadness shows her coming to terms with a failed relationship, and Hometown Women recounts a chance meeting with a female friend4.

Still, lyrical ambiguity permeates the album. The coherence across songs is as fleeting as the individual lines within each song. What holds them together? What am I missing?

Reaching no understanding after two years, I decided to query a large language model (LLM)5, starting with a phrase:

Chinese is a tonal language, but the tonal component is lost in a song. Suppose you hear the sounds /ai yu/ in a Mandarin song, what are the most probable corresponding Chinese characters?

“爱与,” the LLM said, as in “爱与恨.” [Translation: “Love and,” as in “Love and hate.”]

But the line ends with /ai yu/ as a phrase, not followed by anything else. What is the most probable phrase? Give probability.

Unbothered by propriety, the LLM blurted out “爱欲” [lust/desire] as the most probable answer (35%), followed by “哀郁” (25%) [sorrow] as the second possibility.

Let me give you the context in which this phrase appears:我想我永遠都不明瞭男人的心情和期待，曾經以為迷失的 /ai yu/ 填滿我想像的空白. What does /ai yu/ most likely correspond to?

Increasingly confident, the LLM gave its definitive answer:

“Most likely: 愛慾 / 爱欲 (ài yù) — ~90–95%.”  [“lust/desire”]

As if that weren’t enough to persuade me, it doubled down: 

“哀鬱 / 哀郁 (āi yù) — “melancholy” → ~5–8%, possible grammatically, but “迷失的哀鬱” is less natural.”

Impressed by its bluntness, I took my companion’s advice and asked about the poster behind Sarah.

“Tess. It is a 1979 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel.6”

I think I’ve found the missing clue.

Tess, the oldest girl in a poor family in 1880s England, is sent to a wealthy family’s estate to claim kinship after her father learns they are descendants of a noble family. Alec, the son of the wealthy family, knows that they are not truly related because his family has purchased their name. Attracted by Tess’s beauty, he gives her a job on the poultry farm. After Tess refuses his advances, he rapes her. Loathing her situation, Tess returns home after a few months and gives birth to a sickly child named Sorrow.

After her son dies in infancy, Tess goes to work on a dairy farm, where she falls in love with Angel, who is training to be a farmer. Tess loves Angel but cannot bring herself to explain her past. She refuses his proposal, tries to tell him why, even writing him a letter, but the trauma and the fear of losing him prevent her from revealing her past. On the night of their wedding, Angel confesses to a brief affair before meeting Tess. This gives Tess the courage to tell Angel about her time at Alec’s estate. But Angel cannot accept her past. Acknowledging that she was sinned against, Angel says she is no longer the woman he loved. They separate, and he tells her that if he is able to bear it one day, he will return. He leaves for Brazil to seek new opportunities.

Destitute, Tess goes back to the dairy farm to find her friend, but the farm is no longer running. She takes on hard labor for an exploitative man. Learning about Tess’s circumstances from her mother, Alec offers help, but she refuses him angrily. She writes letters to Angel, begging him to come for her, but receives no reply. After her father’s death, her mother and younger siblings become homeless. In one of her last letters to Angel, Tess tells him that she has done nothing wrong, but he has been cruel and treated her with injustice. To save her family, Tess returns to live with Alec.

Suffering from health problems, Angel returns from Brazil, having realized that he still loves Tess. One early morning he finds her at Alec’s place and asks for her forgiveness. “It’s too late,” says Tess. After Angel leaves, Tess breaks down at the breakfast table. Unaware of what has transpired, Alec dines and reads the newspaper while scolding Tess for being moody. He requests that she puts on a good appearance for a lunch appointment. She kills him.

Tess catches up with Angel as he is leaving. He vows to save her. They spend two days on the run, ending at Stonehenge, where Tess is arrested. She is tried and hanged. 

苔丝（Tess）是1880年代英国穷人家的长女。父母得知他们的先人曾是贵族后，便派她去一个富人家认远亲。富家子弟亚历克（Alec）知道他们没有亲戚关系，因为他的家族是买来的姓氏。他看苔丝那么漂亮，就留她在家禽农场工作。在苔丝拒绝了他几次后，他强暴了她。苔丝恨他，厌恶自己在那里的身份，几周后回家，后来生下一个体弱多病的孩子，名为“哀愁“（Sorrow）。

苔丝的儿子夭折后，她去一家牛奶农场工作，在那里爱上了正在学习务农的安吉尔（Angel）。苔丝和安吉尔真心相爱，但因为她的过去，苔丝拒绝了安吉尔的求婚。她试图解释，甚至写了封信，但过去的创伤加上现在又担心失去他，使她难以告知真相。他们成婚的那晚，安吉尔请求苔丝原谅他在认识她前曾有过一段短暂的恋情。苔丝鼓起勇气跟他讲了和亚历克的事。但安吉尔不能接受她的过去。他不怪罪苔丝，但说她已经不是他以前爱的那个人。他说他们要分居，如果哪一天他能接受她，他会回来找她。安吉尔离开英国，去巴西寻求生计。

苔丝离开了安吉尔的家，陷入贫困。她走回牛奶农场找到旧友，但农场已经关闭。她就在一个很坏的人的农场里做苦工。亚历克从苔丝的母亲那里听到她的处境，找到她，要她回去跟他住。苔丝愤怒地拒绝了他的帮助。苔丝给安吉尔写了很多信，请求他回来把她接走。但他没有回应。苔丝的父亲去世后，母亲和弟妹们被驱逐出门，流落在寒冷的街头。在给安吉尔的最后一封信里，苔丝说她觉得自己从没做错过什么，而安吉尔对她很残酷，给她的只有不公正的待遇。为了救她的家人，苔丝只得回到亚历克身边。

安吉尔路途中病倒，回到英国。他意识到他有多爱苔丝，读了苔丝的信后，他到处找寻她，一天清早在亚历克的居所找到她。他请求苔丝跟他走。苔丝说太晚了。安吉尔离开后，苔丝在饭桌上悲痛欲绝。亚历克起来吃早饭，一边看报纸，一边数落苔丝，要她一会儿打扮好了去见人吃午饭。苔丝将他杀死。

苔丝去火车站追上安吉尔，他发誓要救她。他们逃亡了两天，苔丝最后在巨石阵被捕。她被审判后死于绞刑。

The poster of Tess gives meaning to Beauty and Sorrow. It's notable that in the story Tess is "beauty" and her son's name is "sorrow." The scene of Sarah throwing the newspaper at a nonchalant Bobby now feels like a less violent version of Tess’s final moment with Alec. 

In fact, the songs on the 1988 album suddenly cohere when read against Tess’s story. “If you inadvertently discover my secret” could be a reference to the secret Tess kept from Angel. “The desire/lust that I once thought lost now fills my imagination” could refer to Tess falling in love with Angel after being abused by Alec. “All the beauty you once imagined would be lost in lamentation” (所有你想像的美麗都會在嘆息中漸漸老去) was a reference to Alec’s manipulation of Tess when bringing up her beauty. The uncommitted lover in Tomorrow, Will You Still Love Me could be Angel. Boisterous Street might be Tess waiting for Angel, who never came to her rescue. Even Hometown Women becomes Tess’s return to the dairy farm to find her old friend.

And the poster and the homophone converge. If Tess was the album’s hidden framework, then desire could not be avoided. It entered the song obliquely as a homophone to keep it culturally acceptable for Sarah to sing it.

These reinterpretations are my own – there are no magazine reports, interviews, or retrospectives to back them up. Their strongest evidence lies in the album cover. The best argument, besides the poster, is how well Tess explains the songs.

We do not know the producers’ true intention in linking the album to Tess. But the cover art gives a hint: the urban woman in Sarah Chen’s album may be read through Tess. She is modernized, lives in Taipei, never kills anyone, and drinks coffee rather than liquor with her friend. But fundamentally, a 1980s Taiwanese urban woman is the same as an 1880s Victorian woman: morally restrained, economically disadvantaged, facing harassment, and treated with injustice.

But did Sarah Chen sense the connection?