Journal • June 15，2026 ｜ Past Issues 前期

The first documented public mention of Sarah’s Taiwanese Songs occurred on February 9, 1989, at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia1,2,24 days before Chen’s Lunar New Year concert.3 One of her New Year’s wishes was to record a Taiwanese album, preserving traditional Taiwanese songs before they were lost. Chen wanted to give these songs modern musical arrangements. But she had not found the right collaborators who shared her vision.2 Her upcoming concert was to include four Taiwanese songs,1 with her dressed as a tea-mountain woman (Figure 1). 

This press conference came months before the November 1989 album Talk to You, Listen to You, and three years before she eventually recorded the Taiwanese album. The 1989 press conference shows that Chen was the originator of Sarah’s Taiwanese Songs before anyone else entered the story.

But while time flows in one direction, history is easily erased and rewritten. By 2026, Chen’s role in this album has become secondary. Apple Music says: “Under the supervision and production of ‘the godfather of Mandopop,’ Jonathan Lee, Sarah’s Taiwanese Songs reveals Sarah Chen’s simple, unadorned, graceful, and refreshing side.”4 (在「华语流行乐教父」李宗盛的监制下，这张《淑桦的台湾歌》展现出她简单素朴、婉转清新的一面).

Apple Music did not exist in 1989 and could not have been at the Kuala Lumpur press conference. But absence is no excuse for reframing a woman artist's long-held project under the authority of a man described as a godfather. The yellowing newspaper tells a clear story:1,2,24 Sarah Chen originated the album’s idea.

Finding a collaborator, however, was the least of Chen’s problems. To return to Taiwanese songs, she first had to reckon with a fraught past.

Sarah Chen’s musical roots are often traced back to her teenage years, when she performed English songs in Taiwan hotels.5 But beneath that familiar origin story lies a more complex one: Taiwanese roots that expose a painful beginning.6 Those roots began with the 1966 national “Taiwan Folk Song" competition held by the Broadcasting Corporation of China.7

Taiwan was under martial law, and music was subject to state censorship.8 The government did not promote Taiwanese songs, and even banned songs deemed politically suspect, including the folk song “Mending the Torn Net” (補破網).9,10 Nonetheless, it sponsored the competition. Open to all ages, it was won by an eight-year-old girl with the song “Everyone Is Satisfied.” That girl was Sarah Chen;7 she won a large refrigerator.

She soon joined Five Tiger Records, which specialized in Taiwanese folk songs. In 1967, the company produced a Taiwanese album (Figure 2A), Jiang Lei, Chen Shu-hua Becoming Famous Golden Songs, which included the nine-year-old Sarah Chen’s first recording, “Water Wagon Girl” 《水车姑娘》. Chen would continue singing Taiwanese songs at ages 12 and 18, ending with a beautiful duet with Liang Shan in 1976, “Sorrowful Rainy Bridge”《哀愁的风雨桥》(Figure 2B).

By then, martial law had tightened around Taiwanese folk songs, leaving virtually no commercial space for them.10  As the labels failed, Chen’s early recordings were nearly lost.6 Chen may not have mourned their demise: she tried more than once to write off her history as a child singer.5,11 After all, her teenage work lacked the sophistication of her later work.

But her nine-year-old recordings were lovely. “Water Wagon Girl” was widely considered Chen's debut song. Not understanding Taiwanese, I first listened to those recordings with a mother’s tenderness: she melted my heart, sounding like five yet trying like twenty-five. That is, until I read the lyrics and realized what she had been made to sing. I wish I had not read them.

I learned that it was common practice for Taiwan’s child singers to perform adult-themed songs in the 1960s, a practice not limited to Taiwanese songs. And Chen wasn’t the only girl made to ventriloquize a woman: when Teresa Teng debuted at age 14, she sang many ballads. And yet, the fact that the music industry had normalized the practice did not make it any less appalling. Chen became increasingly uncomfortable singing ballads. She would later recount how, at age 14, she had to sing on TV and was relieved to be assigned an age-appropriate song.12 

Chen spent the next decade performing exclusively in Mandarin and English, except for two Taiwanese songs she performed in live concerts in Malaysia and Japan in 1986. By 1989, two years after Taiwan lifted martial law,13 she had voluntarily returned to her Taiwanese roots. Her wish to preserve traditional Taiwanese songs11,14 may sound like a cliché, but doing so required revisiting a tangled past. 

And yet performing Taiwanese songs on her own terms may have been the only path to finding closure. It was as if the adult Chen had traveled back in time to find her nine-year-old self and reassure her that it would all be okay – that there was value in her Taiwanese folk songs, and that this time, she was singing them for herself.

Sarah Chen did not record her Taiwanese album in 1989. Instead, she worked on fulfilling her other long-held wish: using songs to speak to her listeners.15 She pitched this idea to Jonathan Lee (Figure 3A), then Rock Records' deputy general manager, and their collaboration yielded Talk to You, Listen to You, Taiwan's first album to sell over a million copies. 

The next year, with Johnny Bug, Chen released an award-winning album, A Lifetime of Waiting, showing that her success was independent of Lee.16 But the narrative of Lee as the mastermind behind her work had spread, diminishing Chen's role in conceptualizing the album and obscuring her outstanding years as the Golden Bell Best Female Singer. It would be repeated by the label,17 colleagues,17 and the news media until it hardened into an unshakable narrative in every Sarah Chen bio4, and in some Jonathan Lee bios.18     

As the narrative shifted to the producers, the pressure to keep innovating pushed Chen to take extreme measures. She became gravely ill after a popular weight-loss drug she had taken was found to be adulterated. Rapid weight loss brought on life-threatening conditions.6 There was no space for Taiwanese music – or any music – as she fought for her life. Miraculously, under her mother's care, she managed to record a philosophical album in 1991, Be Wise, Be Easy, as a reminder to herself.

As she recovered from her illness, Chen was interviewed in New York by the Voice of Chinese Americans19 (Figure 3B). Given Chen’s history as a child singer, the host asked her whether, given the chance to do it again, she would still choose a singing career. Chen paused, then asked the host to give her time to think, and after a short moment, answered, “Yes.”  She said that she had thought about this a lot during the ten-month illness. But she would choose to sing again because “the charm of musical notes is that they can seep through every opening. No matter what you do, even when you sleep, music is always there, quietly and stealthily making its way into your heart. You cannot shake it off.”

The three-year delay, the near-death experience, the months of soul searching – Sarah Chen was ready to make her Taiwanese album. She returned to the people she had worked with in 1989: producers Jonathan Lee and Huang Jian-Chang, and arranger Ken Shima. These were not the team behind the intervening albums. The return of the 1989 team, with no obvious Taiwanese-music specialist added, suggests that Chen had arranged the project in 1989 while working with this team.

Sarah Chen gave two interviews to Gui Ya-Lei in 1992 about her new Taiwanese album,14,16 the only documented promotional attempts I could find. This diverged sharply from her earlier collaborations with Jonathan Lee, which were heavily promoted. In a 1992 interview, Lee expressed low expectations for Taiwanese songs, saying he was satisfied with making an album suitable for playing in Hyatt Hotels23. 

In her interviews, Chen told Gui that she had long wanted to record a Taiwanese album as a way to reach her grandmother. “My ancestry is Taiwanese,” she said, “although my records sold well, whenever I talked with my grandma, it seemed that we had no common topic." Her family's reaction to her Mandarin album, she said, was more like "that's good, it's you singing, after all." So three years earlier she had wanted to make a Taiwanese album, but only now had she found suitable arrangements.

Using “Remembering” (思想起) as an example, she said whenever she went to a karaoke lounge she would sing it, only to find the key too high and the rhythm wrong. She wanted to set the terms herself. These interviews show that the album wasn’t a random collection of covers, but Chen's own rethinking of Taiwanese songs.

Although the project was delayed by three years, Chen was still fully in command of her vocal power. It was prime Sarah Chen that went into these 10 songs, with her finest voice, most tender feelings, and inimitable style. The album has modern arrangements, with blues and jazz inflections, creating a cultural blend of traditional Taiwanese folk, Mandopop sensibility, and Chen’s Western-style singing.

She chose 10 traditional songs that flow through time and space, best representing emotions of longing, reflection, and hope. The album starts with the 1930s Japanese-occupation-era “Moonlit Sorrow” (月夜愁), as she waits alone at night for a person who will not come, then moves to the 1970s “Revolving Lantern” (走马灯), a philosophical musing about the churn of life, before reaching the once-banned song “Mending the Torn Net” (補破網), in which a broken net is repaired. 

But Chen did not end on a hopeful note. The final song, “Lonely Flower of Love” (孤恋花), returns to a lonely woman waiting as flowers and leaves fall. Yes, we may find hope, but life keeps us waiting.

A few nights ago, I decided to listen to the final track on Sarah’s Taiwanese Songs, an instrumental version of “Remembering” (思想起). I had never listened to the piece, having excluded it from Chen’s discography, but I wanted to know how she wrapped up the album after “Lonely Flower of Love” (孤恋花).

After an initial segment identical to her song, the erhu – so unexpected – suddenly drew me in. It sent me back to nights when my family sang to my father’s erhu, to the years afterward, when his music was the closest thing left of him. Tears poured out as I experienced a moment of visitation. 

I was certain that I had heard this melody before, somewhere in my father’s repertoire, but I also knew it was likely a memory error, an illusion created by Chen’s song and the erhu’s texture. From all that I’ve read, “Remembering” (思想起) is a traditional Taiwanese folk song passed down through generations.20 My father had not had contact with that tradition; if he knew the tune, he would have found it somewhere else. But was the memory his, or mine?

I come from a family of people who lived by memory. Books were scarce at the time; my father read borrowed books overnight, memorized them, and taught us from memory. Much of what I learned came this way. I did not fully grasp how extraordinary this was until after he died, when the musical notes he left behind matched modern recordings precisely. I inherited something of that capacity, except for memory of my own life.

This is what makes the “Remembering” 思想起 flashback so puzzling. The memory is likely false, reconstructed from Chen's album. Yet it may be true. Much as Sephardic ballads emerged from shared medieval roots,21 “Remembering” 思想起 might have ancient roots from the Ming-Qing dynasties24. The melodies may then have evolved independently in multiple regions, retained in my father's memory—and mine.

Whatever the flashback was, it came from listening to Sarah's Taiwanese Songs. Perhaps it is my reward for tending this memory gate.