Journal • July 1, 2026 ｜ Past Issues 前期

Our story begins with Teresa Teng. In 1983, Teng co-produced Mandopop’s most significant ancient Chinese poetry album – Serene Feelings (1983)1. It was a collection of twelve famous Tang and Song dynasty verses, with music composed by Teng’s contemporaries. But Teng did not invent this tradition: ancient ci – verse meant to be sung2 – survives in the modern word for lyrics, geci 歌词, literally "song words."

Yet Teng’s album, while artistically significant, risked alienating listeners unfamiliar with ancient ci, who may not have understood the lyrics. Teng could take that risk because her style was immediately recognizable: listeners heard “Teresa Teng” no matter what she sang. Her album became a statement about the connection between song and Chinese poetry. But its success was not easily replicable.

Long before Teresa Teng produced her poetry album, Sarah Chen had already been singing poetry for years, culminating in her 1982 song “Seven-Mile Fragrance.”3 A year earlier, the artist-poet Xi Mu-Rong had released her first modern poetry collection, Seven-Mile Fragrance《七里香》4. Unexpectedly popular, the book went through multiple reprints within a year5, and its title poem became a Sarah Chen song.

Xi, born in Chongqing in 1943, moved to Taiwan around age eleven6. She wrote about a soul returning nightly to the place she had easily waved goodbye to twenty years before. When Chen sang it, she was 24, born and raised in Taiwan; she had never experienced Xi’s longing. But that did not prevent her soul from haunting the “Seven-Mile Fragrance” as if lifetimes, not decades, had passed since she left. Chen’s artistic identity was already formed, even as she remained obscure.

“Seven-Mile Fragrance” was not an outlier in Chen’s early-career repertoire with Haishan Records7. Although the other songs were not repurposed poems, many were poetic, following either ancient ci (e.g., 秋别 “Autumn Farewell”) or modern free verse, as in "Longing after Farewll" 思念总在分手后，"Smoky Rain, Slanting Sun" 烟雨斜阳，and "Red Chamber Dream" 红楼梦.

Still not sophisticated at building singers’ personas, Haishan never branded Sarah Chen as “the poetic singer.” It was her long-time collaborator from that period, Joseph Ye, who would later call her “the female singer with the deepest understanding of culture.”8 “Seven-Mile Fragrance” epitomized Sarah Chen bringing poetry into pop culture through song. 

In 1983, Sarah Chen joined EMI and began a productive collaboration with Xiao Xuan, a lyricist whose husband, Tan Jian-Chang, composed the music9. Xiao Xuan held a degree in Chinese literature. Unlike Xi Mu-Rong, whose poems were set to music after the fact, Xiao Xuan wrote her verses as song lyrics, making her an ideal partner for Sarah Chen. The three became known as the “iron triangle” (铁三角)10, producing some of Chen’s most beautiful songs: 雪花飘，海洋之歌，梦里的呼唤，含泪的眼，梦里年华，浪迹天涯，失去钥匙的心锁，黑发变白发，请问芳名.

Although written and sung by women, these songs were not specifically for women. The emotions were universal. In fact, the title track of the 1983 album, “Starry Sky,” was covered by male singers like Cui Jian11. The gendered reading of these songs came from the singer herself: Chen sang them with her unique phrasing, tenderness, and female interiority.

Her female songwriters rarely wrote gendered songs. That genre – gendered songs for women – oddly belonged to male songwriters, a topic we pick up in the July 15th issue on “Mandopop Mansplaining ”《男子作闺音》.

Chen's EMI-era work strengthened her place as a poetic singer. By staying largely with modern poetry, she made her songs more accessible than ancient verse set to music. The Chen-Xuan-Tan partnership was so successful that Chen' albums broke EMI’s sales record in 198512. In the right hands, a song carries literature, and the human feeling it holds, to a wide audience.

The restructuring of EMI13 in 1986 ended Sarah Chen’s productive collaboration with Xiao Xuan12. Chen's later songs became more story-driven than purely poetic, but she stayed grounded in Chinese literature, this time through Sanmao.

Born in Chongqing in 1943 and moving to Taiwan as a young child, Sanmao was a witty, free-spirited Taiwanese writer and world traveler14, known for books drawn from her life in the Sahara with her husband, Jose. She returned to Taiwan in 1981, after Jose died in a diving accident. In 1985, Sanmao collaborated with Chyi Yu and Michelle Pan on Echo 回聲15, writing lyrics for the album, which included the beloved female duet “Dreamland”《夢田》. One of Sanmao’s final works was the screenplay for the 1990 film Red Dust 《滾滾紅塵》16, a tragic wartime romance loosely based on writer Eileen Chang’s life17. Sarah Chen sang its title song18.

In 1994, three years after Sanmao's death, Chen unexpected recorded a solo version of “Dreamland”19. It could have been a memorial, but Chen did not set the song in grief. Instead, she sounded full of hope, even dancing in a field in the music video20, as if celebrating Sanmao's life. Her warm voice matched Sanmao's witty, affectionate prose.

Like language, a song has form and meaning. Sarah Chen’s gift to a song’s form was blending the best of Western and Eastern pop21; her gift to its meaning was the bond she built with Chinese poetry and literature.

On this account, Sarah Chen is more than an “East-West” singer with a Western style. What she delivers is the inner life so many Chinese women have tried to express: Teresa Teng, Chyi Yu, Tsai Chin, and others in Mandopop; Xi Mu-Rong, Eileen Chang, Sanmao, and Xiao Xuan in literature and poetry. The line can be traced further back, at least to Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. It is not a leap to bring them into a league of their own.

The commercialization of Mandopop, with Chen often reduced to her million-selling album “Dream to Awakening,” buries the timeless value of her work. There is nothing wrong with making music consumable. But while fashion changes rapidly, the heart moves slowly. And it is to the heart that we compose, write, and sing.

The league that Chen and her peers belong to is the league of poets. They have a common goal: to understand the soul that lives within us, in a world where we do not quite belong.