Journal • July 15, 2026 ｜ Past Issues 前期

For thousands of years, China’s patriarchy meant that few women received a classical literati education, leaving men to dominate the narration of women’s voices, including in writing ci. Men wrote songs in a feminine voice, a practice known as “男子作闺音.”2,4 The assumed voice was often that of an abandoned woman or longing wife4,5. This tradition valued the male author’s lyric voice more than the female performer’s agency, even though her voice was what made the song ring true.4,6

By the early 1970s, when Sarah Chen began her singing career in Taiwan, that tradition remained in place. Her first batch of Mandarin songs, released when she was 12, were written by a 25-year-old male lyricist7. Far removed from the interior feelings of a 12-year-old girl, he followed the old tradition, writing about a woman longing for romance and fearing abandonment, as in "How Sweet" (多么的甜蜜) and "My Love" (我的心上人)8. Trying to escape from these songs, Chen swallowed words and hurried through lines, as if singing faster could get her out of the situation.

Beyond the harm to a child singer, these songs raised an epistemic question9: Is it possible for men to fully grasp the interior feelings of women10, especially feelings only women are expected to sing? 

By the late 1970s, Taiwan’s songwriters had largely stopped writing gendered songs that only women could sing. Male songwriters still dominated songwriting11,12, including for female singers, but many songs could be performed by anyone. By expressing universal feelings, the songwriters bypassed the question of how women felt.

Nearly all of Sarah Chen’s songs through 1987, over 200 songs, were gender neutral: "Smoky Rain, Slanting Sun" (烟雨斜阳)，"Fog" (雾)，"Autumn Fills My Heart" (秋意上心头)，"Song of the Ocean" (海洋之歌), and so on7. Men sang some of these songs too13, evidence that these were not gendered songs in the "男子作闺音" mold.

Sarah Chen’s recordings came across as feminine not because the songs were gendered, but because she brought a woman’s interior life into them. "Rain By the Window" (窗前雨) would not have evoked Li Qingzhao's verse if a man had sung it.

The neutrality of the songs, paradoxically, brought the authorship of the singers to the forefront. Precisely because they could also be sung by men, Chen’s authorship became clearer: when she inhabited "Smoky Rain, Slanting Sun", it was gentler than Liu Chia-Chang’s; when she sang "Yellowing Bookmark" (泛黄的书签), she made it a different song from Wen Zhang’s.

This is not to diminish the songwriters. But while the written song has an imaginary form, Chen’s recordings gave it an actual form: her voice, interpretation, and soul.14

By 1987, when Sarah Chen’s production shifted to Rock Records, the Mandopop market had moved from poetic ballads to love stories15. Under the cultural constraints of moral purity (the Mandopop Catch-22), women could not easily get away with writing those stories themselves12. Ballad songwriting fell largely to men, who revived the old practice of writing gendered songs that only women could sing. 

For Chen, the albums with the highest concentration of such songs were Woman’s Heart and Tomorrow, Will You Still Love Me. Examples from these and later albums include: "A Single Woman Like Me" (像我这样的单身女子), "That Night You Were Drunk" (那一夜你喝了酒)，"That Year I was 25" (25岁那年)，"Beauty and Sorrow" (1988; 美丽与哀愁)，"Tomorrow Will You Still Love Me" (明天还爱我吗)，"Heartbroken Hotel" (伤心旅店), "Questions" (问), and "Love Will Not Come Again" (爱情不再来).

By reviving the old tradition, the modern songwriters walked into the same trap: how does a man inhabit a woman’s interior life?9,10 Because the songs were gendered, he could not simply consult his own feelings. He had to imagine women’s experiences he did not directly know. 

Modern Mandopop songwriters were no better than their ancient counterparts. Their songs were a mix of the traditional “abandoned woman” script and Mandopop Mansplaining, in which men wrote not what women felt, but what they thought women were supposed to feel.

Take “A Single Woman Like Me" (像我这样的单身女子). The woman declares that, as a single woman, she does not care what other people think; staying single is no one else’s business. On the surface, it is an anti-tradition song, a declaration of freedom from love. But the protest itself gives away the male imagination behind it: being single is imagined as something she needs to defend, as if she still owes the world an answer for it. 

The songwriter later covered this song, but not as "A Single Man Like Me." He sang it as "To All Single Women." A male singer could sense that "A Single Man Like Me" would sound wrong: "If a sorrowful man walks past you, don't worry, that isn't me." But why, when a woman sings the original version, is it heard as a declaration of independence rather than self-mockery? Perhaps the song was never a woman's voice to begin with – it was Mandopop mansplaining in manifesto form.

The problem with these gendered songs becomes clear when they are compared with songs women wrote. Xiao Xuan16 wrote the lyrics for nearly twenty Sarah Chen songs in the mid-1980s, none of them gendered. Men could sing "Starry Sky" (星光满天)，"Song of the Ocean" (海洋之歌)，and "Wandering the World" (浪迹天涯) just as naturally as women could13.

Women songwriters, even when writing from interior feelings, tended to write universal ones12. Being carefree becomes laughing at the mortal world in "Mundane World" (笑红尘), devotion becomes a muddled heart in "Be Wise, Be Easy" (聪明糊涂心), and companionship survives hardship in "Enduring Remembrance" (长相忆). Women wrote themselves mainly as people, not as women defined by femininity.

Some songs written by women could only be sung by women, such as “Hometown Women” (本城女子), a song about two friends who met by chance. The lines “Ah, single women, living in the same crowded city; do you, just like me, have no one to confide in?” could not have been sung by a man. But being single in the song is a neutral state, neither lament nor declaration. There is no protest, as in "A Single Woman Like Me" (像我这样的单身女子). To a woman songwriter, staying single is a fact of life; to a man, it becomes a state to defend.

By 1987, when gendered songs reappeared in Sarah Chen’s repertoire, she had more than a decade of professional singing experience. Her 1985 Golden Bell Award for Best Female Singer had confirmed her status as a top Mandopop singer17. She had even outsold Michael Jackson in Malaysia18. Still, she had difficulty adjusting to the gendered songs.

Chen could not fully rescue "A Single Woman Like Me" (像我这样的单身女子). She returned to the avoidance strategy of her twelve-year-old recordings: reading the lyrics aloud. A 1987 magazine review pointed out the song's problem19, calling Jonathan Lee’s writing “100% self-centered” and saying Chen merely “read” the song aloud in a recitative style. The reviewer concluded producer Niu Da-Ke should not have arranged it for her. （「不喜欢「像我这样的单身女子」，作者李宗盛的写歌格式，100%以自己为主，故此陈淑桦以「朗诵」式的「哼」出此歌，是怪怪的感觉。身为制作人的钮大可不应该安排此歌给陈淑桦灌唱。」）

When Lee became the producer for Chen’s next album, Woman’s Heart, the tension boiled over20. Production took a full year,21 as the two quarreled and fought cold wars before reaching a compromise. Before the album was blanketed by promotion, its reception in Malaysia was lukewarm. One reviewer asked whether the “woman’s heart” in the album was Chen’s or Lee’s.22 Another reviewer23 noted their stylistic conflict, calling the collaboration novel but unsuccessful.

The reviewers spoke too soon. They underestimated industrial promotion. Woman’s Heart was aggressively marketed. It sold 200,000 copies and became Chen’s bestseller at the time.24 Its promotion placed Lee at the center. The album's description read: "Jonathan Lee made Sarah Chen adopt a more mature and nuanced emotional style, which he used to shape her pure voice into one that conveyed greater individuality." Chen was then an EMI singer whose music production was subcontracted to Rock Records, while Lee was rising inside Rock Records, becoming its deputy general manager a year later 25,26. Institutional power was with him, not her. 

By the time her next batch of gendered songs arrived, in Tomorrow, Will You Still Love Me, Sarah Chen had found a way to work around "男子作闺音." Producer Bobby Chen wanted to produce an album around Sarah’s own love experiences.27 Sarah said little, yet across their many conversations, she let enough of herself emerge to make the album hers28. The “abandoned woman” script remained detectable, but the woman was now witty enough to give the man a taste of his own medicine: she ditched him, ending the album over coffee with a female friend in “Hometown Women” (本城女子). 

To be fair, gendered songs were a minority in Sarah Chen’s repertoire. If Mandopop Mansplaining had only created a few unnatural songs, I would have treated it as a curiosity. But these songs, far beyond their number, helped shift Chen’s career narrative from herself to the men who held institutional power25,26. Marketed as a singer "successfully transformed by songwriters"27 – the “voice of urban women” – by the men whose voices she had to embody, Chen gradually lost control over her own career narrative. By 2026, nearly all Chinese-language articles, including official channels such as Apple Music29, described her career through Jonathan Lee.

My first encounter with Sarah Chen was in early 2024, when I found her English Wikipedia page, a stub. After stating her name, the opening paragraph said that her success largely stemmed from collaborations with Lee, then listed awards for Lee-Chen songs. An alarm bell rang in my head: whose biography was this?

It took me more than a year, and later the help of long-time Sarah Chen fans, to discover that she had already established herself as a Mandopop diva30, Taiwan’s best female singer17,31,32, and Singapore’s beloved voice33,34 before working with Rock Records. After a brief collaboration with Jonathan Lee, Chen later won the Golden Melody Award twice, showing that her success was independent of him. Her 1989 album with Lee brought her peak commercial success, but 1988 and1989 were also the years when her career narrative and agency began to erode.

The loss began around those gendered songs. The interior described in them was hardly women’s – a female songwriter would not have written "Questions" (问) much as a male songwriter would not have written "Men's Questions" (男人问) or sung "A Single Man Like Me" (像我这样的单身男子). These songs failed the gender reversal test, as the songwriter could not put himself in the words he wrote for women to sing. 

Just as Chen gave the songs credibility, the narrative that “Jonathan Lee made Sarah Chen sing in his new style” was repeated a thousand times. From there, it didn't take much to erase Chen’s agency. In a 2003 Rock Records documentary27, she is reduced to someone who fulfilled songwriters’ dreams, even “shrinking herself small.” It says they gave Chen "strong medicine" to "wash her past image clean." Looking back, her image was washed, but her achievement was washed away. It is the thousand-year tradition of 男子作闺音 taking a triumphant turn through the modern age, with disastrous effects on the female singer's career narrative. 

Except modern technology preserved all of Sarah Chen's recordings, a past that will not wash off. They are the undistorted witnesses to her contribution. In them lives Sarah Chen’s soul, breathing gentleness, love, and warmth into every line. She took possession of the songs, softened them, and dignified the women inside them. Men may imitate, even try to possess, women’s interior, but Chen’s singing came from a woman’s heart. She made the songs with an inner world men could not have fully imagined.