Journal • Oct 1, 2026 ｜ Past Issues 前期

The first clue that Woman’s Heart (1988) may have imitated Miracle of Love (1987) came from the striking conceptual similarity between 请原谅我 (Please Forgive Me) on Woman’s Heart and If You Ever Had a Broken Heart on Miracle of Love.

While many ballads are about lost love, If You Ever Had a Broken Heart has a highly specific sequence of ideas: a woman meets an otherwise acceptable new man but refuses him because an earlier relationship is still psychologically present. She recognizes that beginning a new relationship before she has recovered would be unfair to the new man. 请原谅我 (Please Forgive Me) reproduces this exact structure.

Unlike other hits on Miracle of Love, If You Ever Had a Broken Heart was not a major international standard. Jayne Collins recorded it in 1985 as the B-side of a single with limited circulation2. Its obscurity makes it unlikely that the resemblance reflects common pop-song conventions rather than specific knowledge of the song.

The conceptual similarity between If You Ever Had a Broken Heart and 请原谅我 (Please Forgive Me), the latter with lyrics by Jonathan Lee, led to the following hypothesis: 

Woman’s Heart, particularly songs written by Jonathan Lee, drew some of its narrative concepts from Miracle of Love.

The album’s production history makes this hypothesis plausible3. First, according to interviews with Sarah Chen, Woman’s Heart, produced by Jonathan Lee, and Miracle of Love, produced by Reggie Verghese, both entered production in February 1987, meaning that the two albums were in production concurrently.

Second, whereas Miracle of Love was completed and released in June 19874,5, Chen recalled a protracted production of Woman’s Heart3. One reason for its delay was that Lee could not settle on its content. Chen said that Lee would write 50 song titles one day, only to scrap them the next day. The album moved through changing concepts before its February 1988 completion. It ultimately contained only eight Chinese songs plus one English version of a Chinese track6.  The slow production and the low song count suggest that the album had hit a creativity bottleneck. Drawing ideas from Miracle of Love would not be a terrible solution.

But could the similarity simply reflect the genre – ballads – that Chen sang? Maybe all her Chinese albums resemble some of her English songs, simply because they share similar themes. A convincing test requires a data-driven approach that quantifies the conceptual similarity between Chen's Chinese albums and same-period English albums. We provide such an analysis.

We used a large language model (LLM)7 to score conceptual similarity between Chinese-English song pairs. The scoring system emphasized narrative structure rather than shared words; generic ballad elements such as love, loneliness, and longing received little weight on their own. Each pair received 0-2 points on five dimensions: (1) the relationship between the narrator and other characters, (2) narrative situation, (3) narrative progression, (4) distinctive details, and (5) whether the narrator reached a similar resolution. The total score ranged from 0 to 10. Scores of 0-3 represented weak resemblance, 4-5 noticeable similarity, 6-7 substantial conceptual correspondence, and 8-10 unusually close correspondence.

For the primary analysis, 50 Chinese songs were each compared with all 12 tracks on Miracle of Love, generating a complete 600-pair matrix. For every Chinese song, we recorded its highest score against the 12 English tracks. The six Lee-written songs on Woman’s Heart formed the target group. Negative controls included the two Chinese songs on Woman’s Heart written by others, 32 songs from Chen’s 1983-1984 EMI albums (Song of the Ocean, Endless Love, and Wandering the World), and nine non-Lee songs from the 1988 Tomorrow, Will You Still Love Me. 孤单 (Loneliness), written by Lee, was kept separate. 

Table 1 shows the strongest Miracle of Love counterpart for each of Lee’s six Woman’s Heart lyrics. The result was not a forced one-to-one reconstruction. 我只为你美丽 (Beautiful Just for You) had no substantial counterpart. Even so, four of the six songs scored at least 6. 

The six Lee-written songs had a mean maximum similarity score of 5.67 (Figure 1), which was significantly higher than the mean of 2.40 among the 43 negative controls (one-sided Mann-Whitney test, p = .0038; Cohen’s d = 1.72). At a threshold of 6, 4/6 Lee songs reached substantial similarity versus 2/43 controls, a statistically significant difference (Fisher’s exact test, p = .00099). 

The negative controls were not similarity-free. For example, 玫瑰花园 (Rose Garden) showed a high similarity score to Somewhere Out There. What distinguished the Lee set was the density of high-scoring matches. Across all 6,096,454 possible combinations of six songs from the 43 controls, none reached the summed similarity score of Lee’s six-song set. Similar results were obtained when we excluded the song that drove the hypothesis (请原谅我) from the analysis. These findings were replicated by a second LLM (see Appendix).

Thus, a data-driven approach supports the idea that Woman’s Heart, particularly the songs written by Jonathan Lee, bears strong conceptual similarity to Miracle of Love. 

We examined whether Lee’s six songs merely resembled English-language ballads in general. They did not. Their similarity to Miracle of Love was much higher than their similarity to Chen’s other English albums, the 1983 The Right to Sing and the 1988 Hold Me Now. This source specificity argues against the possibility that Woman’s Heart merely resembles the kinds of romantic ballads Chen happened to sing in English.

English reference |Mean score for Lee’s 6 songs

Miracle of Love 5.67

Hold Me Now 2.83

The Right to Sing 2.50

The early EMI albums provided an important negative control. When the 32 Chinese songs from 1983-84 were compared with their historically appropriate English reference, the 1983 The Right to Sing, their mean similarity was just 1.69. 

We extended the same scoring framework to Chen’s second collaboration with Lee, the 1989 Talk to You, Listen to You 8, separating the four Lee-written songs (梦醒时分, 你走你的路, 傲慢与偏见, 依然想你) from the five songs written by others. This album could plausibly have drawn on both Miracle of Love (1987) and Hold Me Now (1988).

The similarity score showed that Lee's four songs remained similar to Miracle of Love. However, the 1989 album no longer showed the same author- or source-specificity: non-Lee songs also scored relatively high.  

The Right to Sing Miracle of Love Hold Me Now

Lee-written songs (n=4) 3.25 5.25 4.25

Non-Lee songs (n=5) 3.20 4.00 4.20

At the album level, the 1989 album averaged 4.56 against Miracle of Love and 4.22 against Hold Me Now. In contrast, the 32 songs from Chen's 1983-84 EMI albums averaged 1.69 against their same-period English reference, The Right to Sing; the difference was significant (one-sided Mann-Whitney p = .00034 for Miracle of Love and p = .00065 for Hold Me Now).  This suggests that by 1989, Chen's Mandopop songs had become more broadly aligned with English pop.

Our analysis supports the idea that Woman’s Heart, particularly the Lee-written songs, drew conceptual inspiration from its same-period English reference, Miracle of Love. Although the initial hypothesis came from noticing the striking similarity between 请原谅我 (Please Forgive Me) and If You Ever Had a Broken Heart, the subsequent analysis was data-driven. Using an LLM rather than human scorers also reduces scorer inconsistency and some potential biases, although independent bilingual human replication or corroboration from people involved would strengthen the analysis.

Despite the compelling data, we have not found corroborating evidence from interviews or period reports. The heavy promotion of Woman’s Heart generated dozens of magazine and news reports, none of which noted the similarity between Woman’s Heart and Miracle of Love. A language barrier likely obscured the audience’s perception of that similarity5. In later years, discovery was hindered by the 1990 EMI/Rock Records split, which ended label support for both albums9. Woman’s Heart was never reissued. Miracle of Love was reissued in the early 2000's with the wrong tempo and pitch, making the songs unpleasant to listen to10. These factors likely kept later listeners from noticing the similarity.

From a creativity perspective, there is nothing wrong with generating ideas from English songs, especially if credit is given to the source material. But neither the label nor the production team explicitly linked Woman’s Heart to Miracle of Love. To the contrary, Woman’s Heart was promoted as “Jonathan Lee's new experiment.”11 In the 2003 documentary A Letter to Sarah, Lee described Woman’s Heart as the strong medicine he used to “wash away Sarah’s old image.”12 That framework would collapse if Woman’s Heart did draw on Chen’s earlier work.

But are the Chinese songs on Woman’s Heart conceptually more advanced than their English counterparts? In the October 15, 2026 issue, we will provide a close reading of the songs with the highest similarity scores on the two albums.