Teresa Teng's angelic voice defied censorship and continues to reverberate through time.
The News Lens
Date: 2019/08/27
By: By Zuzana Shejbalová
Photo Credit: QQ
She was born on January 29, 1953 and unfortunately died at only 42 on May 8, 1995, suffering an asthma attack while on vacation in Thailand. She remains one of the most successful singers of the Mandarin-speaking world. She was born to a waishengren (外省人) family, one of the many that settled in Taiwan following their defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Teng’s singing won her talent competition awards at a young age and she left school early to become a pop-star.
She had a voice for both classic folk songs and contemporary ballads, sounding sweet yet powerful. Her style also reflected a transnational ethos. She covered traditional folk songs accompanied by Western-style orchestration. Many of Teng’s songs were Mandarin renditions of Japanese hits, the orchestration of which had characteristics of Japanese popular music. She also recorded songs in Taiwanese Hokkien, Cantonese, Japanese, Indonesian, and English; a multilingual approach that greatly contributed to her expansive audience.
Teng was known across Southeast Asia and her fame spread to China in the 1970s and 1980s despite censorship. As the child of a military family, she often performed for the troops and became known as the “soldier’s sweetheart." The immensity of her popularity gave birth to the expression, “By day, Deng Xiao-ping rules, but by night, Teresa Teng rules.” That is, people listened to Deng because they had to, but people listened to Teng because they wanted to. FULL STORY]