On Friday night at Legacy Taipei, Singaporean singer/songwriter Tanya Chua (蔡健雅) performed a mini concert titled Je T’ai Manque (I miss you) in which she shared her new celebratory philosophy about life.
Chua mostly sang numbers from her latest album If You See Him (若你碰到他) released last August, performing only four songs from her preceding body of work.
Clad in a simple white T-shirt and a pair of black pants, Chua greeted her fans in French. She has spent every February in Paris over the past four years, learning the language.
To echo the theme of the evening, she performed the French song Que Reste-T-il De Nos Amours? (What is left of our love?). Ever a cosmopolitan girl, she delivered this chanson of ambiance with aplomb.
Chua went on to perform her newest composition, You Come to My Head, a song included in the sound track of the gangster blockbuster Monga (艋舺). She delivered the jazzy tune in such intimate, whispery vocals that she sounded as if she were confessing her inner feelings to close friends.
Blessed with an astoundingly emotive voice, Chua is that rare singer who, when she sings, all traces of her technique become invisible. When her voice soars, the aching outcry of love’s turmoil is easily felt.
“I am tired of all those sad love songs of the past. I think I was too dark and prone to dejection before,” Chua said. “I think we all need to feel warm sometimes. I want to become ... more positive.”
She went on to sing Only Love from the recent album. “This is my first song to celebrate the joy of love,” she said.
As a Mando-pop poetess who draws on the travails and treacheries of love, Chua is known for songs full of melancholic metaphors, with titles such as Endless Hole (無底洞) and Amnesia (失憶症). Of late, Chua has learned to rejoice in the sunnier aspects of romance.
The highlight of the evening came when Chua performed her popular classic Reminiscence (紀念), whose lyrics were penned by Yao Chien (姚謙).
“I scolded him [Yao] when we dined together the other night,” Chua said, laughing. “I cried, ‘why did you write such heartbreaking lyrics?’”
“Longing becomes a line, spreading across time, becoming long enough to cut the world into two halves,” Chua sang. “At that moment, you suddenly realize love and longing are ... reminiscences.”
Chua went on to sing three songs from her recent album before revisiting another classic.
“I have sung this song so many times,” Chua said. “If I want to sing this again, I have to rearrange it.” And then she delivered a rock rendition of Beautiful Love with pounding guitar chords.
She ended the evening with How Much (多少), a song she wrote for Hong Kong star Eason Chan (陳奕迅). For the encore, Chua performed her award-winning single Darwin (達爾文).
Though only 90 minutes long, what her concert lacked in time, she more than made up for with her heartfelt and affecting delivery.
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
RSS