So after over 20 years I finally found out what her name was: Priscilla Chan.
Back in 1988 my family moved up to Watsonville CA near Santa Cruz. There I was enrolled into an International High School / Jr High. I was 14 and this was during the height of my Japanimation phase. I will truthful say I was at the height of the only time I was truely an Otaku. Everything I said, did, eat and breath had to be about Japan. I was most likely very annoying!
We had many Asian students from Honk Kong and one had a nickname that everybody called Disney. Well Hong Kong was close to Japan in my mind so I was always bugging the kid.
One nice thing he did was give me a couple of cassettes of Chinese Pop, or Cantopop, to borrow and copy. Lacking the equipment to do it correctly I put one player on another and pressed record. I made a cover from a Animage Z-Gundam cassette cover that were given inside the magazine at the time.
And the music was great! Melodic pop just like you would find in anime at the time. I loved that tape and over the years I would locate it and play the tunes and that would bring me back to the late 1980’s.
Comes 2010, We hired a young Chinese lady named Silu here at work. We later got to talk of Cantopop and I brought up the cassette I recorded all those years made a copy and asked her to find out who the artist was.
Typing away on a Chinese website, In a few minutes she had two names for me. The Tape was actually two artists Priscilla Chan and Anita Mui.
Prescilla Chan is a Cantopop artists from Hong Kong and born in 1965. Her musical heyday was during the 1980’s early 1990’s and today still a legend in Cantopop. What makes here career so interesting as at the height of it, she stopped recording and touring, left the music industry and enrolled into Syracuse University in New York. In the Cantonese pop world that is like Madonna leaving the music industry after Material Girl. It was that big of a change and it was a shocking and bold move on her part to follow her own dreams for herself.
The album is fantastic pop and through Silu’s help I was finally able to get a copy on CD. Thank you Silu, I owe you lunch!
It’s great to finally say I’m a fan of Priscilla Chan! Now if I can find it on vinyl……
©2010 Leonardo Flores