Jiang Meiqi 江美琪

I feel I ought to say something about this matter; I owe her this much at least, for the pleasure she has given me through her soul-rending music -- I am talking about Jiang Meiqi, one of my favourite singers in Chinese Pop. She has a most beautiful voice, but for some reason, she's never quite hit big time, even if people generally have praise for her work.

Perhaps it's because she's not impossibly pretty -- at least in the conventional sense, which seems to be the necessary ingredient for pop starlets that the record industry wheels out like pretty confections on a conveyor belt.

But Jiang Meiqi is pretty. A bit on the tanned side, and she looks ordinary even; there's a certain willfulness in the shape of her jutting jaw and lips, and her nose is a little too large. But what an ensemble they form with her eyes, which are large, full of emotion, vulnerability and yet an utter absence of self-consciousness. A picture of perfection in imperfection, I would say. Of course, I'm biased. And from the looks of album sales and her non-existent career, this perception is largely my own.

Such a pity for me, really, cos I like her music lots -- such a melodic voice, with a clarity comparable to Kit Chan's (another singer I like) but warmer, rounder, impregnated with a greater sense of doubt, haplessness and longing. When I listen to her songs, my heart aches. And what more can one rightly ask of music? So I still kick myself to this day, for missing an interview with her when she was doing some school concert tour in Singapore a few years ago to promote her album. I was supposed to interview Jiang Meiqi for FHM -- I was a staff writer then. But I couldn't go because two weeks (I think) before the interview, I crashed a car, uprooting a lamp post, and when the day of the interview came, I was still nursing a terrific black eye, and one side of my lips was numb. No kissing required at interviews of course, but a black eye is no fitting conversation piece.

Oh well, zip back to the present, to 2008, on my birthday. And feeling a little rough for wear -- 38 years, firmly in mid-life crisis zone, no? -- I was looking for a nice CD to play, and chanced upon one of Jiang Meiqi's later albums. Not one of my favourites, which i bought a few years ago and put aside after playing once or twice. Much as I love Jiang's music, I have not played them for quite a while, partly because EMI is shit and their CDs tend to skip. But before long, with the CD spinning in the shitty Samsung deck, I was feeling that familiar ache again (I shall write about heartaches in a later post). The low and behold, uncannily enough, Track 5 came on, "Happy Birthday"!

Oh my. "Cheek to cheek, I just want to be close to you, I want to sing you a song... I whisper into your ears, 'May all your dreams come true,' because it's your birthday." Oh my. Thanks. From Singapore, and you won't know who I am, but Jiang Meiqi, I hope all your dreams come true, too. Live well.