At long last, amateur singer fulfills dream of moment in spotlight
Print Edition
HUA Jin is not a professional singer, but that hasn’t waylaid her dreams of singing on a grand stage.
Last month, with the help of several friends, she held a live show at the Mercedes-Benz Arena, one of the largest performing venues in Shanghai.
She said it would be the last live show she would ever perform, but who knows? The music dream is hard to extinguish.
Hua lives in Qibao Town and is a stay-at-home mum with two children. Her fondness for singing started when she was in elementary school. Her decision to follow “stable life” choices in studies and marriage veered her from music but not from her passion for singing.
“When I was in elementary school, I was the coordinator in our class responsible for organizing shows and performances,” she recalled. “I started to take part in singing contests back then.”
Hua said she thought she had a pretty good voice, but no one else seemed to think so.
When she was in Grade 3 in junior high school, she went to a music teacher and told her that she wanted to study vocals.
The teacher tested her voice and told her that she couldn’t “produce sound correctly.” She asked her to go home and “think it over.” Hua was thrown for a loop by the dour assessment.
Her big “break” came when she was in her first year in senior high school. An art and music training institute in Shanghai was recruiting pupils and Hua signed up for singing lessons. Against expectations, she managed to get enrolled.
“Without my mother’s support, I could never have gotten into that training school,” she said. “It was very expensive and my family wasn’t rich. But if I hadn’t taken the course, I would never have learned the skills and techniques of singing.”
But her mother’s support proved elusive when it came time for college. Hua wanted to attend the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, but her mother balked. She considered singing an unworthy profession and worried that Hua might not be able to support herself.
Hua tried to dissuade her mother but couldn’t. So she went on to major in accounting.
Her dream of becoming a professional singer may have been dashed, but Hua didn’t give up music.
While in college and even after graduation, Hua found part-time jobs singing in bars. There she met other amateur singers and they all talked their dream of one day performing on stage.
“Then one day, the group got an idea,” Hua said. “We were chatting, and someone said, ‘Why don’t we mount a small live show together?’ We all thought it was a splendid idea.”
Money, of course, was a big consideration. The group needed to finance the show itself and most of them earned no more than 5,000 yuan (US$752) a month.
They scraped together what they could and, in 2006, staged a live show in the Ark Bar in Xintiandi. There was no live band, no dancers. Just karaoke-style background music. But beyond anyone’s expectation, more than 300 people came to watch the show.
As Hua’s musical circle widened, she met more bands and musicians, who inspired her to go beyond just Hong Kong and Taiwan pop tunes.
“A keyboard player I knew was obsessed with jazz and he suggested I try singing it,” she said.
A lot of jazz was written in English, not Hua’s strong point. So she listened to countless albums by jazz greats like Norah Jones and Ella Fitzgerald, and she tried to imitate their style.
“I had to adjust my way of singing and practice a lot,” she said. “In the end, I found that my voice handled English songs better.”
In 2008, Hua staged her second live show on the campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. One of the songs in the show was “The Last Time,” which was meant as swan song to her performing career.
“Every live show is costly to mount, and I just couldn’t afford it, especially after I became a mother,” she said.
But this year, she decided to give it one last shot. “The Mercedes Benz Arena is one of the best stages of all,” said Hua. “I don’t think anyone would let the chance of holding a live there slip by.”
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