Some Songbirds!

I did not watch the 1979 Taiwanese hit movie, Your Smiling Face when it was shown in the local theatre, not too when it was shown in TV some years later but I remember it shot Sibelle Hu Hui Chung (inset), the Taiwanese starlet to stardom. The theme song Gan Lan Shu or The Olive Tree was an immense hit and had since become a Mandarin classic. Strangely though, I did not come to know the identity of the singer of this marvellous song until the mid- eighties when in a friend's house in Dungun, Trengganu, I came across Chyi Yu's album and it was in English! And Chyi Yu, by no means was the only Chinese singer doing cover versions of English songs during that period; there was also the beautiful Taiwanese singer, Tracy Huang, who, if I am mistaken, turned her back on the entertainment industry during her peak. She decided to move over to Singapore when she got hitched to a Singaporean man, much to the chagrin of the composer-singer who discovered her, Liu Chia Chang, or so I heard. And then, of course, there was the Hong Kong songbird, Frances Yip. I am sure she was already belting out English songs long before her mega-hit, Shanghai Bund or Shanghai Beach which was the theme song for the TVB classic, Shanghai Bund starring Chow Yuen Fatt, Lui Leung Wai and Angie Chiu.

Chyi Yu's Gan Lan Su...