Hwelang by Hwelang

I spent the last year (2020-21) learning and singing these two songs obsessively with my pandemic pal, Sherwood Chen. Sherwood and I have never met except through social media, emails, Zoom and text messages. We are both dancers and dance teachers. Neither of us are trained singers, but singing together across distances has been the closest we've come to approximating dancing together. A way of getting to know one another's internal landscapes through listening and singing to one another in languages that have a deep significance for both of us: Hokkien/Taiwanese and Bahasa Indonesia/Malaysia. These two songs cover the expanse of land and waters between Taiwan and South-East Asia: land and waters that have formed us in different ways.

At the end of 2020, Sherwood said something like this to me, "Why don't we learn a Hokkien/Taiwanese song together as a gift to each other? We could sing it to our families at the lunar new year. They will be so unimpressed but we will be very proud of ourselves"
I went in search of a Hokkien song. My friend, Howard Dai sent me to Bang Chun Hong, saying that almost every Taiwanese person has grown up singing this as a child. I thought well, heck, how hard can it be then. Well, it was very hard for me. This song hits all the weird places in my (rather limited) vocal range. And despite Hokkien being my mother tongue, I had never actually sung a Hokkien song in my life, which brought up a lot of FEELINGS.
So it has taken us more than a year, but here we are.

We had been singing (me struggling) with Bang Chun Hong for a few months when Sherwood suggested that maybe there was another language that made me feel at home. I went in search of a Malay song. I decided on the Indonesian song, Bengawan Solo because to me, it is emblematic of the Nusantara Melayu and just about everybody would know it in some way. As a child in Malaysia, I grew up hearing it in some form or another constantly. Sherwood's parents, who are Taiwanese, also know it but translated into Mandarin. Bengawan Solo is a love song to the River Solo, which begins in Solo. I chose this also because Sherwood had spent some time in Solo studying Javanese court dance.

Mostly though, singing with amateurish zeal has been my way of staying mentally well during this extraordinary time of isolation, lockdowns and prolonged uncertainty. I hope this album, which was made across distances, from our living rooms, with the support of Junhong McIntosh-Lee who wrote and played the backup tracks as well as engineered the recordings; and Mino Devost, singing teacher extraordinaire, in turn gives you permission to sing, dance and do whatever it is that gives you pleasure with amateurish zeal as well.

Imperfectly,

Lee Su-Feh

I make performances. I like sound. I sing with amateurish zeal.
leesufeh.com