By Charissa Zeigler
I’ve been scrolling for an hour through half-American half-Chinese music blogs searching for clues about A-Mei, the artist behind the album Mei-Rok. I’ve been playing her eight tracks on repeat for the last few months and it’s now one of my all-time favorite albums. I first discovered her music on a single for the album a Rough Guide to the Music of Yunnan.
As someone from Yunnan, but who has not gone back since I was a child, I’ve wanted to explore China’s music outside of mainstream love ballads. Mei-rok’s album is one of the first albums I have that sparked pride in the region of China I am from.
A-Mei’s got rock, passion and a folk twang that heralds from the Wa people, an ethnic group living in Yunnan, China. The language she sings in sounds close to Vietnamese, but when I shared her song 通撒美 “tong sa mei” which graced cafes in the underground music scene in China in the 2010s with my Chinese-speaking friend, he identified the language as Wa.
Wa is the language spoken by the Wa people which includes three major dialects and is part of an Austro-Asiatic language group unlike Mandarin which belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language group.
My search for more information about her turns up a black and white photo of her kneeling to play the ‘er-hu,’ meaning ‘two strings,’ a traditional Chinese folk instrument.
My search for the artist also became the reason I wrote this blog. ‘A-Mei’ whose birth name is Li Jao died in 2020 from cancer at age 32.
Her producer, American Sam Debell, whose record label “Sea of Wood” produces music from artists in Yunnan wrote in her obituary: “her premature passing is a terrible blow to the community she helped to shape and influence.”
Link to reference article:
https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/4513/obituary-a-mei-a-yunnan-music-icon