From Deserts Chang to Anpu — Two Names, One Question

30-second overview: Chiao An-pu wrote "Baby" at 13, and under the stage name "Deserts Chang" became the defining voice of Taiwan's independent music scene. In 2013 she raised a Republic of China flag at a concert in England and was banned from the Chinese market; in 2015 she voluntarily retired the stage name, disappearing for three years before returning as "Anpu." In 2022's 9522, a forty-year-old woman went back to sing songs she had written at fourteen, winning Song of the Year at the Golden Melody Awards. In 2024, a handwritten letter blessing China's National Day broke Taiwanese fans' hearts. The same person, losing two audiences twice, for completely opposite reasons.

Two Tables of Customers at the Witch House

In the years when Chiao An-pu still went by Deserts Chang, her father Chiao Jen-ho worried every single day.

Chiao Jen-ho had been Secretary-General of the Straits Exchange Foundation, the principal speechwriter for President Lee Teng-hui, and the man who formulated the phrase "One China, respective interpretations" in 1995 — the leading figure in cross-strait negotiations ¹. His eldest son Chiao Yuan-pu became Taiwan's most prominent classical music critic, interviewing fifty-five of the world's top pianists; his youngest daughter Chiao Tz'u-pu went into law. Three children — and only the middle one had dropped out of senior high school and drank and smoked, her education permanently stalled at "partial high school attendance."

Deserts Chang waited tables at Trader Vic's for NT$80 an hour. At night she had a residency at the Witch House. Chiao Jen-ho did not dare go listen, so he sent his younger daughter with two friends. The report that came back chilled him to the bone: there were only two tables of customers in the place, one of them a couple sitting far from the stage. Only his daughter and her two friends sat up front ².

"Can you really eat just from music?" he told his daughter. "How many people who call themselves musicians end up playing violin in a subway underpass?" ²

Deserts Chang shouted back: "Dad! I'm definitely going to make it!"

This girl, who couldn't cover next month's rent, who was too reluctant to spend NT$200 on a cab home, was willing to slam the table in front of Taiwan's top cross-strait negotiator for the sake of music ². Chiao Jen-ho later used a kite to describe the relationship: he let out enough string for the kite to fly, but he would never let the wild wind carry the kite away ².

📝 Curator's Note: The daughter of the cross-strait negotiator took a stage name that means "suspended" or "unresolved." Chiao Jen-ho has never attended a single one of his daughter's concerts. But he proudly tells everyone he meets that, in addition to being SEF Secretary-General and Overseas Community Affairs Council Chairman, he is also "Deserts Chang's father" ².

The Family War at Age Thirteen

On May 30, 1981, Chiao An-pu was born in Taipei. Her grandfather Chiao Tien-k'uei was among China's first generation of lawyers ¹. In this legal-political family, she was what her father called a Lin Tai-yu — "no matter how carefully you speak to her, you still manage to wound her." Her younger sister Tz'u-pu was a Hsüeh Pao-ch'ai: smooth and bright, "drank her milk and went straight to sleep"; An-pu "needed two hours to finish 200 milliliters" ².

At thirteen, she had an argument with her family, slammed the door, and walked out humming a melody ³. That song was called "Baby". "My baby baby, let me give you a little sweetness, so you can sleep peacefully tonight" — it would later become the lullaby parents across Taiwan sang to their children, but it began as a teenage girl singing comfort to herself.

In high school she began writing new poetry, submitting under the pen name "Deserts Chang" (張懸, zhāng xuán): the character xuán meaning suspended, unsettled ⁴. Her reading list ran to Kafka and Mishima, later expanding to Shen Ts'ung-wen, Cheng Ch'ou-yü, Bei Dao, and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land ⁵. She read The Waste Land for twenty years; in a 2022 interview with Unitas literary magazine she said: one must abandon the attempt to decode metaphors — the real metaphor arises from the background and form constituted by Eliot's vast quantity of quotations ⁵. She once said: "Books gave me a push that turned me into a singer" ⁵.

At sixteen, she walked into her parents' bedroom and said she was dropping out. Chiao Jen-ho only said: "Alright, I understand." The tears and brave declarations she had been preparing suddenly deflated. "No one will argue with you anymore. You can no longer feel like you've been wronged," she recalled later ². That was the first time she felt strongly that life came entirely from her own decisions.

Chiao Jen-ho sent her to a British homestay. She could not stand the 8 PM curfew and fled back to Taiwan ². Back home she worked at restaurants and sang at the Witch House. Father and daughter communicated through letters; they both still keep each other's correspondence to this day ².

From the Witch House to the Golden Melody Awards

In 2003, as frontwoman of Mango Runs, she performed at the Hohaiyan Rock Festival in Gongliao and won Best Popularity and Best Independent Music ⁶. Over the next few years she became one of the most frequently appearing singer-songwriters at Taipei live houses, having already written over 100 songs before her nineteenth birthday.

In 2006, her debut album My Life Will… was released on Sony BMG. But the recordings had been completed back in 2001 — after signing, she had encountered a label reorganization, and the masters sat in a vault for five years. It was only after producer Lee Shou-chuan heard her live again at the Witch House that he convinced her to re-sign and release the album ⁷. It was nominated for four awards at the 18th Golden Melody Awards, including Best Mandarin Album and Song of the Year for "Baby" ⁷. It won nothing — but the all-or-nothing guitar of "Wildfire" announced her arrival to the entire indie scene.

City (2009) was a stylistic turning point. She practiced electric guitar relentlessly, formed the band Algae, and pivoted from fresh-faced folk toward rock and garage ⁸. No longer "indie-soft" — but the listeners who stayed were more devoted.

God's Game (2012) was the real watershed. She wrote the words and music for nine of the album's ten tracks and served as co-producer ⁹. The opening track, "Rose-Colored You", was written for "those who dedicate their lives to things truly worth it, who can never be bought off by small advantages": street activists, independent publishers, everyone persisting against the wind ¹⁰. The song later became the unofficial soundtrack of the Sunflower Movement, and earned her Best Lyricist at the 24th Golden Melody Awards ⁹.

"Rose-Colored You" was reportedly censored and removed in China ⁹. The woman who wrote songs for protesters had reached the summit of Taiwanese independent music. Then she decided to kill the name "Deserts Chang."

The Flag in Manchester

On November 2, 2013, in Manchester, England, at a small concert of roughly 500 people ⁶. Most of the audience was Chinese students studying abroad. A few Taiwanese students in the front row produced a Republic of China flag. Deserts Chang took it, held it to her chest, and said in English to the full house:

"It's just a flag. It shows where I come from. Why do you have to make it about politics?" ¹¹

A Chinese student shouted: "No politics today!"

That sentence ended Deserts Chang's performance career in China. The wave of boycotts on Weibo forced the cancellation of the planned Beijing concert ¹². Back in Taiwan, tens of thousands of netizens crowned her a "patriotic singer." She was baffled: "You've read me wrong" ¹³.

A month later, in a Taipei Times interview, she said: "If Taiwan's national identity wants greater international visibility, it will inevitably be challenged. I'm not the first person to face this question. Even if I don't do it, someone else will" ¹¹.

She only picked up a flag. But on this side of the Taiwan Strait, nothing is "just" anything.

Sunflower Movement and the Last Tide Maxims

After the flag incident, Deserts Chang did not retreat. When the Sunflower Movement erupted in March 2014, she posted continuously on Facebook, criticizing the government's forced passage of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement and calling on people to "never give up the right to participate in civic issues" ¹⁴. She gave sustained voice to the anti-nuclear movement, the Central Science Park water-rights dispute, and marriage equality ⁴. "Rose-Colored You" became the soundtrack of the streets, but she always refused to be called a "political singer."

"Tide Maxims" (潮水箴言) was her concert series that began in 2010, growing from a thousand-seat Legacy venue all the way to the ten-thousand-capacity Nangang Exhibition Hall. She served as her own concert producer and artistic director, designing each show as a contemporary art exhibition rather than a commercial event: literary texts as the foundation, film techniques as storytelling, each song with its own visual world ¹⁵.

In January 2015, the final "Tide Maxims" show closed at Kaohsiung Arena ¹⁶. When the last note faded, she announced: the name Deserts Chang ends here.

Her reason for reverting to her real name, she said in a single sentence: "Anpu is the name my parents gave me. I simply want those who clip newspaper articles to see these two characters when they collect them" ¹⁷.

Then she disappeared.

Three Years of Silence, and a Cat

The catalyst for the retreat was a cat. During the promotional period for God's Game, the cat she had raised since childhood was diagnosed with a tumor. Between work obligations and accompanying the animal through its final days, the anxiety became unbearable, and she chose to stop ¹⁸.

Over those three years, she studied, practiced calligraphy, wrote poetry, reinforced her musicianship, learned stage production ¹⁹. She accompanied that cat all the way to the end. On Facebook she wrote that the attention she received had never truly belonged to her.

The blank was important. Deserts Chang had spent twelve years growing into a symbol: indie music, social movements, national identity. The symbol was too heavy. She needed to set it down to discover what lay beneath.

Refining Clouds: A Declaration Built from 3,200 LED Panels

In May 2018, under the name "Anpu," she held the "Refining Clouds" concert at Taipei Arena — 20,000 tickets sold out instantly ²⁰.

The show cost NT$36 million to produce. The main stage was assembled from 3,200+ irregularly shaped LED panels into the form of clouds; the stage alone cost NT$15 million and took six months to design ²⁰. From more than 200 candidate songs, she selected 22 covers: all works by Taiwanese musicians who had influenced her, spanning thirty years of underground and independent music history — Chao Yi-hao, Chen Shan-ni, Huang Hsiao-chen, Lin Chiang. For the 20,000 in attendance, most of these were "new songs" they had never heard before.

Music critic Ma Shih-fang wrote: "A magnificent dream." He described the stage, built like interlocking blocks, as creating an oneiric sensory experience: precise, sweeping, breathtaking — yet never overwrought ²⁰.

She sang only one of her own songs — "Baby." By all accounts, she cried when she finished.

"Refining" (lian) was her definition of the show: to extract the void from existence, to ceaselessly simplify the complex ²⁰. This was not a comeback concert — it was a declaration: I am back, but I am not the person you remember.

9522: A Letter Written to Girls Still Growing Up

On January 18, 2022, Anpu announced her divorce at a concert, saying she had completed the paperwork that very afternoon. She and animation director Su Po-wei had been married for two and a half years; they have a son ²¹. She publicly praised her ex-husband as "the bravest man in the Mandarin-speaking world" — for daring to marry her ²¹. She said she planned to see a psychotherapist after Lunar New Year, openly acknowledging she needed professional support ²¹.

Nine months later, the album 9522 was released. Sixteen tracks, almost all written between her fourteenth and seventeenth years. The cipher-like album title hints at 1995 to 2022 — a 27-year span ²². A forty-year-old woman going back to sing songs written in her girlhood, framed as "a letter of blessing written to girls and women still growing up" ²².

"The Best Time" was the first single; its main melody was written when she was fourteen. She once submitted it as a car commercial jingle, and it was rejected. Years later, actress Chang Chun-ning heard the demo, was moved by the melody, and encouraged her to finish it. Wu Ch'ing-feng (Waa Wei) was the first to hear the completed version and gave it this assessment: "This moment makes an entire life worth it." The two of them listened to each other's albums and talked until dawn ²³.

In 2023, "The Best Time" won Song of the Year at the 34th Golden Melody Awards ²⁴. The jury's citation: "A work that transcends era and time — a good song to be heard forever." On the day of the ceremony, her name was not Deserts Chang. It was Anpu.

💡 Did you know: When Chiao Yuan-pu interviews world-class pianists, he brings along his sister's CDs as a gift. His introduction: "Our family's musician." ²⁵

The Handwritten Letter of October 1

At 10:01 PM on October 1, 2024, Anpu's management uploaded a photograph of a handwritten letter to Weibo: "Wishing the New China blessings on its 75th anniversary — may the people live in harmony, and peace reign across ten thousand li." Signed: Anpu's blessing. The timing precisely marked China's National Day ²⁶.

The person who had been banned from China eleven years ago for raising a Republic of China flag was now wishing the People's Republic a happy birthday.

Taiwanese fans' reaction was not anger — it was heartbreak. The person who sang "Rose-Colored You," who spoke out during the Sunflower Movement, who said "It's just a flag" in Manchester — how could she have written this? Her close friend Ho Hsin-sui tried to soften the blow and was excoriated for it ²⁷. One writer directly analyzed her recent trajectory, calling it "long-premeditated loyalty-signaling" ²⁸. Political scientist Huang Chao-nien identified the move as part of China's "three middles and one youth" (三中一青) united-front strategy: forcing Taiwanese artists to declare political positions in order to influence young people's identity ²⁹.

Eleven days later, on October 12, the Takao Festival. Before Anpu took the stage, the crowd was already full of Taiwan independence whale flags and Jade Mountain flags. A fan called out directly: "Chiao An-pu — why?"

She did not answer the question directly. She said ³⁰:

"In my performances, you will always be free and safe. The world is a big place. I wouldn't dare say every place is the same — but at least in the place where I perform, you can be yourself."

Then she bowed deeply to those holding flags.

The next day, October 13, at the same Takao Festival. Trash (滅火器) frontman Yang Ta-cheng paused in the middle of his set and spent nearly seven minutes addressing the matter ³⁰³².

He neither defended Anpu nor joined in the condemnation. He spoke to the structure: "This is the awkwardness of an era, and the awkwardness of the market. We are fortunate — we don't have to think about the Chinese market. But they face a different problem: enormous temptation, perhaps a need to support more people." His "they" referred simultaneously to Anpu, Mayday, and Wu Kang-jen — three acts targeted by Taiwanese public opinion in the same week over their Weibo National Day posts ³².

Then he said the words that silenced the crowd: "If our witch-hunting looks exactly like that of the little pinks on the other side — that is the most terrifying thing of all. So I beg everyone: put your energy into Taiwan's future. Don't divide each other" ³².

He offered an alternative: instead of "going after" the idols who disappointed you, discover who is making good films, who is putting on good concerts and music festivals — spend your time supporting them ³².

The crowd cheered. Those seven minutes were uploaded to social media by audience members and spread far beyond the Takao Festival itself ³².

You Can Be Yourself

Eleven years ago in Manchester, she said: "It's just a flag." Eleven years later at the Takao Festival, she said: "You can be yourself." Both sentences point to the same thing: a refusal to define your freedom for you, and a refusal to let you define hers.

At forty-three, Anpu says she is living in "the most honest phase of my life" — she has shed the unanswerable questions of youth and begun to cherish the things that never needed an answer ³¹. She says she is not an authority, only "someone who accompanies people through a change of mind" ³¹. She looks forward to growing old: "Society demands that women always look young — that exhausts me. The freedom that comes after you are released from hormones and other people's gaze is what genuinely happy aging looks like" ³¹.

You can say she has changed. You can also say she has been doing the same thing all along: living in a gray zone that no single flag is large enough to contain, that no single name can hold.

In a 2019 interview, Chiao Jen-ho said that the most precious gift Deserts Chang had given him was showing him that the world is plural — and that life is a multiple-choice question, not a single-choice question ².

Perhaps the daughter learned the same thing from her father. Only the answer she chose is not the one anyone on either side wanted to hear.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Independent Music (zh only 台灣獨立音樂) — The indie music scene Deserts Chang belongs to
• History of Taiwanese Rock Music (zh only 台灣搖滾樂發展史) — From the era of banned songs to the Hohaiyan Rock Festival
• Sunflower Movement (zh only 太陽花學運) — The thirty seconds in 2014 that changed Taiwan
• Taiwan Music Festival Culture (zh only 台灣音樂祭文化) — From Gongliao to the Takao Festival
• Yang Chen-lin (zh only 楊丞琳) — Another trajectory for a Mandarin female singer across 25 years, from being produced to self-producing: a same-generation contrast to An-pu's journey from teenage singer to complete author

References