Waa Wei: Twenty Years of Wanting to Be Heard, from Naturally Curly's "Wawa" to Two-Time Golden Melody Queen

30-second overview: Waa Wei (Wei Ru-xuan) is a Taiwanese singer who won Best Mandarin Female Singer at the Golden Melody Awards in both 2020 and 2025. From vocalist "Wawa" on Naturally Curly's 2003 debut C'est La Vie, to going solo as "Waa Wei" in 2007, to the four-language elegy "That Place" mourning Ellen Loo in 2019, to the 2024 album Pearl Punishment making the pearl's formation through pain its core — twenty years on a path rarely taken in Mandopop: making her voice more famous than her face, letting her work outlive her persona. At the 36th Golden Melody Awards ceremony in June 2025, she compressed those twenty years into a single sentence: "Some courage and some tenderness grow out of pain."

On June 28, 2025, at the 36th Golden Melody Awards ceremony, Waa Wei took the stage and claimed Best Mandarin Female Singer for the second time — with Pearl Punishment — exactly five years after her first.¹

She opened with a joke: "One, and now two!" Then she slowed down for what came next:

"To others I may look like someone who knows everything — but in fact I have many uncertainties and doubts myself. Like not knowing whether I can keep singing, whether I can keep standing on this stage, even doubting whether I am a good mother."

"The character 'xing' — punishment — is what I want to share: some courage and some tenderness grow out of pain."

"The hardest thing is not to give up."¹

These words were subsequently quoted by multiple media outlets. They were not just acceptance-speech craft — they compressed into a single sentence the arc from her 2006 vocal cord injury, to postpartum anxiety in 2018, to her first Golden Melody in 2020, and then the five years it took to win the second.

📝 Curator's note: An acceptance speech is remembered not because it is beautifully written, but because twenty years of work hold it up.

Four Languages at Grandma's House

Wei Ru-xuan was born on October 10, 1982, in Taitung. After her parents divorced, she and her older sister were raised by their Hakka grandmother in Fuli Township, Hualien County.² Her grandmother had been educated during the Japanese colonial period, and the household moved between four languages: Hakka, Taiwanese (Hokkien), Mandarin, and Japanese.

Later, as a singer, her sensitivity to multi-language rhythm and her instinct for using Taiwanese as a "closing" cadence — singing a single song in four languages to mourn someone in 2019's "That Place" — was a linguistic physiological instinct grown in Grandma's house in Fuli, not a technical choice.²

She later attended Huagang Arts School, Department of Drama.² Her training was in performance, not the idol pipeline. This explains why she could move between songs, radio DJ work, theatre, and film dubbing: drama is her foundation.

The Accidental Recording Session

In 2003, Wei Ru-xuan was recording backing vocals for Yang Nai-wen at Lin Wei-che's recording studio, where she often ran into a recording engineer called Kiko (real name Tsai Kun-chi). Introduced by Yang Nai-wen, the two began collaborating and formed a band. They named it "Naturally Curly" after discovering that both of them had naturally wavy hair.³

That same year, her collaboration with Chen Chien-chi also began — the musical adaptation of Jimmy Liao's picture book Underground premiered at the National Theater, their first major joint project.⁴ These two relationships in 2003 — the band with Kiko, the theatre world with Chen Chien-chi — would underpin Waa Wei's entire career.

On April 29, 2004, Naturally Curly's debut album C'est La Vie was released, selling surprisingly well in the Mandarin independent music market.³ Wei Ru-xuan was the vocalist — a slightly languid, slightly willful female voice, paired with Kiko's slow-tempo arrangements. It was very much the sound of Taipei street-corner cafes at the time.

Then, within two years, that voice broke.

The Year of the Mosquito's Buzz

In 2006, Wei Ru-xuan suffered a throat injury — so severe that her voice dropped to "the volume of a mosquito's buzz," cracking whenever she pushed, turning hoarse immediately.⁵ A vocal cord injury at that level is near-shutdown status for a professional singer. She left Naturally Curly, left Taiwan, and spent time recuperating in Hong Kong. During the recovery, the studio owner Christian and staff prayed for her, and she described her voice as recovering "miraculously."⁵

During that recuperation year, she made a living recording commercial jingles. She never formally announced a solo career or issued a farewell statement — she simply quietly disappeared.

This was the first large-scale practice of what would later become her characteristic desire "not to be recognized."

A 24-year-old female singer vanishing for over a year after her band's success was an extremely unusual choice in the Mandopop world. Most female singers at that stage would maintain continuous exposure, release singles, and sign on to idol drama theme songs. Waa Wei let her vocal cords grow back on their own, then returned with a new name: Waa Wei. Her Chinese name was unchanged; the English "Waa" came from her own nickname.²

The Baby Voice as Method

In November 2007, Sweet Life was released — produced by Japanese musician Toshiya (lead vocalist of Mondialito), with cross-border collaboration with musicians from Spain and Uruguay. On an extremely limited budget it sold over 20,000 copies.⁶

This album pushed Waa Wei into a position others found hard to categorize: impossible to define with "Taiwanese-language singer," "idol singer," "ballad singer," or "independent band vocalist." Her voice sat between a child's voice and a breathy whisper, her singing style close to self-murmuring, and critics commonly labeled it "baby voice."⁷

That term in 2007 was a semi-derogatory label — implying "not mature enough," "not forceful enough," "not womanly enough." But what Waa Wei spent the next ten years doing was turning this labeled characteristic into the one weapon that could not be imitated.

Long-term collaborating producer Chen Chien-chi was complicit in this strategy. He publicly asked:

"We can tolerate Western singers with strange vocal quirks — why can't we accept them from Mandarin singers?"⁷

Rather than correcting her voice, he redesigned the instrumental arrangements around the weaknesses in her voice — breathy whispers paired with sparse piano, child-voice paired with walls of electronic sound, self-murmuring paired with fingerstyle acoustic guitar. The result was that each of her albums sounded more and more like a musical form only she could sing.

She experimented with language itself. The chorus of "Good Night Good Night" (2011) suddenly inserted the French "bisou bisou" (kiss kiss), which she explained this way:

"Some things, said in another language, don't feel so embarrassing — singing 'bisou bisou' in French feels natural; saying 'kiss kiss' in Chinese would feel awkward."⁸

From "I'm Not a Mathematician" (written by Chen Shan-ni) on The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2010), to "In an Uncertain World" (written by Cheer Chen, winning Best Music Video at Golden Melody 26) on Love, Dammit! (2014), to "You Oh You" on Desperate Flowerhead (2016) (later performed live with Jay Chou at his JJ20 Xiamen concert)⁹ — over ten years she didn't transform or "break through," she just kept sharpening the same methodology.

She knew where the edges of her voice were, and she made the edges themselves into her work.

📝 Curator's note: In the history of Mandopop, very few female singers have dared to turn a "weakness" into a "signature." Jolin Tsai leveled up through technique; Cheer Chen maintained herself through aesthetic; Waa Wei took the third road.

Twenty Years with Chen Chien-chi

The 2003 Underground was the beginning. Twenty years later, Pearl Punishment was still produced by Chen Chien-chi.

In the twenty years between, he produced nearly every album Wei Ru-xuan made. Their collaboration crossed theatre, studio albums, radio dubbing, and international collaborations — from early-career independent musician to two-time Golden Melody Best Mandarin Female Singer, from single to married to having a child to divorced, he was always sitting on the other side of the recording studio.

A producer-artist relationship of this length is extremely rare in Mandopop. Most singers change producers for each album, or producers work project-by-project out of a studio. The twenty years between Waa Wei and Chen Chien-chi have one rare quality: his production logic was to redesign arrangements around the flaws in her voice, not to make her conform to the market's ready-made musical forms.

"Ophelia" (2019) is one of the pinnacles of their collaboration — music by Chen Chien-chi and Luo En-ni, lyrics by Li Ge-di, spoken-word by poet Hsia Yu.¹⁰ "Bad Root" on Pearl Punishment was "lyrics by Ge Da-wei, music co-composed by Chen Chien-chi and Waa Wei" — Chen Chien-chi later said: "The last note I played and the first note she sang matched in pitch, creating a song with an unusually wide range."¹¹

A twenty-year producer relationship is not the vague thing described as "working together long enough to have great chemistry." It is a specific creative mechanism: there is someone who has been working on your voice since you were 21 years old, still working on it when you are 43, and every year they understand more precisely how your voice's flaws can become the entry point of the work.

Ophelia's Confession

On Mother's Day 2018, Waa Wei publicly announced her pregnancy.¹² Doctors had originally told her pregnancy would be difficult, but the first attempt succeeded. Her son Louis was born on November 1, 2018.¹³

The sixth studio album, originally planned for 2018 release, was therefore postponed to 2019 under the title Hidden Doesn't Equal Forgotten. During the recording period, she kept a schedule rare for musicians:

"Wake up at 6:30 a.m. to take care of the baby, can only work during the baby's nap, and have to finish before giving him a bath in the evening."¹⁴

Only those two or three hours during afternoon naptime were available for the recording studio. Every evening it ended with the baby's bath. The concrete window of creative politics was hidden inside a six-month-old infant's daily schedule.

The last song completed on this album, "That Place," was an elegy for her close friend Ellen Loo — who died falling from a building on August 5, 2018 — her late father, and her beloved cat. She later described the recording session as one where "the recording engineer and I both sensed an unusual presence."¹⁵ Speaking of Ellen Loo in a HK01 interview, she said:

"Those who don't cry — their grief drags on longer. I didn't know grief could drag on that long."¹⁵

The song uses Taiwanese (Hokkien), Mandarin, English, and Cantonese — four languages, because no single language could carry this mourning.

On the same album, "Ophelia" — with lyrics by Li Ge-di, music by Chen Chien-chi and Luo En-ni, and spoken-word by poet Hsia Yu (a short poem: "I don't know that I have already given away my morning").¹⁰

Ophelia is the female character in Shakespeare's Hamlet who drowns in a river after her father is murdered and her lover goes mad. "To be or not to be" in the play is Hamlet's soliloquy; this song rewrites it as Ophelia's own confession — refusing passive victimhood, refusing suppression.

The music video was directed by Huang Jie-yu, filmed on Yangmingshan, and starred Lin Yu-hsi and Lian Yu-han in a storyline of female-female romance.¹⁰ Li Ge-di was nominated for Best Lyricist at the 31st Golden Melody Awards for this song.

This was the mature work of Waa Wei's decade-long "baby voice as strategy": the timbre of a child's voice paired with an adult woman's words, the singing style of a whisper paired with a literary text. One song rehabilitated the child's voice from "childish" to "resistance."

The Night She Imitated Chen Shih-chung

October 2020, the 31st Golden Melody Awards ceremony. Waa Wei was simultaneously host, nominee, and performer. That year she won Best Mandarin Female Singer with Hidden Doesn't Equal Forgotten — her first Golden Melody since going solo in 2007.¹⁶

What the audience remembered most was the opening sketch she hosted — she imitated Taiwan's CDC Commander Chen Shih-chung's pandemic PSA, reworked her old song "My Dad's Pen" with COVID lyrics, and directly called out netizens on PTT.¹⁷ Six costume changes throughout the night; media afterward called her "a comedian wasted on the music world."¹⁸

A Golden Melody award-winner hosting the ceremony is already rare; the host winning their own award is an extraordinary occurrence in Mandopop history; and this three-in-one of "host performing an imitation of the pandemic commander + winning an award + maintaining dramatic presence throughout" was unprecedented. When she accepted the award, she choked up thanking her son, family, and longtime supporters.¹⁶

Parenting × Divorce × 2021's _Have a Nice Day_

In 2018 she married theatre actor Long Chen-han.¹³ Four years later in 2022, they divorced. Louis is primarily raised by Waa Wei.

This marriage took up almost no space in the public narrative — she issued no divorce statement, gave no divorce-themed interviews, wrote none of it into lyrics. Her way of handling relationships was the same as handling a vocal cord injury, being misidentified as an "ordinary citizen" in a street interview: what happened, happened; no need to make it a commercial narrative, but also no avoidance.

In June 2021, she released Have a Nice Day — produced by Chen Chien-chi, Han Li-kang, and Huang Shao-yung. This album placed Waa Wei in a position of cross-border collaboration: Korean independent musician Sunwoo Junga co-wrote "The Flower Seller," Shadow Project of Kaohsiung collaborated on "My Dish," and Chinese musician Qiu De guest-appeared.¹⁹ Her grandmother's voice and 2-year-old Louis's voice both appear on the album — Waa Wei described it as "a way of placing memory keys."¹⁹

This album was created during the late phase of her marriage, when her child was 2-3 years old. If Hidden Doesn't Equal Forgotten was written by a new mother in the gaps of naptime, Have a Nice Day was written by a mother facing a changing relationship but still working — the concrete window of creative politics expanded another layer.

From _Rose Punishment_ to _Pearl Punishment_

On December 24, 2024, her eighth solo album Pearl Punishment was released.¹¹

The core metaphor of this album is the pearl forming through continuous pain and layering — beauty comes from suffering. The choice of the character "xing" (punishment/form) draws on Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe's 1961-62 photo collection of Yukio Mishima, Killed by Roses (バラ刑) — in Japanese context, "xing" carries the connotation of "beauty made visible through suffering," not punishment.¹¹

The lineup of 10 songs:

• "Bad Root": lyrics by Ge Da-wei, music co-composed by Chen Chien-chi and Waa Wei (Chen: "The last note and Wei's first note matched in pitch, creating a song with an unusually wide range")
• "Jellyfish Moon": Dougie (Dou Jing-tong) featured
• "Sassy": Yang Yu-ning guest-raps
• Other tracks feature Louis's voice (then 6 years old)

In June 2025, Pearl Punishment received multiple nominations at the 36th Golden Melody Awards. She won Best Mandarin Female Singer for the second time.

From the 2006 vocal cord injury to the second Golden Melody in 2025 — nineteen years. From Killed by Roses to Pearl Punishment — sixty-three years. These two timespans overlap on an album released December 24, 2024, restating in the grammar of Mandopop a proposition made by a Japanese photographer in 1962: that beauty grows out of suffering.

The Street Interview That Tagged Her "Ordinary Citizen"

In February 2025, ETtoday Starlight Cloud published a street interview report.²⁰ A journalist stopped a person on the street for comment, and the broadcast identified them with the caption: "Ordinary citizen." That "ordinary citizen" was later recognized by fans — it was the woman who would, a few months later, win her second Golden Melody Best Mandarin Female Singer.

Her stylist shared the incident on social media as a joke. Waa Wei's own response: "Take a deep breath first."²⁰

No PR clarification. No follow-up coverage. Just a self-deprecating line to close the matter.

The street interview circulated online, some treating it as a joke, others as irony — but it is actually a slice that reveals her entire career: a female singer who has won the Golden Melody Queen title, stopped by a journalist on the street who takes her for "an ordinary citizen," and whose reaction is to smile.

An Unplugged Reunion, Nineteen Years Later

November 29-30, 2025, the 20th anniversary of the Simple Life Festival. Naturally Curly reunited once — Waa Wei and Kiko had not appeared together in 19 years; this time they performed in an unplugged format, re-singing "Naturally Curly," "Sunny Afternoon," and "The Couple Sitting at the End of the Lane."²¹

Kiko said in rehearsal: "We want to present things in the simplest way, echoing the spirit of Simple Life Festival."²¹ This performance was a one-time retrospective, not a reunion tour.

The same month, Cheer Chen also returned. In November 2025, Waa Wei and Cheer Chen shared a stage in Shanghai for the first time in 11 years (no joint performance since "In an Uncertain World" in 2014), collaborating on a new mashup arrangement called "Travel Lira" — combining Cheer Chen's "Shangri-La" and "The Meaning of Travel."²² Cheer Chen said at that show:

"Over the past two years performing at music festivals, I've rearranged many songs, but this is the one I never quite dared to sing. Because this song seems to belong to Waa Wei... or to Cheer Chen and Waa Wei together."²²

"One reunion after 19 years" and "one shared stage after 11 years" — these two gestures are how she handles "the past": acknowledge it, don't weaponize it as a commercial narrative, and don't avoid it either.

Why She Still Doesn't Want to Be Recognized

Among Golden Melody award-winning singers in Taiwan, few are willing to bear the cost of "not being recognized." Most female singers, after receiving Best Mandarin Female Singer, enter a period of intensive exposure: endorsements, crossover projects, variety shows, Instagram follower spikes. Waa Wei also maintains social media presence (Facebook @lovewaa, Instagram @waawei), but she deliberately does not shape herself into "an easily recognizable person."

Her stage styling tends toward vintage, Japanese-influenced, slightly Tim Burton-esque — keeping a distance between her on-screen appearance and how she looks walking down the street. This is curated anonymity — deliberately preserving the right not to be identified.

For her, being misidentified as "an ordinary citizen" by a street-interview journalist is a form of success — she spent twenty years making her voice more famous than her face, making her songs more recognizable than she is.

In Mandopop's celebrity system, this is a deeply counter-intuitive path. It follows a simple logic: work outlives persona. Invest energy in cultivating a persona and the work expires when the persona does. Invest energy in the work, and once the work succeeds, it doesn't matter whether the persona is recognized.

In August 2025, she briefly made public a relationship with 21-year-old NYU industrial design student Ian (Chen Chih-heng); within five days it collapsed when he reunited with an ex.¹³ Media repeatedly stoked the story; she gave no press conference, sent no lawyers' letters, and after a few weeks continued her music work. This was consistent with her posture handling the 2022 divorce, the 2006 vocal cord injury: no explanation — let the work speak.

📝 Curator's note: Her anonymity is a work-first professional choice — she wants listeners to remember "Ophelia" and "That Place," not what she posted on Facebook.

The Biggest Work Is One Sentence

Back to the line from the acceptance speech that June 2025:

"Some courage and some tenderness grow out of pain."

This is the result of compressing twenty years of working experience into a single sentence — after the 2006 throat injury, after the 2018 pregnancy anxiety, after the 2022 divorce, after the five years from 2020 to 2024 to win the second Golden Melody.

That this line was quoted by multiple media outlets, becoming one of the most representative acceptance speeches of the 2025 Golden Melody ceremony, is not because it is beautifully written — it is because it has been validated over twenty years.

No major management company. No crossover variety shows. No international streaming tour. What she leaves behind is eight solo albums, half a generation's worth of Mandarin independent music samples, and a demonstration: a female singer can refuse to be simplified, can be unrecognizable, and can still win Best Mandarin Female Singer twice at the Golden Melody Awards.

The most famous work is not "Ophelia," not "That Place," not those two awards — it is this sentence.

Further reading:

• Lu Kuang-chung — another demonstration within the same Mandopop independent music ecosystem of "not famous but award-winning," also following "work first, exposure second"
• Lin Yu-jia — another path from talent show into Golden Melody, perfecting stage professionalism
• Jay Chou — the other end of the Mandopop spectrum: the superstar system vs. the work-oriented independent singer
• Jolin Tsai — another way for a female singer to build a sonic identity, a counterpoint to Waa Wei
• Pop Music and the Golden Melody Awards — the stage coordinates where Waa Wei twice won Best Mandarin Female Singer
• Taiwan Pop Music — the Mandopop industry environment
• Taiwan Independent Music — the boundary between Naturally Curly and the 2020s Golden Melody mainstream

References