In 1997, one of the greatest voices in Mandopop died at 31. He left behind a string of hits, a superstar he personally discovered, and one unfinished song about two great rivers in China, a country he sang about with deep love and, as far as any record shows, never set foot in. To understand why, you have to meet his father first.
His name was 张雨生 (Zhāng Yǔshēng), known to some Western fans as Tom Chang. He was born in 1966 on Penghu, a small island chain off Taiwan's coast, and grew up in a 眷村 (juàn cūn), a military village built for the soldiers who crossed the strait with the Nationalist army after China's civil war. His father was one of those soldiers, a man from Jiaxing in Zhejiang province who left as a young man and could never go home. His mother was Atayal, one of Taiwan's Indigenous peoples, from the mountains of Lishan. From birth, Yusheng carried two stories at once: his mother's island, and his father's lost homeland.
His father never stopped talking about that homeland, the rivers, the towns, the family left behind. For a boy growing up in a military village, China existed only as his father's memories, repeated at the dinner table.
Yusheng was the oldest of five children, and close to his younger sister, 张玉仙 (Zhāng Yùxiān), who loved music and dreamed of becoming a singer herself. He promised to be her first fan. In 1986, when she was just 15, she drowned. That same year, Yusheng entered a band competition, and by his own account, part of the reason was to chase the music dream his sister never got to live.
Two years later, he broke through completely. His 1988 song 我的未来不是梦 (Wǒ de wèilái bú shì mèng), "My Future Is Not a Dream," became an anthem for an entire generation in Taiwan. His debut album, 天天想你 (Tiāntiān xiǎng nǐ), "Thinking of You Every Day," sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and many fans have always heard its title track as a song for his sister. Years later he recorded one explicitly for her, 妹妹晚安 (Mèimei wǎn ān), "Good Night, Little Sister."
He had an ear for talent too. In the mid-1990s he discovered a young Indigenous singer from Taitung, signed her to his label, and produced her early work. Her name was A-Mei, and she went on to become one of the biggest stars in the Chinese-speaking world.
In 1992, he released 心底的中国 (Xīndǐ de Zhōngguó), "The China in My Heart," written for his father. It is not a political song. It is a love song from a son to his dad, about a homeland he knew secondhand but felt completely. In his final years he was writing another one, 黄河长江 (Huáng Hé Cháng Jiāng), "The Yellow River and the Yangtze," about China's two great rivers as the mother of the nation, flowing from the high plateau to the sea. He never finished it.
In October 1997, exhausted after a late night rehearsal, Yusheng crashed his car near Tamsui. He spent 24 days on a ventilator before he died on November 12th, at 31. His parents buried him in Lishan, his mother's mountains, beside his sister. His father died in 2011. His mother chose to spend the rest of her life near where all three now rest.
Sixteen years after his death, in 2013, singer Yang Peian and Monster, the guitarist from the band Mayday, finished 黄河长江 and released it, pairing Yang's voice with Yusheng's own recording. Two singers, sixteen years apart, finally on the same song.
And every time I hear it, one question stays with me. The China in Yusheng's heart was his father's China, a place of memory, a hometown and a family left behind. Today's China looks at Taiwan very differently. Beijing claims the island, sends warships and warplanes around it in large military drills, and has not ruled out force. Meanwhile, roughly six in ten people in Taiwan now see themselves simply as Taiwanese, not Chinese.
Could he still sing "The China in My Heart" the same way today, knowing what the country in the song now says about the island where he was born? We will never know. Maybe that is exactly why his songs still land so hard, nearly three decades later. They were never about borders. They were about love and family, which outlast almost anything a map can draw.
If you have a favorite 张雨生 (Zhāng Yǔshēng) song, I would genuinely love to hear which one, and why, in the comments. Thirty years on, people are still finding their way to his music for the first time, which is about as good an ending as any unfinished song could ask for.