Singer-songwriter Eva Liu Wei-kuen, who was born in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and raised in the suburbs of the UK, grew up much like other Britain-born Chinese children. What she has done with her Hong Kong heritage, however, is a little different.
In September, under her artist name Mui Zyu, she released an EP, titled Nothing or Something to Die For (Cantonese Tasting Menu), for which she took five songs from her second full-length album, released earlier this year, and translated the English lyrics into Cantonese.
“I might do one of the Cantonese songs in Hong Kong, but I feel that’s more nerve-racking [than performing them in the UK]. I think most of the time people will just be looking very confused, like, ‘What is she singing?’”
Although not as fluent as she would like to be, her Cantonese lyrics are part of her efforts to reclaim her ethnic heritage after spending the first two decades of her life neglecting it.
Liu, whose Hong Kong-born parents moved to the UK in the mid-1970s, grew up in Kent and Surrey in southeast England, which were – in her words – “very white”. Because much of her extended family had settled in the UK, she did not visit Hong Kong regularly in her childhood and felt somewhat disconnected from her roots.
