Taiwanese pop sensation Teresa Teng honored with Google Doodle
She would have been 65 years old today
Late Taiwanese pop diva Teresa Teng has been honored with a Google Doodle on what would have been her 65th birthday.
Born to mainland Chinese parents in a village in western Taiwan in 1953, Teresa Teng (邓丽君) would grow up to become perhaps the most popular Asian pop star of the 1970s and 1980s, singing in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and English she won over fans from Malaysia to Japan to mainland China.
In the early 1980s her music was banned in the mainland for being “too bourgeois,” however, sales of her records continued to thrive on the black market and her songs continued to be all the rage at nightclubs and even government offices, spawning the saying that “Deng Xiaoping rules China by day, but Teresa Teng rules by night.”
Long suffering from asthma, Teng unfortunately died from a severe attack while on vacation in Thailand in 1995. She was only 42. About two decades later she was resurrected, like Tupac Shakur before her, performing as a hologram alongside pop star Jay Chou at a concert in Taipei.
Over the years, her songs have been covered by countless artists, including none other than Jon Bon Jovi, who crooned “The Moon Represents My Heart” while hyping up his ill-fated China tour in 2015.
Here’s the original version of that Teresa Teng classic, which you really ought to have in your karaoke arsenal.
Earlier this year, Google also honored Zhou Youguang, the Chinese linguist known as the “Father of Pinyin,” with a doodle on the 112th anniversary of his birth.
