Tough as nails? No way
Self-esteem, or lack of it, can either make or break a person. In the case of Singaporean singer-songwriter Tanya Chua Chian Ya, it moulded her into a tough, aloof and angst-ridden rocker. Or so her self-titled album and her image would have us believe.
'I'm not an angry person,' Chua, in Hong Kong earlier this week, protested. 'Actually I am a very happy person. How could I not be with all that's happened to me?' The 24-year-old is certainly more bubbly than her record company portrays her. There is no hint of that angry glare or the pouting, sullen look. In fact, she started grinning with relief when told that the preferred language of conversation was going to be English - which she is more comfortable with - than her hastily brushed-up Putonghua.
Chua is still in the 'wow!' period of life. The past couple of years have seen her plucked from the relative obscurity of singing in pubs in the lively Boat Quay district of Singapore to a brief stint as a contracted songwriter to one of the most promising singer-songwriters to emerge on the Putonghua song circuit.
'I have this big problem trying to keep myself grounded because I am so scared that one day it will be taken away. It all came from nowhere. I still can't believe I have all these things when once I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.
'At the same time I am not used to the attention I'm getting and I don't know how to react to that. It's a mixture of 'wow' and 'Oh shit! what have I got myself into?' ' Tanya - released two months ago - is her second album although it marks her Putonghua-language debut. Her first, 1998's Bored, was an English album for which Chua wrote eight of the 10 songs. Four of these songs were translated into Putonghua for Tanya.
Critics have described Chua's acoustic guitar-driven music as a breath of fresh air for the Chinese music industry, where saccharin lovey-dovey Manda- and Canto-pop have become the lethargic staple of recent years. Singing-writing female rockers were also not easy to come by.