Faye Wong (Chinese: 王菲; pinyin: Wáng Fēi; born 8 August 1969) is a Chinese singer-songwriter and actress. Early in her career, she briefly used the stage name Shirley Wong (王靖雯). Born in Beijing, she moved to Hong Kong at the age of 18. She debuted as a singer with the Cantonese album Shirley Wong in 1989 and achieved her breakthrough with the Cantopop song "Fragile Woman" in 1992. She established her style by blending alternative music with Chinese pop, and since the late 1990s has recorded primarily in her native Mandarin.
One of the biggest names in the Chinese-speaking world, Wong has also gained followings in Japan and Southeast Asia. In the West, she is perhaps best known for starring in Wong Kar-wai's films Chungking Express (1994) and 2046 (2004). Upon her second marriage in 2005, she withdrew from the limelight and moved back to Beijing, though she has sporadically returned to the stage. Often titled "diva" or "heavenly queen" in Chinese, Wong has gained a reputation for her "cool" personality. In Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture, Jeroen de Kloet characterised her as "singer, actress, mother, celebrity, royalty, sex symbol and diva all at the same time."
In 2000, Wong was recognised by Guinness World Records as the best selling Cantopop female artist, having sold an estimated 9.7 million copies of her albums by March 2000. In 2009, Wong was voted the second most influential Chinese celebrity of the past 60 years in a poll conducted by the State Council Information Office to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, receiving seven million votes and ranking second.
Wong was born at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Dongcheng District, Beijing in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Her father was Wang Youlin (王佑林), a mining engineer and second son of Wang Zhaomin (1901–1985), member of the Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China. Wang Youlin had been parentally betrothed to Li Min (李珉), sister of Taiwanese writer Li Ao, but when Wang Zhaomin left for Taiwan upon the Communist takeover, Wang Youlin, then a left-leaning college student, stayed in mainland China and later wed Xia Guiying (夏桂影), a revolutionary music soprano with China Coal Mine Art Troupe, who would be Wong's mother. Wong had a brother named Wang Yi (王弋), who was two years older than her and died in his fifties due to illness.
Wong grew up in the Qingniangou area near Andingmen, where the residential communities affiliated with the coal mining industry were situated. She attended Ditan Primary School, where she served as the class's arts and cultural coordinator. She then attended Beijing Dongzhimen Middle School.
In 1987, Wong was admitted to study biology at Xiamen University through the national college entrance exam, but she chose to move to Hong Kong to join her father, who had been working there for a few years. The plan was for her to stay there for a year to fulfill the permanent residency requirement, and go to study in Australia. However, since Wong did not know a word of Cantonese, the language spoken in Hong Kong, she experienced great loneliness. Following a brief modeling stint, she began taking singing lessons as a distraction with Tai See-chung, an East Indies-born Chinese who had gone to school in mainland China before tutoring Hong Kong superstars Anita Mui, Andy Lau, Leon Lai, Aaron Kwok, as well as Wong.
As a student, Wong already was involved in singing and attracted interest from several publishers. On occasions, the school had to hide her artistic activities from her strict mother, who as a professional saw singing as a dead-end career. Despite her mother's opposition, Wong released 6 low-cost cover albums from 1985 to 1987 while still in high school, all in the form of cassettes, mostly consisting of songs by her personal idol, iconic Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng. For the last of these early recordings, the producer Wei Yuanqiang chose the title Wong Fei Treasury (王菲珍藏集), intending to show that he recognised a distinctive talent in the teenager.
After moving to Hong Kong, the 19-year-old Wong signed with Cinepoly Records in 1988 on the recommendation of her singing tutor, Tai See-chung, after placing third in an Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union singing contest. It was not only an unplanned move on the part of Wong, since her mother disapproved of a singing career, but also a risky move on the part of Alex Chan Siu-po, Cinepoly's general manager, since Mainlanders were stereotyped as "backwards" in Hong Kong.
1989–1991: the Shirley Wong period
At the request of Cinepoly, Wong picked one of the "sophisticated" stage names, Wong Jing Man, with an English name "Shirley," offered by the company through a fortune-teller, to replace her "Mainland-sounding" name. In 1989, her debut album Shirley Wong sold 25,000 copies and won her bronze at the "Chik Chak New Artist Award." Two more albums (Everything and You're the Only One) followed, similarly featuring many cover songs by artists from the US and Japan. They sold 10,000 copies each, despite relentless promotions by the company. Many in Hong Kong perceived her to be "backwards," lacking personality.
At the time, both Wong and her then-agent Leslie Chan (陳健添) were in conflicts with Cinepoly under Chan Siu-Bo's successor Lal Dayaram (林振業). Leslie Chan then sold Wong's contract for 2 million HKD to Taiwanese singer Lo Ta-yu. Under the arrangement of Lo, who founded Music Factory in 1990 (later becoming the Hong Kong subsidiary of Rock Records), Wong went to the United States for professional training at the end of 1991. She initially went to Los Angeles with plans to learn keyboards, but missed the class registration deadline. She then moved to New York, living with Wawa, another new artist signed by Lo, at the house of Lo's sister, Jennifer, in Flushing. Wong attended classes at the Barbizon School, the Martha Graham School and with personal singing tutors for about two months. In 1996, she explained New York's influence on her:
I wandered around, visited museums and sat at cafes. There were so many strange, confident-looking people. They didn't care what other people thought of them. I felt I was originally like that too, independent and a little rebellious. But in Hong Kong I lost myself. I was shaped by others and became like a machine, a dress hanger. I had no personality and no sense of direction.
Even though Wong found the experience enlightening, her less than tactful communication led Lo to decide to end the contract with her by the time she returned to Hong Kong. The two never collaborated or shared the stage thereafter. With the help of her teacher Tai See-Chung, Wong found a new agent in Katie Chan (陳家瑛), who has remained her agent as well as her daughter's ever since.
1992–1995: Coming Home, No Regrets, 100,000 Whys, Random Thoughts, Mystery, Sky, Decadent Sounds of Faye and Di-Dar
The 1992 album Coming Home, the first release since her return from New York, prominently featured on the cover her new English name "Faye," a homophone to her given Chinese name, and the Chinese character "Jing," a reference to her hometown Beijing. From then on she changed her stage name back to "Wang Fei" (王菲). Coming Home incorporated R&B influences and was a change in musical direction from the more traditional Cantopop fare of her earlier albums. Coming Home also included her first English-language number, "Kisses in the Wind." Wong stated in a 1994 concert that she very much liked this song, after which various websites listed it as her personal favourite; however, in a 1998 CNN interview she declined to name one favourite song, saying that there were too many, and in 2003 she stated that she no longer liked her old songs.
One of the songs on Coming Home, "Fragile Woman" (容易受傷的女人), a cover of a Japanese song "Rouge" originally composed by Miyuki Nakajima and sung by Naomi Chiaki, became Wong's first hit after being featured in the popular TVB drama The Greed of Man (1992). (Thanks to Wong's cover, this 1972 song—in different language versions—would in the early 1990s become a huge regional hit in Thailand, Vietnam, the rest of Southeast Asia and even Turkey; the most popular English version was titled "Broken-Hearted Woman"). The favourable reception of "Fragile Woman" led Wong to abandon her original plans to return to Los Angeles to continue her studies. Instead, she stayed in Hong Kong to build on her newfound success.