In March 2005, after four months of study, A-Mei was about to graduate from Boston University Language School.
It is customary for each student to find his or her own instructor for a one-on-one final exam before the end of the program. Some students have their teachers grade their work by chatting with them in a spoken language, while others write a report or survey to be submitted.
But A-Mei decided to take her final exam in an unprecedented form: a small concert for fifty people.
When the news got out, A-Mei was invited to the principal's office.
The principal said, "I just want to find out who you really are. Ever since the news of your concert got out, the phone calls to the school office have been non-stop every day, and the email inboxes are all jammed up. Everyone is asking where to buy tickets for A-Mei Chang's concert."
A-Mei smiled shyly and told the principal that she was actually a singer.
As a child, A-Mei would force children to listen to her sing on stage.
She forced people to go home and get a flashlight, then sit in a row on stage.
When she went on stage, the audience below the stage had to turn their flashlights on to create the effect of stage lights.
When she sings, a few of the flashlights have to be in her face, and the rest have to be turned toward the ceiling.
At a young age, she planned a concert for herself.
When she was in high school, Chang spent two months teaching 100 of her peers to sing and dance, then took them to Taitung City for the Fengnian Festival Convention, a performance that left the crowd in awe.
But little A-Mei didn't dream of stardom, she just thought that singing and dancing was something that was part of an aboriginal's life.
In 1992, A-Mei was 20 years old, and this was a turning point in her life.
At that time, A-Mei's father was hospitalized for an illness, and in the hospital, he liked to watch the "Five Lamps Award" singing competition.
Because her father said, "I think you're better than any of the other contestants in this competition, and I really want you to do it," she said.
So A-Mei went, and she thought she'd just have to sing a few times to make her dad happy, but who knew she'd make it all the way through.
Every time she went up north to compete, A-Mei had to take an eight-hour train ride, and every time she passed a barrier, there were inexplicably a lot of people outside their house setting off firecrackers to celebrate her honor for the tribe.
Coupled with the fact that Sister had to learn between three and six songs a week to cope with the competition, she felt the pressure mounting, and for the first time, she found singing so painful.
When the competition reached the fifth hurdle of the fourth round, Sister Zhang failed to go on to successfully defend her title because she forgot her words under the combination of a cold and psychological pressure.
She squatted there and cried, "How can I go back and face my folks?" After this, A-Mei didn't even want to sing.
After half a year, her father encouraged her to take up the challenge again, and she looked at her father, who was getting sicker and sicker, and took part in the Five Lamps Awards again.
After six months of competition, A-Mei finally won and became the master of the five-times-five ring.
Unfortunately, when she came back with the trophy, her father had already passed away.
The sad A-Mei once again did not want to sing, and her mother told her that her father was gone, but he was still watching over you.
With the aura of a ringmaster, A-Mei's journey to stardom did not go smoothly. Her first record was a failure, and she returned to her ordinary life, going to work at her sister's restaurant in Taipei.
Soon after, the lead singer of my cousin's band suddenly left, so my cousin thought of A-Mei.
In the 1990s, most of the songs sung in Taiwan's bars were in English, which was a big problem for Zhang Huimei, who didn't know a thing about English, and in order to seize the opportunity to learn ten English songs in a week.
On the day of the show, A-Mei stood on the stage and looked down at the guests, who ate and drank, and rowed and punched, and no one looked at the stage.
She was very apprehensive, if she sang no one to see how to do? She thought, "I have to get people to notice me on the first line."
After calming down, she opened her mouth and sang "I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU", and by the second line, the crowd had quieted down, and the guests started to look back at her.
Within a week, A-Mei's band had become so famous that any bar the band went to would do exceptionally well.
The famous musician Yusheng Zhang came to hear the band, and was impressed by the high, booming female voice, and brought A-Mei into the world of singing.
In March 1996, after seven months of singing in bars, A-Mei signed with Fung Wah Records.
At the time of the signing, the senior musicians asked A-Mei why she wanted to be a singer, and she said, "I want to have a concert, a big concert." They all thought the girl was so big.
Unexpectedly, this girl with a big mouth opened up her career as soon as she entered the singing world.
In December of the same year, Zhang Yusheng's first solo album, "Sisters," which was customized for Zhang Huimei, was born.
The new album sold 300,000 copies in the first week of its release, setting a record of nine consecutive weeks of No. 1 sales since the opening of Taiwan's IFPI charts, and sales across Taiwan topped one million, breaking the 1996 sales record for a local Taiwanese singer.
Zhang Xiaoyan, the director of the company, told her that you have to learn in two years what others do in ten years.
A-Mei was driven by the big wave of her career, i.e. passive and active, and quickly adapted to the great changes and expectations in her life.
In 1997, A-Mei released her second album, BAD BOY, which once again reigned as the IFPI sales champion for nine weeks, with cumulative sales of 1.35 million, breaking the 1997 sales record for a Taiwanese female singer.
In 1998, at the age of 26, A-Mei's dream came true when she held her first concert in Taipei - a solo concert called "Sister Power".
The concert set a record for the fastest ticket sales in Taiwan in the last ten years, the most amazing degree of full house, the audience was the most crazy record.
The original projected capacity of 20,000 people in the stadium, the night of the influx of more than 30,000 people.
Taiwan media said the concert is in addition to the "Michael Jackson" concert outside of Taiwan's largest population density of a concert.
Hui Mui's uninhibited stage presence has shaken up conventional wisdom.
Before her, Taiwanese pop was dominated by soft lyricism.
In the 1980s, there was Su Rui, whose voice represented a female emotion that was not repressed, but with A-Mei, she unleashed her body.
A dancer who had entered a period of career burnout was infected by A-Mei and found her passion for the stage.
She later became A-Mei's long-term partner.
In June 1999, she released her fifth album "Can I Hold You? Lover", the album was number one on the IFPI sales charts in Taiwan for 11 weeks, breaking the record of nine weeks at number one set by her own "Bad Boy" album.
In 2002, A-Mei was honored on the cover of Time magazine, which listed her as one of Asia's most influential people in 2002.
The speed and height of A-Mei's rise to fame was so unimaginable and unattainable that even she didn't get used to it.
At the height of her life, outside of work, she isolated herself, shutting herself in her room every day, not even willing to see her family. She walked past the mirror to see herself and found the person in the mirror repulsive.
It took a year or two for her to realize she couldn't do this, and she began to seek medical help.
In 2004, Chang made a decision that surprised both her family and her company, dropping her job and traveling to Boston for a simple student life.
Before she went to Boston, she asked a lot of people where she could study, and almost everyone warned her not to go to Boston because the city was boring.
When she heard the word "boring," she thought, "That's where I want to go."
Student life in Boston gave A-Mei a rare moment of relaxation, when she could wear a plain face and a comfortable sweatshirt.
The simplicity of life gave A-Mei the passion she needed to get back on stage.
When the principal realized that A-Mei was a singer, he offered to provide a venue for three thousand people to A-Mei, who bargained with the principal and finally settled on eight hundred people.
On the day of the concert, A-Mei wore a special cheongsam, and all her foreign classmates were shocked when she appeared on stage: "You're not usually like this."
Probably regretted not chasing her.
After finishing her studies, A-Mei returned to Taiwan.
After singing "Hostage" in the studio one day, she couldn't calm down because of the pain of her love injury.
At three in the morning she called Wu Yukang and cried and talked on the phone for more than an hour.
After that, she got comfortable and told Wu Yukang on the other end, "I'm sorry, I'm tired, I need to sleep.
Then she hung up.
Wu Yukang was so disturbed by A-Mei that he gave her a song called "I want to be happy" the next day.
Zhang Huimei read the lyrics, did not say a word, looked at Wu Yukang nodded.
Wu Yukang saw tears in her eyes.
It was probably after that that A-Mei got the idea to do "Amit", A-Mei's real name.
But her coworkers disagreed, thinking that even if A-Mei appeared as Amit, people would still know her as A-Mei.
It wasn't until 2009 that A-Mei didn't want to compromise any longer and insisted on releasing an album under the identity of Amit.
And with a whole new set of collaborators, she felt the newcomers could see her in a different light.
A-Mei used Amit's identity to speak her mind on a number of sensitive topics, including broken backs, death, and feminism.
The album features heavy rock tunes, references to ancient Aboriginal tunes, and English foul language.
In the same year, A-Mei began performing songs in the styles of "A-Mei" and "Amit", as well as in musical theater.
Students at the National Taiwan University's Graduate School of Music also did a dissertation on A-Mei's transformation, discussing her bravery in breaking out of the mold, and concluding that A-Mei's less commercially oriented work elevated Amity's creativity to a higher level.
From the spring of 2015 to the winter of 2017, A-Mei opened 104 Utopia World Tour concerts, a concert number that is second only to Jacky Cheung in the Chinese singing world.
In the concert, A-Mei put all the fast songs together and sang for more than half an hour.
A musician commented, "Very few people have this, and I think this is her challenging herself."
One year on New Year's Eve, when many streets in Taiwan were under traffic control, A-Mei changed into civilian clothes after her performance and walked into the surging crowds with a hat and mask, ready to walk back through tens of thousands of people.
She and her colleagues bought fireworks and danced in the crowded plaza shaking the lit fireworks, no one recognized her, and people thought the girl was crazy.
When she was about to return home, she saw a lot of people resting on the side of the road, she walked up to a person, suddenly took off her hat, pulled down the mask and said to the person, "Happy New Year."
After saying that she ran, and the group recognized her and chased after her.
Along the way, she saw a couple taking pictures, and she scurried over to them and shouted, "Happy New Year."
Zhang Huimei said, in fact, I am a village farmer in Taitung County, Peinan Township, Taian Village.
Still at that graduation concert in Boston, A-Mei sang and danced on stage, and saw her Chinese friends downstage, each with a face full of pride.
She was nervous and shaking all the time on stage, as if she was still the newcomer and had to let everyone come to know her.
She got a very high score on her final exam, and her teacher wrote her a comment that she had made all her foreign friends aware of Asia.
Chang replied, "I didn't let myself down with my own talent, I feel like I did right by myself."
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