A new sound blooms in Hakka with Sarah Chen

The 37th Golden Melody Awards, honoring the finest achievements in Mandarin-language music, took place in Taiwan on June 27.

Among the evening's standout winners was Sarah Chen Yi-nuo, who took home the Best Hakka Singer award for her debut Hakka-language album, Blue Hour Bloom.

On July 16, Chen met fans in Beijing, sharing the stories behind her music and the creative journey that shaped the award-winning album.

"Last year, I thought about making an album," says Chen, who was born in Hong Kong in 1999 and graduated from Berklee College of Music, majoring in Contemporary Writing and Production. "And I realized I could speak Hakka. But no one knew. So I decided to write down everything I'd been thinking, and sing it in the dialect."

The result is Blue Hour Bloom, a debut that has quietly upended expectations about what a regional dialect album can sound like.

It is neither a folk record nor an exercise in nostalgia. It is something rarer: a work of contemporary R&B, Neo-Soul, and jazz, sung in a language that most of her generation has relegated to family gatherings and ancestral villages.

Chen began learning piano at 4, studied bel canto and pop vocals at 8, taught herself guitar at 12, and started writing English songs at 16. Growing up in China's Shenzhen and Hong Kong and the United States exposed her to diverse musical traditions and broadened both her songwriting and artistic perspective.