Sally Yeh, sometimes credited as Sally Yip or Yip Sin-Man, is a Taiwanese-Canadian Cantopop singer and actress.
Overview
Yeh has Canadian citizenship. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, she immigrated to Canada at the age of four with her family and grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. Yeh's singing career started in the early 1980s, shortly after her acting career started as she sang songs specifically written for the movie soundtrack. She has released a total of thirty studio albums, plus compilations and live recordings. Yeh speaks English, Mandarin and Cantonese in that order of proficiency. Although her singing Cantonese is clear in songs, one can tell Cantonese is not her mother tongue when she speaks it. Yeh has also collaborated on a number of soundtracks, including "Lai Ming But Yiu Loi" from A Chinese Ghost Story, which won the Best Original Song award at the 7th Hong Kong Film Awards. Yeh has received the Most Popular Hong Kong Female Singer award at the Jade Solid Gold Top Ten Awards four times. In 1992, Sally Yeh collaborated with a couple of other western artists, recording "Dreaming of You" with Tommy Page in 1992 and "I Believe in Love" with James Ingram the following year. On 17 July 1996, Yeh married Hong Kong pop star and composer-producer George Lam. In 2002, Yeh re-entered the Cantopop market, released the record "Can You Hear", and performed a series of concerts in different countries. In 2011, Sally Yeh received the Golden Needle Award at the 33rd RTHKTop Ten Chinese Gold Song Music Award Ceremony.
Language fluency
Due to the fact that Yeh immigrated to Canada with her family from Taiwan at a very young age and grew up in Canada, she grew up speaking fluent English. However, because she did grow up in a Mandarin Chinese speaking household, she was able to converse in Mandarin Chinese while being completely illiterate in written Chinese. Yeh had a natural talent for singing and acting, but unfortunately due to the earlier decades of the 1970s and 1980s when Asians were not especially welcomed in the Canadian entertainment business, the area in which Yeh wanted to make her career, she decided to return to Taiwan to have a chance at stardom. In Taiwan, she worked hard to make improvements on her Chinese to stay in the Chinese entertainment business. However, because she was illiterate in Chinese, her managers had to create romanized or English phonetic versions to help her read the Mandarin Chinese song lyrics. Later, she relocated to Hong Kong, which at the time was the primary center of Chinese entertainment, for a better chance at fame. Yeh learned to speak Cantonese when she relocated to Hong Kong and had to continue to utilize romanizations to read the Cantonese lyrics. Since then, Yeh has focused primarily on the Hong Kong Cantonese entertainment world. With the support of utilizing romanization to read Chinese characters in Mandarin and Cantonese in addition to her interactions within the Chinese entertainment business, she began to make improvements on both her spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, including reading Chinese characters. However, because she never had a formal Chinese education, her proficiency in reading Chinese is still limited to the elementary basics. When Yeh has to read Chinese lyrics, she still relies on Mandarin and Cantonese romanization for support.
