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She's Back Singer survives strong urge to fly by Ma Pijing She was born in Cuiluan, Heilongjiang, the end of the line, literally. She sang her way to the top of the Chinese charts before a tabloid scandal rocked her world, silenced her voice, sent her off packing to a lonely hotel room in the middle of nowhere. She tried sleeping pills. She tried suicide. She tried cutting off all her hair. She found Buddhism. She found friendship. She picked herself up, dusted herself off, packed her bags and came back to Beijing, the city that spat her out five long, dark years ago. She has a new album "I'm Yours". She has a new, English name: Mimi. She has a whole new attitude. Mimi's father Zhang Shuchun, a woodsman, was imprisoned and tortured during the Cultural Revolution. His wife was separated from her three children. It was a less than ideal childhood. "Classmates pointed at my nose and said, 'That's the daughter of a bad element.' This made me desperate to leave home, escape this miserable place where all I knew was suffering and humiliation," she says. One day, Mimi packed her bags, dug up all the money she could find and bought a one-way ticket to Inner Mongolia. After passing music school exams, she joined a performing folk troupe touring country villages. "When we toured, it felt like I had left hell only to enter heaven. It was totally different to my hometown. For the first time in my life, I was liked and respected for just being myself." But soon another busybody identified Mimi's imperfect revolutionary singsong credentials and she was forced once more to fly. She eventually found more work in Guangzhou, the "Hollywood of China". After winning prizes in a national folk song contest, Mimi entered heats for the fourth CCTV youth singing competition. She made the finals. "My mother was severely sick with a brain tumor and so I wanted to quit the contest. But my friends encouraged me to stick it out." She won the contest, but on the very same night, her mother died. "This is my life's deepest regret, to have left my mother alone at that time." The next four years, then-Zhang Mi rose through to the top of the Chinese music industry with the 1990 "Miss PR" TV show theme song and starred in the 1993 "Lonely Star" TV musical series. That all ended at the 1994 Spring Festival TV gala. Teen idol Mao Ning and Zhang Mi both prepared to perform "Blue Night, Blue Dream". But only one performer could sing it on the night and Mao won that battle. It remains unclear who won the ensuing physical contest between Mao and Mimi's boyfriend. The papers loved it. Soon she had split with her boyfriend and Mimi was effectively barred from performing in China. Worse still, "Blue Night, Blue Dream" went on to be a smash. "My only idea was to commit suicide. I took a lot of sleeping pills, but somebody found me." She hid out in a deserted hotel down south and decided to cut off all her hair. The hairdresser talked her out of it. "I suddenly felt very moved there was still one person in this world who cared about me." After traveling across the USA, Spain, Italy, New Zealand and Switzerland, she found a Buddhist master in Beijing to make sense of it all. "Now I would say my experience in 94 harmed me a great deal, but the time since then has granted me wisdom. I have grown through those difficult years and that growth has been precious. "The music I do now is really the music of myself. I hope people who knew my work in the past can appreciate my new maturity." Asked exactly how mature that is, Mimi says, "It's inappropriate to publish a singer's age."
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