This is the last lyric of "Heart Fire." If you've heard it, you know: those three exclamation marks were sung by Yao Beina. It is a song brimming with emotion, yet she sang it with elegance, restraint, honesty, and self-assurance. I believe only a supremely powerful soul could sing with such composure in the face of death closing in, step by step.
I am captivated by the fullness of feminine spirit in Yao Beina's voice—its bodily presence, its autonomy, its grace. Liu Huan once described a scene: they had a song they wanted Yao Beina to record. She agreed without hesitation, drove herself to the studio in a Mini Cooper with dashing flair, and finished the recording efficiently in little over an hour.
This reminds me of the young woman in Haruki Murakami's novels who drives a silver-gray Volkswagen Beetle. That is the core image of Yao Beina in my mind: crisp, free-spirited, sensual, professional. Wherever she went, she planted her high heels on the ground with bold, confident clang-clang-clang; when she spoke and worked, she let feminine softness and warmth flow naturally through the highest degree of professionalism. This image is precisely the professional woman that early twenty-first-century China mass-produced in the tide of globalization. She is therefore an image of an era, and considering the cultural conservatism and regression of the past decade or so, one might even call her a historical image.
Her voice is filled with an open, unapologetic feminine spirit and bodily presence. It is sensuality—the autonomy of sexuality. In her voice, you hear no hesitation or shame, only a total affirmation and enjoyment of her own female voice, body, and emotions. She was using her entire body to experience life and embrace the world. This complete life force finds one of its most supreme expressions in healthy sexuality. You can clearly sense that she could exist within a real, physical, mutually passionate intimate relationship—and that she was the absolute subject within it. It was precisely within this personality and sensuality that she sang at full voice.
In contrast, there are far too many female singers who perform as "objects" in their singing. They are shaped into fragile, desexualized images, made safe to be placed under the gaze of desire. They are delicate, pure, ethereal, deeply sentimental—all of which are projections of male security and the need for control.
But Yao Beina was not that. She was a woman who existed one hundred percent as a subject.
Who could not love Yao Beina?