“When faced with that situation, I told myself ‘Tanya, you either give up on music right now, or you move to Taiwan’. I only had three months worth of rental money, and with my guitar and suitcase, I told my mum I was leaving,” said the singer, who moved to a rented apartment in Taipei.
She did not have an agency or a record label, and started from scratch after the big move.
Chua, who made her debut in 1997, went on to explain: “At that point, I had already been singing for quite a few years, but no one thought of the process [of what I had to go through]. They would think ‘Oh, you already got an award, everything must be going smoothly’. But that was not the case. I felt like I had hit rock bottom.”
She did not expect that she would go on to stay in Taipei for 20 years after, calling it fate’s arrangement.
