Emil Chow Wah-Kin 周華健
Emil Chow grew up in the family of a Hong Kong rice merchant, went to Taiwan to study and began singing in a restaurant. At Rock Records he first worked as an assistant, and then recorded songs that became famous far beyond Taiwan. In Hong Kong, Chow found time to appear on screen with Jackie Chan, while in Taiwan he kept writing music even after he began talking seriously about retiring from the concert stage.
Emil Chow was born in 1960 in Hong Kong's Sai Ying Pun. He was the fourth child in a family that ran a rice shop. As a child, Chow wanted to become a doctor: he saw how much strength his mother's work drained from her and how seriously ill she had been. In his senior years of school he won a cash prize on a television singing competition, but at the time he still had no plans to make a living from music. He went to study in Taiwan, where he enrolled in the mathematics department of Taiwan University. It was a classmate who brought him to sing at a restaurant. There Chow heard the songwriter Jonathan Lee, who later helped him find work at Rock Records.
For the first few years Chow alternated between recording his own material and helping others with their recordings. In 1984 one of his recordings appeared on a compilation, while his next solo project never came out. At Rock Records Chow worked as an assistant and sang quite a few short advertising jingles. In 1987 Direction of the Heart was released, for which Lee also wrote songs. By then his future wife, the American Constance Woods, had already been a regular visitor to Chow's Taipei apartment. She was the first to hear the song he later gave to Michelle Pan (Pan Yue-Yun). Chow and Woods married in 1986. Chow fondly recalled that at home there was always something to do that had nothing to do with music. When his son and daughter grew older, for instance, he had to brush up on his school subjects to help them with their homework.
In the 1990s Chow released one record after another, and they were listened to in Taiwan, Hong Kong and on the mainland. You Make Me Happy and Sad brought him a Golden Melody Award as a Mandarin-language singer. He recorded songs for TV series. Friends and Flower Heart were known even to those who didn't follow his albums. In those same years Chow acted in films. In Project S he starred alongside Michelle Yeoh, then appeared in Rumble in the Bronx and Gorgeous with Jackie Chan. He also appeared in Just Married and the crime film Purple Storm. Chow acted in the breaks between recordings and performances, and music still took up far more of his time.
After the album Now, Chow said, he stopped recording for a long while. Lee advised him not to rush and not to try to release something simply because listeners had grown used to waiting for the next record. When Chow began recording again, he went back to material he had already sung so many times that at some point the team moved their equipment to a hotel in the mountains and set aside two weeks to finish the work. He was also worried that listeners' tastes were changing. Even his son was already drawn more to new music, and Chow tried recording R&B before returning to other people's songs. Many years later he spoke about that period quite frankly. He had the opportunity to record his own albums, but at times it seemed to him that he could no longer squeeze anything more out of himself.
In 2008 Chow, together with Lee, Lo Ta-Yu and Chang Chen-Yue, formed the band Superband. Each of the four had long had records of his own, and the concerts gave them a chance to work alongside musicians whose songs they had known before. Chow's son, Andrew Chau, became an actor. In 2019 father and son together presented Andrew's photo book The Younger Me. At that time Chow said he might leave the stage by the age of sixty. In 2023, however, he agreed to become a mentor on a singing competition. Previously Chow had found the very idea of a competition rather cruel. Now he was interested in explaining to a young performer what to do when something goes wrong on stage and you can't simply start over.
In May 2026 Rock Records released seven new songs by Chow. They grew out of texts by the writer Zhang Da-Chun. Chow served as producer and said that most of the time went into searching for a melody that would preserve the natural rhythm of the prose. For "Night Bus to Taipei" it took about a week. Now he didn't have to hurry as he once had when recording commercials, but the task was the same: to find how a few lines ought to sound.
