How British-born Chinese singer Mui Zyu is taking back her heritage, one song at a time

Performing at Clockenflap 2024, Mui Zyu – real name Eva Liu – is exploring her Hong Kong heritage after years of feeling disconnected

Reading Time:5 minutes

Mui Zyu is singer-songwriter Eva Liu’s Cantonese childhood pet name. She is exploring her Cantonese heritage after years of feeling disconnected from her roots. Photo: Tia Liu

Published: 7:15am, 15 Nov 2024Updated: 10:36am, 15 Nov 2024

Singer-songwriter Eva Liu Wei-kuen, who was born in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and raised in the suburbs of the UK, grew up much like other Britain-born Chinese children. What she has done with her Hong Kong heritage, however, is a little different.

In September, under her artist name Mui Zyu, she released an EP, titled Nothing or Something to Die For (Cantonese Tasting Menu), for which she took five songs from her second full-length album, released earlier this year, and translated the English lyrics into Cantonese.

Re-recording the tunes was no easy feat. “It was extremely hard [as my Cantonese] is terrible,” she says on a call from London, ahead of her first Hong Kong performance at the 2024 edition of the Clockenflap Music & Arts Festival.

“I might do one of the Cantonese songs in Hong Kong, but I feel that’s more nerve-racking [than performing them in the UK]. I think most of the time people will just be looking very confused, like, ‘What is she singing?’”

Growing up in suburban Britain, Liu did not explore her Hong Kong heritage in-depth in her youth. Photo: Tia Liu

Although not as fluent as she would like to be, her Cantonese lyrics are part of her efforts to reclaim her ethnic heritage after spending the first two decades of her life neglecting it.

Liu, whose Hong Kong-born parents moved to the UK in the mid-1970s, grew up in Kent and Surrey in southeast England, which were – in her words – “very white”. Because much of her extended family had settled in the UK, she did not visit Hong Kong regularly in her childhood and felt somewhat disconnected from her roots.