Toronto singer-songwriter Chynna Lewis enjoyed returning to her roots at Harbourfront Centre in late August. It came when the pensive pop and R&B vocalist performed a free show there as part of TAIWANfest Toronto’s ¡Sinophone! Series.
Lewis was born in southern Taiwan and immigrated to Canada at the age of 11. It wasn’t an easy transition.
“You were young enough to adapt, but you were old enough to perfectly understand what you are losing,” Lewis tells Pancouver over Zoom. “To be honest, this makes me extremely emotional, even just bringing it up.”
At TAIWANfest Toronto, Lewis devoted part of her show to paying homage to her grandmother and mother. If the move was tough on her as a child, she recognizes that it must have been far more challenging on the older women in her family.
“That transition is still something I’m unpacking,” Lewis discloses. “It was very difficult to be fully formed as a person—and have attachments to your language, to your culture, to the streets you grew up on, to know where things were—and then to be plucked out of that completely and land into something that I was completely unfamiliar with.”
She confesses that she wishes that she could go back in time and show that 11-year-old girl a vision of a brighter future.
“It was a homecoming of sorts not just to be at TAIWANfest, but to be doing something that I love—playing music in front of a Taiwanese audience,” Lewis says.
Watch Chynna Lewis’s video for “Asleep”
Lewis finds her groove on “Asleep”
Lewis earned a position on the stage, which also featured free performances by JUNO-winning Toronto songwriter Jacqueline Teh and the innovative Taiwanese indie band Lilium. Lewis’s debut EP, What Are Friends For, made Met Radio’s list of the top 128 albums of 2022. On November 6, she’ll perform at a free showcase at The Annex (823 Seymour Street) in Vancouver as part of the Jade Music Fest.
One of the tracks, “Asleep”, was born out of a rough patch in a relationship. The moody music accompanies what Lewis calls a “stubborn, demanding message”.
“Don’t you dare give up on this, and don’t you dare get lazy with this,” she says of the song.
In other words, if the couple’s going to make it, the partners had better not fall asleep and become too complacent.
“The song sounds dark,” Lewis acknowledges. “And I don’t typically write very dark songs, actually, but that one just matched my feeling.”
The haunting video was filmed in Trinity St. Paul’s Church in Toronto.
Meanwhile, Lewis wrote the EP’s title track, “What Are Friends For”, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests and a wave of anti-Asian hatred. According to her, the song looks at the world from the perspective of a woman of colour.
She feels that so much of society expects these women to show unspoken strength without paying nearly as much attention to other aspects of their identity.
“These strong women of colour that I know have felt how I feel about friends not…seeing their needs and their vulnerabilities and their humanity as much,” Lewis says.
It raises a question: why are women of colour sometimes reduced in this way rather than being seen in all of their manifestations?
“Very deep question,” Lewis replies. “I think we could do a whole interview on that.”
Watch Chynna Lewis’s video for “What Are Friends For”.
A message of empathy
Lewis suspects that this reductionism could be linked to a lack of empathy for people who’ve endured painful episodes that don’t correspond with their own experiences or those of their parents, grandparents, or even their ancestry.
“Canada is a predominantly Caucasian society,” she states. “And, you know, there’s always this feeling of ‘people just don’t really get it’—or perhaps they don’t want to get it because it’s uncomfortable. Uncomfortable to face some of the stuff that has come up.”
Yet Lewis maintains that it’s the job of all of us, as human beings, to put ourselves in the shoes of other people’s stories and try to understand how they feel. As someone in a mixed-race relationship, she and her partner sometimes have to work through cross-cultural issues.
“If it’s difficult for two people who love each other, it’s extremely difficult for a society to do that,” Lewis points out.
She recalls that she immigrated to Canada at an age when kids are incredibly self-conscious about blending in and belonging. As a result, she didn’t want to expose her Taiwanese identity outside of her home.
“I really cut out this part of me that was Taiwanese, and I just hid it away,” Lewis says. “I was, like, ‘This doesn’t belong here—I don’t want people to know about this.’ ”
Nowadays, she’s learning more about broadcasting this to the world. She also expresses her feelings through her songwriting.
Lewis comes from a musical family and her dad taught her guitar when she was young. Her younger brother also plays guitar and her older brother plays drums and makes electronic music. In addition, Lewis studied piano.
Expressing emotions through music
Her father is Canadian and was living in Taiwan when Lewis was born. He named her “Chynna” after Wilson Phillips vocalist Chynna Phillips.
Lewis describes Taiwanese people as almost being “ego-less” and very keen to make new connections.
“It kind of feels like you’re meeting someone that you already have met before.”
She doesn’t know if she ever made a conscious choice to become a musician. Rather, it was just something she enjoyed doing—and helped her survive—after moving from Taiwan to Canada.
“Music was a place where I could express that sadness and the missing of home,” Lewis says. “There’s still so much of that coming up now in music for me.”
She’s currently working on her next project, a full-length album, which she plans on releasing in the winter of 2025. Lewis expects that it will have 13 or 14 songs, some of which will come from the 30 or 40 that she’s already written. Moreover, she is working with far more members of Toronto’s musical community than on her last EP.
“I have lots of writers who have collaborated with producers and session musicians—very amazing artists—that have breathed life into this project,” she says. “So yeah, I’m really excited.”
Chynna Lewis discusses how her lived experiences inform her songwriting.
The Jade Music Fest will present Chynna Lewis in a showcase called Concurrent on November 6. It starts at 7:30 p.m. at The Annex (823 Seymour Street) and will also feature Kapa Arkieh, Joyin Wang, and Theseus. For free tickets, visit JMF Showcase Concurrent. The Jade Music Fest runs from November 6 to 9 at various locations in Vancouver.
Follow Pancouver on X (formerly Twitter) @PancouverMedia and on Instagram @PancouverMedia. This article is part of “Beyond Chinese”, a joint initiative of Pancouver and the Asian-Canadian Special Events Association. Through interviews with artists and cultural workers, Beyond Chinese intends to offer a more nuanced view of people with Chinese ancestry. Pancouver and the Asian-Canadian Special Events Association gratefully acknowledge the support of Canadian Heritage.
