From setbacks to light: Karen Kong on her debut, forgiveness and Light

Using durian to describe herself: direct rather than eager to please

The interview opens with a simple icebreaker: if Karen had to describe herself as a food, she would choose durian. She says the fruit is hard and covered with spikes on the outside, yet sweet and soft inside, which she feels resembles her personality. People may initially find her difficult to approach, but after spending time with her they see a gentler side.

She also says she speaks directly and does not like deliberately trying to “please” people. For a relationship to last, she believes the other person will eventually need to accept who she really is. Rather than spending a long time together only to discover that their personalities do not fit, she would rather be straightforward from the beginning. That reluctance to package herself becomes a thread through the episode: whether she is discussing music, career lows or faith, she looks back candidly at both her weaknesses and her experiences.

Debuting in the piracy era: fifty tour dates in three months

Looking back at her debut in Malaysia, one of Karen’s strongest memories is entering the industry when legitimate CDs were being hit hard by piracy. Albums required substantial money and effort to make, yet legitimate discs were not expensive and pirate copies were far cheaper, making it difficult for labels and singers to recover what they had invested.

Her company responded in the most direct way possible: travelling around Malaysia to perform and sell CDs on site. Karen recalls completing fifty appearances in about three months, moving continuously from Friday to Sunday among cafés, live houses, schools and shopping malls, sometimes doing two or three events in a single day. The team drove from Kuala Lumpur to Malacca and Johor, and even travelled to Singapore for interviews. They might sleep only three or four hours before setting off again, and sometimes did not sleep at all.

The intensive schedule let her see fans queue to buy legitimate albums, fulfilling a childhood dream of holding signing events in large shopping malls. It also became important live training. Sound quality varied dramatically between venues; sometimes only basic built-in equipment was available, and she still had to perform when unwell or with a sore throat close to losing her voice. She remembers crying after one show because she felt she had performed badly, yet these experiences gradually built the ability she later relied on in live settings.

“Neither the high notes nor the low notes worked”: how rejection changed her path

Karen was born on Labuan, Malaysia. She describes the island as having almost no route into entertainment, so anyone hoping to appear on television or join a major singing contest had to leave for Kuala Lumpur. As a child she often watched Hong Kong entertainment programmes and especially admired the New Talent Singing Awards, knowing that winners of the Malaysian competition could have the chance to compete in Hong Kong.

She later entered Malaysian Idol and a New Talent-related audition in the same year, but her first experience went badly. Karen remembers being eliminated after singing only the first line, with judges bluntly telling her that neither her high notes nor her low notes worked and that she should go away and practise. The setback hurt deeply. For a period, she would even cry when she saw singing competitions on television because she could not accept that she had failed to get in.

A friend eventually told her that instead of giving up on herself, she should genuinely learn how to sing. Karen used money earned from a summer job to pay for formal vocal training. The following year she tried the same two auditions again and was accepted by both. By then, however, she had won a university singing competition and had been discovered by musician 李志清, who invited her to audition. She ultimately signed as a singer, recording her first Malay-language album while finishing university and officially releasing it after graduating in 2007.

From Taiwan challenge appearances to Hong Kong: the unfinished Cantonese album

After debuting in Malaysia, Karen went to Taiwan with a very small record company. To save money, she at times shared one hotel room with her female boss and manager. Alongside adapting to an unfamiliar environment, she had to learn local language habits and culture. Mandarin was already one of the languages she used, but she jokes that hers was a hometown form of Mandarin; in Taiwan she watched variety shows and idol dramas every day to learn “Taiwan Mandarin.”

She auditioned for programmes including One Million Star and Super Idol, and because of her identity and the shows’ arrangements, she gradually appeared as a challenger rather than an ordinary contestant. Those Taiwan challenge-stage appearances then led to an opportunity in Hong Kong. Karen had originally intended only to come for promotion, not to stay, but the response after her television appearance exceeded expectations and she quickly received different job and collaboration offers.

What truly attracted her to developing in Hong Kong was a proposal to make a Cantonese record of her own. Karen began learning Cantonese from scratch—reading newspapers, watching television dramas and practising pronunciation—because she wanted to make the project well. When the album was nearly finished, however, the company abruptly stopped production and asked her to return to Malaysia. She felt disappointed and disrespected: she had originally wanted to remain in Taiwan, had come to Hong Kong because of the company’s plan, and after investing so much effort was suddenly told to leave.

In the end, driven by a desire to prove herself, she bought a one-way ticket back to Hong Kong, changed her telephone number and decided to stay on her own to pursue the dream of completing a Cantonese record.

Staying in Hong Kong alone: Chiu Tsang Hei and “angels” during a low period

Once she was truly living alone in Hong Kong, Karen quickly discovered that the first question was no longer how to make music, but how to survive. Without family or a familiar circle of friends nearby, she had to solve accommodation, work and living expenses herself while adapting to a pace of life very different from Malaysia. She describes Hong Kong as a place where “everything is fast,” with pressure from the city itself seeping into people. Over time, her emotional state sank into a low period.

During this period, Chiu Tsang Hei became one of the important people in her life. Karen describes him as both a mentor and, at that time, a “lifesaver.” Beyond making music with her and teaching her songwriting, he helped with work and visa matters so that she at least had enough income to keep going. Chiu encouraged her to write her emotions into songs and use creation to organise what she was feeling. It did not solve everything at once, but it began to give her an outlet.

Another turning point came backstage at a television station. 陳明恩 and Gary Lau noticed that she was not in a good emotional state, prayed for her and invited her to a Christian singers’ group. At her first gathering she saw Jade Kwan personally cooking and pouring tea for everyone, which was a major cultural shock for her: why would a singer she regarded as a diva-level figure care for others without airs? That kind of concern, with no obvious return expected, led Karen to reconsider both faith and the way she had previously dealt with people.

Beginning with a wedding invitation: reconciling with her former boss

One of the biggest lessons Karen connects with faith is forgiveness. She knew she had carried deep anger towards her former record-company boss, but when faced with the idea of genuinely forgiving him, her first reaction was still that she could not do it. Her friend Mimi 鄧婉玲 reminded her that forgiveness is difficult by nature; if she could not do it immediately, she did not need to force herself and could move through the process gradually.

The real opening came while Karen was preparing for her wedding. She suddenly felt that she wanted to invite her former boss. Although afraid of being rejected, she eventually called him, and he quickly accepted. After the wedding, a former colleague told her that the boss had been moved to tears when he saw her getting married. For Karen, this was the first time she began to reinterpret the past: perhaps he had always cared for her, but neither side had known how to communicate in the right way.

Even more unexpectedly, the day after the wedding Karen went for a walk by the sea and ran into her former boss without any arrangement at all. They spoke again, and after that she began meeting him for meals whenever she returned to Kuala Lumpur. Their previously tense relationship gradually healed. He later transferred to her, for a symbolic one dollar, the rights to songs she had recorded in Hong Kong in the past.

Looking back, Karen says forgiveness is not simply a matter of saying “let it go.” It took a long period of struggle, understanding and concrete action before the relationship between them genuinely changed.

Forgiveness Works and Light: taking the “rubbish” out of the backpack piece by piece

That reconciliation is directly connected to Karen’s newer song Forgiveness Works. She sees forgiveness as a deep and difficult subject. People often tell someone who has been hurt to “let go so you can free yourself,” but a person still inside the wound may simply not be able to do that immediately. The song therefore is not telling listeners to forgive someone at once; it is meant to accompany people who are still struggling.

She compares accumulated resentment and bitterness to “rubbish” in a heavy backpack. Each time a person truly forgives someone, it is like taking one piece of rubbish out. As the weight gradually decreases, the person has more strength to keep moving forward. For Karen, forgiveness does not erase what happened in the past, but it means she no longer has to carry those events on her back all the time.

Forgiveness Works is also part of the Light EP. Karen says making her first Cantonese EP had once been an important reason for coming to Hong Kong, but after years of twists and turns she had come to think it might never happen. Completing Light eventually felt to her like a gift from her faith. Each of the six songs has a different theme, almost as if she first received a “blueprint” and then realised the ideas one by one.

Turning the most painful experiences into strength: In the Blink of an Eye and music as healing

Later in the programme, Karen talks about how much she admires people who can transform their own suffering into strength—for example, people who write about illness after going through it and then encourage others facing the same situation. She hopes her music can do something similar: not hide the most painful parts of her past, but turn those experiences into works that can accompany other people.

She particularly hopes that people who are in despair or cannot see meaning in life may hear her songs and, just as friends once pulled her up, begin to see a little light and hope again from the darkness.

Near the end of the episode, host Leslie also shares that In the Blink of an Eye gave him great comfort during a period when he was emotionally stretched very tight. He describes hearing it for the first time as being like a small boat battered by a storm suddenly entering a calm lake. From the introduction to Karen’s voice, he gradually became still and felt, for the first time, what “healing” through music could mean.

From early audition rejection and fifty tour dates, through Taiwan challenge appearances, living alone in Hong Kong and enduring a low period, to learning forgiveness and completing Light, the episode links more than Karen’s singing résumé. It shows how she has repeatedly tried to turn failure, disappointment and pain into the starting point for the next piece of music.