“Fortunately, I met many nice teachers in my life who gave me encouragement. That’s why I chose to become a teacher,” she continues. After completing her degree, Lung started working as a full-time teacher in a secondary school.
In the classroom, Lung found students seemed to lack the initiative to learn. She wanted to find a way to get them more interested in their lessons. She thought songs would be perfect teaching tools because students love listening to pop music. They could help spread positive messages if the teenagers who listened to them learned the meanings of lyrics.
Last January, Lung shared her insight on her Facebook page. Dean Siu, her present manager, read the Facebook status and invited her to help rewrite lyrics of popular songs for him. Lung’s first attempt was to rework the lyrics to Canto-pop star Eason Chan Yik-shun’s Bitter Gourd.
The new version, Banana, was uploaded to YouTube. The singer’s name was given as Lung Siu-kwan. Explaining her stage-name, Lung says “Lung” symbolises the descendent of dragon, while “Kwan” means fungus in Chinese. “No matter how adverse the conditions are, I can persist and fight, like a fungus,” she says.
Lung Siu-kwan’s Banana track got more than 200,000 views in a short time and Lung received a lot of positive feedback. She decided to continue publishing songs on the internet as well as teaching. However the tight teaching schedule left little room for her to realise her ideas about education in class.
“The situation back then made me change my way of thinking. I hoped to continue my work in education using the lyrics I wrote,” she says. “I am an imaginative and creative person, so I decide to educate in another way.”
When a secondary school sent the internet singing sensation Lung Siu-kwan an invitation to perform in April, Lung felt she was ready for some changes and agreed. “I hoped I could sing in live shows and interact with audiences,” she recalls.
The only problem was Lung was still a full-time teacher and performing publicly would affect her job.
