Why this award-winning folk musician in Vancouver sings in English, Mandarin, Taiwanese and French

For Vancouver songwriter Gina Lam, music is a way to reconnect to her roots in Taiwan, where her parents are from.

Lam, known by her stage name Ginalina, has released Going Back: Remembered and Remixed Family Folk Songs Volume 1, a compilation of Asian folk songs in English, and Mandarin and Taiwanese, which her parents speak. The songs feature a fusion of guitar, ukelele, and Chinese string instruments such as guzheng and erhu.

She also sings in French on other albums.

Lam, who has received three Juno nominations, four Canadian Folk Music nominations and two Western Canadian Music Awards, is teaming up with the Vancouver Chinese Music Ensemble on Feb. 26 to perform modern and traditional folk songs at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver Chinatown.

She spoke to Margaret Gallagher on CBC's North by Northwest about her latest album.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

I really love that song — it makes me smile a lot. What's the origin?

The nursery rhyme is a song from Taiwan, and it's one of the few songs I remember singing when I was a child from Taiwan. 

The lyrics are really funny, and it's just a little poem about how there's an old woman riding a trishaw, but somebody's pulling it and the fee is being charged a couple of cents. Instead, the one pays a lot more for that. So the tagline is: "Do you find that strange?" or "don't you find that strange?" And it's just meant to be a little nostalgic piece from my parents's homeland.

I love the images you create about going to the markets and the sound of the languages. I went to China once during Lunar New Year, and I have Chinese origin, and it brought me back there to that feeling of being in that place.

That's what I was hoping for, because in fact I grew up here in Canada and now I've got my West Coast roots. But I thought, "How are we going to bring this kind of nostalgic feeling to even those people who've never experienced that?" It was really fun to bring all those instruments together.

The album is called Going Back: Remembered and Remixed Family Folk Songs, Volume 1. What do you mean by 'remembered and remixed'? 

A lot of these songs are actually songs I've never grown up with.

This particular first one we talked about … I don't actually know how I was taught. Maybe it was in a Chinese school. Maybe my mom had said it. Maybe when I visited Taiwan, my grandparents had said it to me.

But the other songs are pieces I had to research and look up, because when I was growing up, my parents were working so hard and also wanting to make sure my English language was on track, so they didn't sing to me. 

Certainly these songs ... would have been their childhood songs and after immigrating to Canada and taking on the responsibilities of all those things, I don't think they had time to necessarily consider bringing these songs into my life.

You describe your music as being for families. Why did you want to work in this genre?

I've got a couple of other albums and they're all rooted in this West Coast family folk sound. Those albums were inspired by my time outside with my kids and just being with them.

It's almost been a decade of just being very present with them and following their passions and guiding them along their interests, and I felt like making music that followed the track and path of our life was a meaningful way to document our story.

Some people take photographs and some people do videos, and all those are amazing ways to keep track of life that's passing. But there was a real joy in documenting our lives through songs.

So these family folk songs I've presented on this particular project, Going Back: Remembered and Remixed, was something that was created with a lot of help from my parents.

I was thinking my kids would enjoy it, and should they ever have kids, their kids would enjoy it.

These kinds of ideas really helped my vision, as I wanted to make these songs really accessible to children now and children in the future who might have some curiosity or even some real heritage in their Asian roots. That way, they could understand what these songs were about and get that feeling of nostalgia.

You sing in three languages. Why was it important for you to bring them together?

When I grew up, my parents spoke English and Mandarin to me, and they really were fine with me responding in English — they never tried to push me to speak Mandarin. They spoke to each other in their native language of Taiwanese. 

I often heard their conversations and I couldn't quite figure out what they're saying, but I really wanted to. It wasn't until much later when I finished university that I had this opportunity to go and study language in China. 

I took a year away from Canada to go and travel, teach and study Mandarin and Chinese culture in Nanjing, China. It was really eye-opening to suddenly figure out and be exposed to the nuances of certain words.

When I came back, I knew I could understand my parents on a much deeper level, and I knew what they were saying wasn't necessarily the exact translation of what they meant. But there's some transliteration going on and some cultural nuance happening. 

Being able to sing this particular album in English and Mandarin, and then my parents' native language of Taiwanese, felt so honouring.

WATCH | Ginalina sings In the River in French and English:

How did you begin in music? I understand you also have an engineering background.

I always had music as part of my life. When I grew up, my oldest brother encouraged me to play the violin. Because he really enjoyed the violin, I remember him taking me and positioning my shoulders and putting the violin underneath my chin. He would say, "Gina, you're going to learn how to play the violin, but you really need some muscle strength. So today, we're just going to stand with the violin underneath your chin for as long as you can." 

Maybe he was wanting to do something else and he was just babysitting me. But I was like, "My older brother is so wise. I'm going to just do everything as he said." So I started playing the violin when I was quite young — and I've got strong shoulders.

I continued in that, and in high school, I picked up the guitar.

I just continued using the guitar as a way to explore some contemporary songs and popular songs, but also as a way to express some feelings I was going through. 

High school and university can be filled with so many emotions, and for me, working through them with music was really therapeutic and cathartic. That didn't change even as I studied and travelled in China for a year; it didn't change when I worked as an engineer for a long time; and it certainly didn't change when I had my kids.