Teresa Teng; Taiwanese Pop Singer
Teresa Teng, 42, a Taiwanese pop star whose ballads won fans across East Asia in the 1980s. China banned Miss Teng’s love songs as “spiritual pollution,” but fans still listened to her on pirated tapes smuggled from Hong Kong. Taiwan used her songs in anti-communist propaganda broadcasts to mainland China during the Cold War. A singer since the age of 6, Miss Teng sang in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and English. She stopped singing in recent years and had been living in France. In Bangkok on May 8 after an asthma attack.
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