Credit: IG/@realerin6
Key Takeaways
Some people are not suddenly seen. In the days when no one was watching, they quietly trained themselves up, little by little.
For most people, the first place they get to know Erin Lian (Lian Ying) is the stage. On stage she has power and steadiness, as if she can do anything well. But before she was truly seen, she was also slow to warm up and introverted, unsure how to get others to notice her.
She has been through training, auditions and waiting, and she was also cut the year she turned 19. Those moments made her doubt herself, and she once turned the outside world's standards into reasons to deny her own worth.
But this is not a story that stays stuck in the hurt.
She did not keep handing her worth to others to decide. Instead she slowly learned to turn waiting into preparation, and denial into a clearer understanding of herself. Later many people said she had changed, but Erin knows she never did.
What changed was only the way the world looked at her.
Having come all this way, what matters most for her is perhaps not that she finally got everyone to understand her, but that she first became the person who believes in herself.
Erin first began to imagine the stage back in kindergarten.
Both her parents loved music, and the television at home often played concert DVDs by artists like Madonna, Queen, Bon Jovi and Il Divo. Watching the singers stand on stage, the young girl naturally felt that one day she could become someone like that too.
Later she took up dance and moved toward the girl-group and performance stage. Looking back, she does not single out any one phase as the only turning point, because every stretch of experience led her to different people and things and let her absorb something new.
She describes herself as a sponge, soaking up everything around her every day, without stopping.
"I believe no step is ever taken in vain, so every choice is crucial to me."
That line is very much like Erin. She is not the type to frame her life as some glamorous comeback. More often, she simply believes that the roads she has walked stay with her, and even when there is no result in the moment, it does not mean that step was meaningless.
Before her debut she was someone slow to warm up and introverted, not quite knowing how to get others to notice her, and not good at promoting herself. The method she knew best was to put her head down and train.
But effort does not always get noticed right away. Back when she took part in her first talent show, she auditioned four or five times, and after that was called to the open auditions, yet still was not chosen. She was devastated, thinking to herself, "Is this how it ends?"
That process of waiting to be chosen was always hard for her. Not because she felt she was naturally owed an opportunity, but because when someone has already worked so hard and the next step is still not in their own hands, it is easiest to start doubting yourself.
What truly made Erin doubt for a while whether she was suited to this path was a cut she suffered the year she turned 19.
She had just arrived in Taipei, a stranger to the city, and her family had run into trouble too. She was a girl-group trainee at an agency, in line for debut, and about half a year after joining she was cut in an evaluation.
She describes that time very bluntly: on the road to chasing her dream, she fell flat on her face.
What hurt was not just losing the chance, but that she began to pile all the reasons for the failure onto herself. Was she not thin enough? Not pretty enough? Was she really not as valuable as others said?
Her intense body-image anxiety led her to try some extreme weight-loss methods. During that time she was negative every day, hated herself, and even felt it was a kind of "negative energy you couldn't hide even if you tried".
What broke her most was that she did not know how she could get any better. She once worked up the courage to ask a staff member whether there was something she had done wrong and how she could improve. The answer she got was this:
"You haven't done anything wrong, you're just not polished enough."
"There's nothing wrong with you, but that is your biggest problem."
To someone who had always believed "if you're not good enough, keep training", that answer was cruel. Because it pointed to no move she could correct, no skill she could shore up; it was as if it were saying she, as a whole person, was the problem.
During that time it was friends and family who stayed by her, reminding her that a person's worth should not be judged by anyone. Only then did she slowly climb out of the self-denial.
Later she joined the reality idol show "DD52" and was seen by far more people. But before that, hardly anyone knew these stories.
The first time she felt truly remembered by an audience was a trailer that aired before the show.
On screen, she made those remarks about "dance level". People began sending the clip to her and tagging her online. Seeing it, she was both startled and thrilled, and immediately sent it to her mom, with a small feeling that "this was all part of my plan". The line carries a smile, and also a certainty only she herself knows.
She is not someone who was suddenly seen. She simply waited a long time, trained a long time, and was let down many times. So when the chance really came, she would not pretend she was unprepared. But after her debut, she quickly understood that a dream coming true does not mean all she has to do afterward is perform hard.
"Just having ability and working hard is not nearly enough; at most it's a passing grade."
Having learned dance since she was little, she was once used to a more straightforward world. In dance, you can often let your ability do the talking; where you fall short, you keep training. But the entertainment industry is not only about ability. It also involves the camera, relationships, individual character, work judgment, and how the world sees you.
That was almost her first proper job. Many things that people can slowly learn in an ordinary workplace, she had to figure out while standing in front of the camera.
When the group first debuted, she often felt she was "the one left over". After the host called out the other members, the one whose name was not called at the end was sometimes her.
She simply told herself that in the days when no one had noticed her yet, she had to work harder than everyone else. While the chance had not come, she would store up her strength; once it came, she would seize it well. Waiting is not stopping. Waiting is getting yourself ready first.
She calls this her own "cheetah spirit".
As a girl-group member, your looks, your figure, your popularity and your stage performance can easily become the standards by which others judge you.
Because her looks did not fit the so-called "girl-group standard", Erin kept going through being chosen, being cut, then being chosen again. It frustrated her and also made her unwilling to accept it, because she knew her worth was far more than that.
Later she began to push herself to be stronger, thinner, prettier. Not because she fully believed in the outside world's standards, but because she no longer wanted to stay forever in a position where she could only wait for others to decide.
She wanted to choose the position she wanted to stand in.
After a certain point, many people felt she had "grown into someone almost unrecognizable", surprised at how she had become who she is now. But she herself knew clearly that she had never changed.
"What changed was only the way the world looked at me."
This line is not a denial of the effort she put in. On the contrary, she knows exactly how much work she did on her ability, her looks and managing her condition. It is just that she also knows the person who loved the stage, was willing to train, and had ideas about her work had in fact been there all along.
She also does not see all appearance management as catering to others.
In her mind, being an idol is a serious profession. A girl-group member needs discipline, needs to keep improving, and needs a certain degree of management over her appearance. This is a job she chose herself, so she believes she must also be responsible for that choice.
She is not trying to become the girl-group member in other people's eyes, but to become the kind of girl-group member she herself believes in.
People around her would say, "There's no way Little Lian would be like that," or "Little Lian will definitely do it well." These words are a kind of trust, and they also slowly became a kind of pressure. Because when everyone believes you can do it, it becomes even harder to admit that you also have your vulnerable, anxious, not-okay moments.
She is in fact like many people: she has social anxiety, body-image anxiety, and gets world-weary too. She just does not like letting others see these parts. She always felt that an idol's duty is to bring people joy, and that no one has any obligation to carry her emotions. So much of the time, she would slowly process things alone first.
This habit probably started in college. Back then her dad passed away, which dealt her a heavy blow, but she also discovered that even when her own world changed, the world outside kept turning as usual. From then on, she rarely told others right away when a low point hit; instead she waited until she had sorted herself out before sharing with the people who cared about her. It is not that she did not need comfort. She was just too used to not letting others worry first.
But everyone has a moment when they can no longer hold on.
When the group had just debuted and was promoting its first album intensively, the schedule was so packed she could barely sleep one or two hours a day. One day she finally could not hold it together and called her mom. The moment the call connected, she burst into tears, able only to keep saying, "I'm really so tired, so tired."
She no longer remembers what her mom said that day, only that every time she finished talking with her mom, her mood would lift a great deal, and she would feel again that she still had the strength to carry on.
Family has always been very important to her. No matter how busy work is, every Lunar New Year she will move heaven and earth to return to her grandmother's home in Pingtung to be with family. That place is like a harbor; just being with family, she can be fully at ease as herself.
Another one waiting for her at home every day is the cat "Tabi", who has kept her company since she was four months old. Tabi is very clingy, following her wherever she goes, lying beside her purring every day. Whenever she has no work, Erin basically stays home to play with her.
On stage she has to hold up so many things. But back home, she can finally stop having to be strong all the time.
Some kinds of pressure can be swallowed by the emotions first, but the body remembers. Late last year, with too much work pressure, Erin had a panic attack in her sleep for the first time. She was in Australia, suddenly unable to breathe normally, and her first thought was that she seemed about to die, followed by a very real thought: "I don't want to die in a foreign land."
Afterward, the same thing happened on and off a few more times. At first she did not know what was wrong, only that it was terrifying, until she saw a doctor and learned it was hyperventilation brought on by panic. In that moment she finally faced the fact that she really had been pushing herself too hard.
She used to feel that if she was not making progress, she was falling behind. Now she has begun to feel that life is more like the tides: there is a rising tide, and there will surely be an ebb too.
Sometimes you charge ahead very fast, and now and then you freeze in place like a crashed machine. Ebbing a little more this time does not mean the next tide will not rise even higher.
She did not stop her steps because of it; she simply began to learn to accept. The good, the bad, the moving forward, the standing still, all can be part of life.
A person does not need to prove every single moment that they are getting better. Sometimes, being willing to stop and rest is itself a way of protecting yourself.
In recent years, the area where Erin feels she has grown the most is her ability to bring everything together. Now she takes part in different stages of her own music and visual work. From music production, visual design and costume styling to script proposals and budgeting, she is involved to a large degree in all of it.
In the past she might have felt that as long as she took care of her performance on stage, that was enough. Now she has begun to understand that a piece of work is not completed by the single moment of finally stepping on stage. It includes the choices, judgments and communication that come before, and it includes whether you are willing to take responsibility for your own ideas.
She once used a single sentence to describe this shift: that she was "no longer just a commodity at the mercy of others, but an artist with a will of her own".
Placed within her story, this line is not an accusation, nor a rebellion. It is more like a girl who, having grown up, finally begins to know what she wants and does not want, and has the ability to take part in deciding how she is presented.
The Erin of today also denies herself less often because of other people's judgments.
Not because she does not care about the outside world at all, but because she is now clearer about where her own worth lies.
Erin says she is someone who is often misunderstood. When people are not close to her, many find her aggressive and hard to get along with. Only after truly getting to know her do they realize she is nothing like that.
But the Erin of today is no longer in a hurry to explain herself to everyone. Because she believes time will let people see who she really is.
This belief is also like the reminder she has given herself all along. She feels that on the path of art, one of the hardest things is to choose to believe in yourself even when no one has seen you yet and no one understands your worth.
She loves a line Lady Gaga often shares: when there are 100 people in a room and 99 of them don't believe in you, you only need one person who does.
Later she came to understand that the one person is not someone else; it is yourself.
For the Erin of today, becoming the lead of her own life is not about being strong forever, nor about everyone liking her. It is about becoming who she wants to be, saying what she wants to say, doing what she wants to do, eating what she wants to eat, wearing what she wants to wear, and loving whom she wants to love.
If she could say one thing to the self who was just starting to chase her dream and was still so afraid of being denied, she would say:
"I know you won't give up, and you'll definitely succeed, so go and experience life to the fullest!"
All content and images in this article are published with the interviewee's prior authorization.
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人物FAQ
Erin Lian (Lian Ying) is a girl-group member and performer from Pingtung, Taiwan. From kindergarten she was inspired by her parents' concert DVDs, moving from dance all the way to the girl-group stage, and she once took part in the reality idol show "DD52". For her, the vulnerability and emotions off stage are usually things she processes slowly on her own.
When she first arrived in Taipei at 19, she was a girl-group trainee at an agency, and after about half a year she was cut. Combined with severe body-image anxiety, she rejected herself completely for a time. Late last year, work pressure even triggered a panic attack in her sleep, with hyperventilation, and only then did she face the fact that she had been pushing herself too hard.
It means that in the days before anyone has noticed you, you work harder than others and store up your strength, and the moment a chance arrives you seize it with everything you have. For her, waiting is not stopping; it is getting yourself ready first.
She went from only caring about getting on stage to taking part in the music production, visual design, costume styling, scripting and budgeting of her work, describing herself as "no longer just a commodity at the mercy of others, but an artist with a will of her own". For her, this is what it means to stop handing your worth to others to decide, and to first become the one person who believes in herself.
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