The 1988 Woman’s Heart, Sarah Chen’s first collaboration with Jonathan Lee, held a special status in Mandopop history1. Lee described it as the first of three albums he used to shape Sarah Chen into Taiwan’s “voice of urban women,” with the songs acting like “strong medicine” to wash away her past2. In the previous issue, we challenged this framework by showing that Woman’s Heart drew conceptual inspiration from Chen’s earlier English album, Miracle of Love. But was Lee’s Mandopop adaptation better than the original, especially in promoting women’s agency? Here, we examined the four Lee-written songs most similar to Miracle of Love. We found that although the Chinese songs were narratively more detailed, they were consistently reductive, restricting women to nonreciprocal and dependent roles. Despite its promotion as an album heralding women’s independence, Woman’s Heart is fundamentally a Man’s Heart – a description of what women in 1980s Taiwan were allowed to be in a patriarchal society.

陈淑桦和李宗盛的首度合作——1988年的《女人心》——在华语乐坛史上占据独特地位1。李宗盛将它描述为陈淑桦「都市女子」三部曲的第一部，其中的歌曲是要把陈淑桦“以前所有的旧的形象全部洗掉”2。十月一日的期刊对这种说法提出疑问，发现《女人心》在概念上非常接近陈淑桦之前的英文专辑《爱的奇迹》（Miracle of Love）。

虽然可能是效仿，但《女人心》会不会青出于蓝，在女性地位的呈现上比英文专辑更上一层楼？本期比较了四首与《爱的奇迹》最相似、由李宗盛作词的歌曲，发现虽然《女人心》里的歌有更多叙事细节，其中女人的地位却总是比英文歌中的女人更受束缚。《爱的奇迹》中的女人期待的是平等的爱，改写后，《女人心》中的女人成了依赖婚姻、为爱付出而不求回报的女人。虽然官方宣传说《女人心》迎合了都市女子的独立性，它更像是「男人心」：八十年代台湾父权社会里，男人替女人规划出来的心。