Lifelong musician Terence Hsieh, OC ’12, never anticipated that one day he would be performing in Taiwan’s largest stadium on tour with Taiwanese American pop star David Tao. When he first moved to China, he hadn’t even planned for music production to be his main career. On Tuesday, in the middle of his world tour with Tao, Hsieh stopped by Oberlin to explain his winding career trajectory in the talk, “My Musical Journey in Greater China After Graduation.”
At Oberlin, Hsieh studied Jazz Performance and East Asian Studies. Although he had not always planned on moving to China after graduating, he visited several times, participating in language immersion programs and Winter Term projects. Hsieh’s experience abroad ended up forming the foundation for his future career in China.
“[I was a disciple of Wendell Logan, who] really impressed upon us that there was a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this,” Hsieh said. “That resulted in most of us having the dream to move to New York and to be showing up to as many jam sessions as we could, getting our butts kicked, learning how to play every song in every key, and then if we need to, have a side hustle as a teacher.”
Hsieh decided he didn’t want to partake in that kind of environment. In 2012, he bought a one-way ticket to Beijing. College fourth-year Kaiya Noguera, who attended the talk, was struck by the risk that he took.
“Him moving from the U.S. to Beijing a year after he had just graduated college — being so young and hungry to pursue this — that’s what really inspired me,” she said. “I can relate to that hunger.”
Initially, he did not intend on being a professional musician. He started work as a magazine editor, picturing music to be more of a side gig. Gradually, however, music became Hsieh’s primary career. In 2013, Hsieh worked his first gig for a singing competition TV show. From 2014 to 2020, he served as director of jazz programs at the International School of Beijing, and from 2016 to 2018, he worked at Blue Note Beijing as the artistic director of their jazz orchestra. Around this time, he also accompanied actress and singer Karen Mok on her Ultimate World Tour.
In January 2020, everything changed. Hsieh left Beijing to celebrate the Chinese New Year in North Carolina with his family. As he drove down the highway to the airport, he noticed an eerie lack of drivers surrounding him, a presage of the impending pandemic. From North Carolina, he flew to Taipei, Taiwan for a gig. While there, Beijing’s borders closed. Unable to return to the place he had lived in for nearly eight years, he stayed in Taiwan.
As Hsieh’s original musical plans for the next year fell apart, he had to reconsider what music production could look like in lockdown. He started to work on an album with some friends, working with new technologies so they could record asynchronously. With his band The Spice Cabinet, he produced the album The Adventures of Pie Boy, which won three Golden Melody awards in 2020.
In 2023, Tao reached out to Hsieh, asking him to join his world tour as a keyboardist. Now, he regularly performs for audiences of tens of thousands. Double-degree fourth-year Heyu Wang was amazed she got to hear Hsieh speak.
“I’m really impressed and feel lucky that I can talk with their keyboard player,” she said. “I’m a big fan of David Tao. I tried to buy tickets in China and they’ve always been sold out in 10 seconds.”
As a Theater major about to graduate, Noguera expressed that the talk came at just the right moment in her life.
“To attend an event where there’s an Oberlin alum, a person of color like myself, pursuing an arts-related career … was very inspirational and helped me believe that it’s not as impossible as some people may make it feel to pursue the arts,” she said. “It was something I really needed, especially with the semester coming to an end and graduation inching closer and closer.”
