During a 2025 Chinese-American cultural exchange Lantern Festival gala, Eric HZ and celebrated Chinese performing artist Liu Xiaoqing took the stage together.
Eric HZ serves as both host and guest performer for renowned Chinese singer Tan Jing’s “Musical Journey” concert at New York’s Lincoln Center, while also performing “Child” alongside young musicians.
Through “Child,” Eric HZ explores fatherhood, cultural identity and how love can be understood across languages and cultures.
I hope to carry my culture with me into the world.”— Eric HZ (Hechen Zhao)LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, September 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Prior to Eric HZ’s lead vocal kicking in on Child, the track opens with the laughter of his young kids.
Child, submitted for GRAMMY® consideration in the Best Asian Pop Music Performance category, originated from a realization Eric had after becoming a father: love does not vanish when someone errs.
What insight about love did fatherhood give you?
“Kids mess up. They can be stubborn, playful and far from perfect,” Eric states. “Yet none of that alters the simplest reality: they remain my children, and my love for them will never diminish. Above all, I want them to grow up feeling loved.”
That notion formed the emotional heart of Child. It was a deliberate choice to keep his children’s actual voices at the opening.
“Strip away the production, the arrangement and the performance, and this song originates from something quite plain — a father with his children,” he says. “I wanted that authenticity to stay in the recording.”
That concept of love reaches beyond Eric’s own household. Alongside his artistic career, he instructs and guides youth who are passionate about music, watching them evolve from hesitation during vocal lessons and rehearsals to the bravery required to perform on stage. Through projects linked to the Chinese American Federation of Arts and Culture and the Chinese American Music Festival, he has worked to build platforms where young voices can be heard.
In 2025, Eric performed alongside acclaimed Chinese performing artist Liu Xiaoqing at a Chinese-American cultural exchange Lantern Festival gala. Later that same year, he was asked to perform Child at the Golden Angel Awards ceremony of the 21st Chinese American Film Festival and Chinese American TV Festival, where he also received the International Outstanding Contribution to Arts and Culture Award. In 2026, he hosted and performed as a guest artist at New York’s Lincoln Center for renowned Chinese singer Tan Jing’s Musical Journey concert.
Several of the young musicians Eric has mentored have also shared major stages with him. Thomas Wu, Mia Zhang, Derek Roy Li, Isabella Ruoxi Hu, Feiyin Wu, Yuni Guan and others — also invited performers at the 21st Chinese American Film Festival and Chinese American TV Festival — provided both background vocals and live contributions to Child.
“A song I wrote for my children ended up becoming a piece where young musicians could add their own voices,” Eric explains. “My hope is to help them reach bigger platforms, so more people can listen to what they have to share. Somewhere along the way, their aspirations became intertwined with mine.”
Can a Chinese Story Connect with a Global Audience?
As Asian pop music gains greater international visibility, Eric has been pondering another issue: what does it mean for a Chinese-language artist to connect with a broader audience while preserving his cultural identity?
“I hope to carry my culture with me into the world.”
“I used to ask myself whether reaching a larger audience meant conforming to something the world already knew,” Eric says. “Now I think the opposite is true. I don’t intend to erase my origins in order to be comprehensible.”
He doesn’t view Child as an effort to interpret Chinese culture for a global audience.
“I don’t want to offer the world a lecture on Chinese culture,” he says. “I prefer to tell an honest narrative rooted in my culture, my family and my life. If someone from an entirely different background hears it and reflects on their own father, their own child, or someone who loved them despite their flaws, then we have already achieved mutual understanding.”
For Eric, cultural roots and universal appeal are not opposing forces.
“Culture provides us with different methods of expressing ourselves. Love gives us a means to understand one another.”
Two Songs, One Pursuit of Meaning
While Child originates from fatherhood, Eric’s other track submitted for GRAMMY® consideration, Encounter (还好遇见你), explores another facet of his life: faith and humanity’s quest for meaning and purpose.
“Both of them begin with love,” Eric says. “Child helped me grasp love through the lens of being a father. Encounter comes from my personal journey of faith and the questions that journey has prompted me to contemplate.”
“Faith has influenced my life and given me my own answers, but music doesn’t demand that everyone reach the same conclusion,” he adds. “No matter our culture or belief system, many of us eventually pose similar questions: Why are we here? What imbues life with purpose? What makes a life worth living?”
For Eric, a song can stay grounded in a specific language, family, culture or faith while still reaching someone whose life looks completely different.
Remembering Where the Music Started
Child features lyrics by Eric HZ and music by Christian TJ, with production handled by Zhang Zhonghao, Christian TJ and Eric HZ. Zhang Xianhua served as mixing engineer, Chris Gehringer as mastering engineer, and Xu XiaoDong performed electric guitar. Background vocals are provided by Thomas Wu, Mia Zhang, Derek Roy Li, Isabella Ruoxi Hu, Feiyin Wu and Yuni Guan.
When asked what he hopes a non-Chinese speaker might take away from Child, Eric returns to the song’s origin.
“We spend a lot of time asking how far someone can go,” he says. “I’ve become more interested in a different question: as I travel farther, will I remember why I began — and where I came from?”
If a person who has never encountered Eric HZ hears Child and recalls a parent, a child, or someone who once loved them unconditionally, then language has not become an obstacle.
It has become a connection.
And perhaps that is the greater promise for music that transcends cultures:
We don’t have to abandon our origins in order to arrive somewhere new.
Child — For Your GRAMMY® Consideration: Best Asian Pop Music Performance
Encounter — For Your GRAMMY® Consideration: Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song
Chris Jin
Chinese-American Federation of Arts and Culture
festival@cafacofficial.org
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Eric HZ Performs “Child” at the 21st Chinese American Film Festival Golden Angel Awards
