To hear her sing Vietnamese ballads, you wouldn’t know Dalena is American-born.
But the blue-eyed, blond sensation from Muncie, Ind., croons so well that she’s winning over Vietnamese fans.
Dalena, who doesn’t even speak the language she sings in, is the rage among Vietnamese youths and adults. Her sultry voice-often compared to that of Karen Carpenter-gives a new spin to old-fashioned love songs.
Her posters plaster store windows. Young fans copy her hairstyle and mail her hundreds of letters.
“Vietnamese music is so touching. I’ve never heard anything like it,” says Dalena, who, like Madonna, goes by only one name. “Here’s a language I don’t know, a culture I’m just getting to know, yet I totally love it.
“I always explain to Vietnamese people before I sing that I’m 100 percent American, but many people don’t believe it. They think there must be some Vietnamese blood in me.”
In fact, she’s never even seen the country whose language she sings so well.
Dalena has just released her fourth album in Vietnamese-“From Me to You, with Love, Dalena”-which she recorded in several studios around Orange County, Calif.
“I’m not up on American music anymore,” Dalena says. “I’ve been so busy trying to do the Vietnamese accents just right. It’s not easy, you know.”
To mimic the accented tones of Vietnam’s central region, the fast lilt common among southerners and the clear, clipped style of the northerners, all of which Dalena has perfected, she practices new songs for days.
Often, she says, she listens to two or three different recordings of the same song to pin down her pronunciation. She learns what the songs mean so she can seep a part of herself into its lyrics.
“Sometimes I love a song so much, I have to convey it in English,” Dalena said. “I want people to hear how beautiful and haunting Vietnamese music is.”
Dalena, who will not reveal her age except to say she considers herself 22, has toured much of the world. Russia is her next stop.
With no formal music training, Dalena began singing in church when she was 3. While other children contented themselves with toys and dolls, she wrote her first song at 10.
“She got out of a lot of dishwashing, I tell you,” recalled Darlene Arenberg, her mother and her manager. “Almost every time it was her turn, she’d say, `Oh Mother, I have a song I must write.’ “
At 13, Dalena, the sixth of seven children, taught herself to play the guitar. But her ability to mimic accents did not surface until the early ’80s, after getting a job selling tickets at Walt Disney World in Orlando.
Dalena said she learned to say “hello, goodbye” and other pleasantries in a dozen languages, doing it so well that foreigners would start conversations with her.
But the singer attributes her success simply to fate.
She bought a Chinese music tape from a Chinese grocery store in 1988. She found the music so haunting that she memorized it, later performing some songs for the Vietnamese-Chinese owner of a restaurant. By chance, he had a band that played Vietnamese songs and invited Dalena to join.
Dalena and the band played at weddings and parties, and she became so sought-after that word spread to a nightclub owner in Canada who invited her to sing. Before long, Dalena made her first appearance in Orange County, the heart of the overseas Vietnamese community, in 1990.
“Vietnamese youths look up to her, and for us, it’s an honor,” Arenberg said. “They say she gave them a newfound appreciation of their own music, which some of them couldn’t understand before until she translated it to English.”
Two dialects of Chinese, Hebrew, Spanish, French and Japanese are among the other languages Dalena can mimic. And she’s thinking of branching out to Japanese, Chinese or Spanish.
But for now, one special wish remains. Dalena dreams of going to Vietnam, once the United States and the country re-establish diplomatic relations, to perform for the people who inspired her career.
