They say you haven’t truly made it until you’ve survived your first scandal. Helena Gao was launched headfirst into hers immediately after she released the first single of her most recent project, Gao Dan Dan.

In May, the Danish-Chinese singer who was living in Shanghai at the time dropped her song “Lao Shi” (or “teacher” in Chinese) which was already generating buzz on the Chinese social media platform Douyin after she posted a dance challenge on the app. But shortly after it landed on streaming, and the hook — “老师可不可以教我咋么爱” (“teacher, can you teach me how to love”) — went viral on Douyin with over a million uses, the song was swiftly was banned on the app.

“It got taken down,” Gao says over a video call in August, explaining that some of the song’s language and content had flagged concerns on Chinese social media. “I don't condone [student-teacher relationships], I think teachers should not be friends with their students, honestly,” she adds. “But I used it as a metaphor. I [had] friends who called each other lao shi all the time. It’s like every time I’m with my friends I’d be like, lao shi! Lao shi!”

Gao, who splits time between Shanghai, London, and Copenhagen, isn’t one to get her feathers ruffled. Dealing with the hubbub has been “chill,” she says — “There's not really anything you can do.” And she exhibits a self-awareness around the fact that she’s trying to “make it big” in a country, and culture, she didn’t grow up in.

That’s the circumstance that birthed Gao Dan Dan, her stylish and bilingual left-field pop record that was written during her early stints of living and partying in Shanghai alone for the first time as an adult. A merging of trendy Western sonic influences and Chinese colloquialisms, its clubby songs illuminate the invisible fissure line where both sides of these cultural spheres meet: where flirty, student-teacher bops inadvertently set off cultural alarms and Chinese-language club anthems are about getting with a foreigner. And while these songs did initially stem from Gao’s desire to enter the country’s music industry, they grew to encompass something more transformative for the singer.

“It's very much about reconnecting with my roots,” Gao says of creating the record. “I think I was trying to alienate myself from [my Chinese identity] when I was younger and it just felt like I was stealing some part of myself. That's something spending time here has allowed me to dig further into.”

Gao grew up in the roughly 300,000 person-populated, diversity-“nonexistant” city of Aarhus in Denmark which was not conducive to forging strong connections to her Chinese identity, she says. Born to a family of “late bloomers,” who changed countries and careers late in their life, she was one of “maybe like three” Asian kids at her school of nearly one-thousand students.

“You would internalize and you would brew on [ideas about your identity] for a long time,” Gao says of her childhood. “I didn't even realize that I had internalized some until I was in my 20s and had moved to Copenhagen and had met more people who were anything like me. Asian was just not something that I had encountered, basically.”

Beyond meeting more people that shared her background, Gao’s move to Copenhagen to attend the prestigious Rhythmic Music Conservatory (whose alumni include Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Molina, Clarissa Connelly, and Smerz) opened up her musical life. Growing up she was a student of the piano but time at the conservatory steered her interests into production and honing her own voice.

After graduation, Gao went on her first songwriting trip to Los Angeles where she met Margo XS, MNEK, and Zara Larsson, with whom she would write parts of Midnight Sun and its subsequent deluxe edition, Midnight Sun: Girl’s Trip. In the West, that’s largely how Gao’s become known, though she considers it to be but an asterisk in her artistic journey. “That’s been crazy to witness,” she says. “[It’s] a lot of exposure. Everything has come in such a way you have to react pretty fast. We definitely used that as a ramp for my own project.”

Gao Dan Dan is a homecoming dressed up as a club record. After the pandemic, Gao returned to Shanghai for the first time in years, spurred on by a curiosity to re-experience a place she’d only ever visited with her parents. In between all-nighters at the club and meeting local DJs and other creatives, she began writing music that played off of the new slang and culture she was experiencing for the first time.

Songs like “wo sao ni” (or “I scan you,” a riff on China’s QR-code payment system) and “niu bi” (which roughly translates to “cool” or “badass”) — use Chinese lingo to express social connection and flex how cool her life is. She wrote “Lao Wai,” a slinkier number that plays into her own exoticization in the country with the lyric “Do you wanna try getting with a 老外” or “foreigner,” after noticing how often she was being stared at in the country. The songs, playful and light on the exterior, feel revelatory from an anthropological lens: depending on whether you’re hearing them from the East or the West, the meanings of the songs shift and mutate.

Since the Douyin events, Gao has somewhat become a niche artist in Shanghai. At an early September show in the city, a roomful of native Chinese youth knew all the moves to her dances. Her fan text group on WeChat has grown from 20 to 300 users. The changes have spurred Gao to think about what she wants her and her music to stand for were she to continue pursuing a longer-lasting career in the country.

“Because I've already gained some success in the West as a writer that means that I have less stakes in it than if I was just only doing it in China,” she muses. “I can take my chances and really double down on wanting to show something genuine. Something that's less perfect.”