Rongrong Souang, a 37-year-old native of China whose only brush with the music business had been as an accountant for a piano store, is as surprised as anyone about her new career as a budding pop star who calls herself Miist.

Until just a few years ago, she had never written a song in her life. And then, in 2024, she came out of nowhere with two singles from her debut album breaking onto the Billboard pop and top 40 charts.

“I don’t know if we can call it an accident,” she said one afternoon last week, sitting in the living room of her shoreline home in Tiburon with its stunning views of Richardson Bay. “But I wouldn’t admit that I have this ability because, for 34 years of my life, I’d never thought about even trying to do something like this.”

Even more randomly, this hidden talent emerged as the result of an argument she had with her husband, Andre Souang, a Bay Area real estate developer who now describes himself as his wife’s “accidental full-time music manager.”

She chose the name Miist because actual mist can be both refreshing and mysterious. She decided to misspell it just for fun. Her transformation began during the pandemic, when she started watching YouTube videos to learn some simple chords on the piano so she could accompany herself and sing along in her lilting soprano. Her husband, however, had other ideas. Sensing an inborn songwriting talent in her, he was adamant that she learn to play by ear, to use her innate ability to write music without being inhibited by someone else’s idea of how it should be done.

“She would sneak on YouTube because she knew I didn’t want her to do it,” he said. “I knew she had a creative part of herself that hadn’t been explored, that she had the ability to innately learn music.”

The longer this squabble went on, the more it became a sticking point in their marriage.

“Every time I’d watch videos, we would get in a fight,” she recalled, a pained expression on her face even now. “We fought for six months. One day I said, ‘We can’t keep doing this. I love you, and I don’t want this to become something between us.’”

So she agreed to give songwriting an honest try, to do it his way.

“I told him, ‘You’re going to see that I can’t do this,’” she recalled. “I know what I can’t do.”

To her surprise and his delight, melodies and lyrics flowed out of her unbidden. In a matter of hours, she wrote a song for kids in Chinese about the family dog, a lullaby for her 11-year-old stepdaughter and a love song to her husband.

“I wrote three songs that day and completely proved myself wrong,” she said. “The song for my husband is about how he inspired me in life and freed me from this cage, this prison that I had put myself in. He freed me from that.”

She showed so much promise as a singer-songwriter that Grammy-winning Marin record producer Narada Michael Walden agreed to work with her on a debut album, “The Songs from the Living Room,” released on the independent label she and her husband started, Ephemeral Music.

“Her songs have been in her all along, and I was able to get them out by saying to her, ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t block it,’ and all this music started flying out of her,” Walden said. “She’s gifted, but she wasn’t able to pursue that gift until now.”

At her first meeting with him at his Tarpan Studios in San Rafael, where he had famously recorded hits by Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, she sat down at the piano and sang him a breakup ballad she had written, “It’s Too Late to Love You.” He was so taken with it that he recorded it with her as a duet. That song climbed to No. 11 on Billboard’s top 40 indie chart and to No. 21 on Billboard’s top adult contemporary (AC) chart.

Another single from the record, the dance track “Move Your Body Slowly,” rose to No. 26 on Billboard’s AC chart and shot all the way to No. 1 on an indie record AC chart compiled by Mediabase, a service that monitors radio play in the U.S. and Canada.

Decked out in a sparkly pink pantsuit, matching cap and signature veil, Miist stars in a video for the song that was shot in a spectacular three-story Belvedere mansion overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s gotten 1.6 million views on YouTube.

As a newcomer to the pop world, working with Walden and getting songs on the charts her first time out gave her a credibility she hadn’t had before, when she was a complete unknown in the music business.

“It opened doors for us,” she said. “Before that, I had just started, so nobody wanted to pick up the phone to even talk to us. Now people will pick up the phone and listen to our pitch.”

These days, that pitch is all about a new song, “Could You Lend Me a Smile,” and the worldwide Smile Project she and her husband are building around it.

“Could You Lend Me a Smile” was inspired by a news story she read about a Japanese man who lived such a lonely life that his body wasn’t found in his apartment until long after he’d died. She believes that a simple smile from a passerby could have lifted his spirits, sparing him from such a bleak existence and lonely death.

“I’m from China, and in China, Korea and Japan, it’s a common thing that we’ve been hearing about loneliness,” she said. “But it wasn’t real to me until I read this story.”

In connection with the Smile Project, she and her husband have formed a nonprofit they call the World Smile Initiative to spread Miist’s song and its message. So far, they say, other musicians and producers on five continents have re-recorded and re-interpreted it in 15 languages. Go to miistthesinger.com/smile.

The videos were released worldwide in May, getting 800,000 streams so far. They say it “reflects a mission of unity, empathy and creativity.”

“It’s been incredibly difficult, and we learned why no artist has ever done it before,” he said. “In fact, it’s the first time in history anybody has done it.”

As part of her campaign, she also hosts a podcast, “Make Me Smile with Miist,” that’s available in 150 countries. For a donation, listeners are mailed a “Kindness Cube,” a small paper box with messages like “Say a kind word,” “Remind someone you love them” and “Be grateful” written on the sides.

“It’s a call to action that people can do in 15 seconds,” she said. “Every day you can say, ‘I’m going to take 15 seconds to do one of these.’”

It’s been a long road from China to Canada to Marin to pop stardom. The daughter of a mother who was an engineer and a father who taught math in college, Miist (birth name Rongrong Ma) grew up in Harbin, a major city in northern China near the Russian border. As a preschooler, she was raised primarily by her father, whose idea of discipline veered into what she believes was physical abuse. At age 5, she felt abandoned when she was sent off to boarding school. That sense of abandonment became even more acute when her father left the family.

After college in China, she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to study accounting. At 28, she underwent surgery to remove a tumor that was initially diagnosed as cancerous but mercifully turned out to be benign. The cancer scare and the operation were such an ordeal, though, both mentally and physically, that her mother left China to be with her daughter in Canada to help her heal and recover. Her mother still lives with her and her family in Tiburon.

Her accounting training led to the job with the piano store in Vancouver.

“Every one of my coworkers was a musician,” she recalled. “I was the only one who wasn’t. I had never even thought about trying to be a musician.”

Through her boss at the store, she was introduced to Souang, her future husband, who was divorced and had a then four-year-old daughter. They were married five years ago in Santa Cruz before moving to Tiburon.

As she and her husband work on their Smile Project, she’s putting the finishing touches on a new album tentatively titled “Six Important Songs” that deals with issues like loneliness, abuse, abandonment, depression, alienation in relationships and other personal problems that she and others have gone through or are going through.

As her husband says: “Pop stars in their 20s are limited about the things they can write about — heartbreak, the dream of falling in love, things like that. But someone who has survived cancer, who was abandoned at 5, who has lived in three different countries on her own, that gives her a whole different perspective on life, and that pours out in her music.”

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net