“I THE TWO SIDES OF A LEGEND
While she may be renowned for her compelling performances on the silver screen, the dramatic life of Shanghai actress Qin Yi has proved to be just as captivating
made a mistake, again,” said Qin Yi, during her opening remarks at a cultural salon dedicated to her, one day before International Women’s Day.
The 95-year-old actress, who has been dub bed one of the four greatest actresses in China, said that the short pause during her recital of a monologue by Mother Lu from the tragedy play Thunderstorm was not an intentional one, but rather a result of her empathy for the fictional character.
Not that anyone in the audience noticed the blunder by the veteran Shanghai actress who has enjoyed an illustrious career that spans close to 80 years.
Established in 2013, the salon is an invitation-only event held at the Equatorial Hotel every month. It focuses on the glorious past of Shanghai, mainly the period in the 1930s when the city’s prosperity had earned itself the reputation for being an “Oriental Paris”. The topics of the salon range from music, culinary, fashion, architecture to Shanghai dialect. It was even once compared to the meetings that took place at Montparnasse in Paris which were attended by famous artists like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso.
“We have wanted to feature Qin (as the theme of the salon) since the first day we had the salon,” said Chen Gang, composer, co-founder of the Shanghai Colormen salon and a lifelong friend of Qin.
“There is no better way to celebrate International Women’s Day than having the most legendary woman in the country share her life stories.”
Chen also revealed that it was Qin’s friends and fellow colleagues who were attending her birthday party in February who had convinced the famous actress to share her life stories at the salon.
Written by acclaimed Chinese playwright Cao Yu, Thunderstorm is considered one of the most important creations in contemporary Chinese literature. Mother Lu, a character that Qin has played several times on stage and in films, is an upright servant in a corrupted Chinese traditional clan. She is also a loving mother who is miserable because of her failure to disconnect her two children from the clan.
Mother Lu’s struggles can also be said to be a reflection of the trials and tribulations that Qin has gone through in life, which explains the connection she feels for the fictional character.
Passion
Born in 1922, four years earlier than Marilyn Monroe, Q in is the second daughter in a traditional Chinese family in Shanghai. Her uncle, the alpha male of the clan who Qin, her parents and siblings resided with, had married nine wives. Because of the uncle’s conservative parenting methods, Qin was not allowed to wear short-sleeved or sleeveless attire and she always had her socks on even during unbearably hot days.
In 1938, she dropped out of nursing school and fled to Chongqing alone when the war against Japan took place in Shanghai. She explained in an interview with a Chinese newspaper that the reason she ran away from home was to escape from her family rather than the war.
In Chongqing, Qin was discovered by two directors who put her on stage to perform for Chinese soldiers and members of the public.
“I have always wanted to be a part (of the fighting force),” said Qin at the salon, recalling how she had volunteered to help wounded soldiers at the frontline in Shanghai during her days at nursing school.
“I was so passionate and naive that I stood in front of a window at a warehouse as bullets flew right past me. A veteran then pulled me away.”
Marriage
Before her stage career had taken off, Qin married an actor who turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. The marriage lasted less than three years and was the reason behind her fleeing again, this time to a more remote city that was situated at the border of Sichuan and Tibet.
Qin was quoted as saying that “she would never marry again” and that she would dedicate her life to acting. However, less than a year later, she met Jin Yan, a Korea-born Chinese who was dubbed the “most handsome man in the country”. She soon married Jin, who was 12 years her senior, and gave birth to a son. Chinese columnist Huang Tongtong once wrote that her second marriage was inevitable, noting how it would have been too difficult a task for a beauty like Qin to refrain from romance at such a young age.
Back during her days in school, Qin was nicknamed “peacock’s peer” as people said her beauty always incited peacocks to flaunt their tails. When she was older, she was even called “the most beautiful Chinese actress ever” by the then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai.
“I only see it when looking into the mirror. But how much time can one stare at the mirror in her life?” said Qin, in response to a question about beauty during the salon.
Her second marriage did not last long either. While the couple separated after less than seven years together, they never went through a divorce. When Jin was struck by a stomach illness, a result of overdrinking, Qin took care of him for more than 20 years despite her acting career picking up in the 1950s. In 1959, Qin played the lead character in three blockbuster films. Jin died from internal bleeding in the stomach in 1983.
Qin’s role as mother was no less arduous. A year after she was publicly criticized and tortured for being an actress during the cultural revolution (1966-1976), her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
She said that the diagnosis was as much a sentence to her as it was to her son, adding that it served to “put out all her desires ever since”. The condition caused her son to turn violent but Qin would not stop him from beating her. She only told him that he could not hit her on the face as she needed it to earn a living.
Qin later spent her life savings to buy an apartment where she could take better care of her son. In 2007, less than two years before the construction of the apartment was completed, her son passed away.
She never moved into the apartment.
Regrets
Q in said there are three things she regrets most in her life — never enjoying the sweetness of love, her son’s disease and not getting to play a truly satisfactory character that was created by her.
These days, she spends most of her time trying to rectify that last regret. In 2014, she kicked off the production of The Beautiful Kokonor Lake, a film written by her that is based on the true story of an Australian meteorologist and his wife who were working on an artificial rainfall project on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The wife lost her life during a car accident while working on the project.
In the show, Qin plays the role of the wife. She is believed to be the oldest actress to play a leading role in a film. Qin, who was then already 92 years old, had to commute six hours every day during the filming on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The film was released in 2015.
Working at the high-altitude plateau was tough and Qin joked that she had to fake gasps to be a part of the crew, many of whom suffered from nose bleeds, dizziness and headaches.
When asked about the happiest days of her life, Qin replied it was the few months she spent in the remote city, after running away from her first husband. Singing and dancing in the sea of opium poppy, she said, was liberating.
Despite her age, Q in is still searching for more acting opportunities, saying there are at least another two roles she wants to sign up for. She is also working on the script for a new film in which she hopes to act in. Attending English classes, she said, is also on the agenda.