Last night I sat down and watched a Chinese program with my folks for about 15 minutes. The program was an interview of an actress in her middle age. They also showcased her many works through the years. The actress was born in 1949, a year younger than my dad, a year older than my mom. You can say they are all of the same generation.
Actually I was quite impressed with her many stories, over the course of her long acting career. She talked about one scene where she was to be slapped so hard she would literally be knocked to the floor, and that she was to overturn a coffee table in the course of her fall. Evidently Chinese cinema back then didn't believe in "faking it" and her male counterpart really had to give her a resounding slap.
So they filmed the scene and the actor delivered a blow to her face. She describes the sensation as a thunderclap on her left cheek, and she subsequently heard a ringing in her ears. She was knocked off her feet and her cheeks swelled up and immediately showed the imprints of the four fingers from the blow. She sat on the floor quite stunned and amidst the commotion, she heard the director say, "That was good, but we have to do it again! Because you didn't knock over the coffee table the first time." She put on a brave front, but she was quite understandably very distressed that she'd have to repeat this experience. So they repeated the scene and the guy gave her another brutal slap to knock her down, this time she said she was almost completely knocked unconscious, but during her fall, she maintained enough wit to remember to knock the coffee table over. The coffee table turned over, the porcelain and glass cups and plates fell over and broke to many pieces and she gashed her palm on the jagged edges of those broken pieces. So the actress recalled how she sort of sat there stunned, as she tried to fight off the encroaching blackness and when she stood up, she told everyone she was fine, while her cheek swelled up to unholy proportions and her hand was raining blood all over the place. She remembered walking to the side of the set and very suddenly, bursting into tears.
So what made this particular thing blog-worthy of course is not so much just her experience but my parents' reaction to it. First, they were quite riveted by the program, that was amusing too. Secondly, upon hearing this story, my mom turns to me and goes, "Yi qian de ren zhen de heng hui ci ku. Ni kan kan!" all the while, shaking her head in undisguised admiration.
Roughly translated, she said, YOU should learn to eat bitterness and like it, damn it. Okay okay that translation was a bit too rough. But that is indeed the subtext. My mom comes from a long line of hardworking, bitterness-eating-and-liking-it type folks. She and of course, subsequently, I, believe that nothing can be gained without the same or more amount of effort to be expended first. Something for nothing does not happen. One must work really really really really really really hard to get somewhere in life. Really really hard. Really.
3 comments:
That was the worst show ever in the history of shows. My parents were watching the same thing and I promptly let them know that it was the worst show ever. All I know was that they had some little kid come up and he was just blabbering about nothing. I want find the producer of that show and tell him he's an idiot.
Hahaha. I like how you get so angry and worked up about NOTHING at all.
I guess a certain someone forgot to spend 15 seconds to scribble out a card for a certain someone else. :(
-the neglected one
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