With fame comes public scrutiny and nasty haters, and veteran Singaporean actress Xiang Yun is all too familiar with it.
In the first episode of the YouTube talk show DNA where celebrity parents and their children have a chat with its host, actress Rebecca Lim, the 64-year-old opened up about the difficulties of being a public figure with kids.
She is married to local former actor Edmund Chen and they have two children, 25-year-old Chen Yixin and Chen Xi, 34.
Rebecca asked if Xiang Yun ever worried about how her children would react to negative news about her, prompting her to share her “first encounter with nasty audiences”.
“When Edmund and I decided to get married in 1981, many reporters wrote about it in the news. That was the first time we realised how powerful the media can be,” she said.
“The audience was simple back then. They only knew how to write us letters… When Edmund and I got married, people would mail me death notices with my photo on them.”
They didn’t want the couple to get married, she said, adding that she used to receive “a lot” of hate mails.
“I was obviously upset at first, but I grew to accept it,” she said.
The haters went as far as to send her joss paper: “I’ve always believed that people who hurt others are deeply unhappy themselves. So, I’ve learnt to ignore them.”
The hate mails eventually stopped but then came the new era of media where the internet became accessible.
The hate she received was no longer a private affair, and this was when she realised her kids had to be strong like her.
“I told them to ignore the negativity,” she recalled, with Yixin adding that it was “hard to understand” that receiving hate was part of being a celebrity.
To Yixin, also an actress, it was frustrating being unable to clear up assumptions others made.
‘The first time I saw her feel wronged’
One incident that Yixin recalled being “really upset” with happened when she was around the age of 11 to 12.
It was an article with the headline “Xiang Yun brings leftovers back for her family”.
Xiang Yun shared she was “furious” when it was published.
She explained how back then, when actors worked overtime on set, the production team catered meals for them and she saw how leftovers were thrown away.
She started bringing them home to avoid food wastage.
“I come from a poorer background, so we don’t waste food. It’s just the way the article was written, my father would’ve been hurt by it,” she said.
Yixin chimed in with the reason why this particular incident left a “lasting impression” on her: “I’ve seen my parents react to articles… But this was the first time I saw her feel wronged, and as if she let her family down.”
She remembered feeling frustrated but being so young, she didn’t know how to tell her mum, “So what?”
Misunderstandings
Yixin also talked about how she used to struggle to process emotions over why people felt “entitled” to private matters.
“As a kid I just wanted to fit in… Wanting to fit in was my main priority,” she recalled.
But her feelings were “translated the wrong way”, and her parents thought she was ashamed of them.
Xiang Yun shared that back then, Yixin was afraid of seeing her and Edmund in school.
“She’d tell us to stay further away,” she said, before Yixin cut in to clarify: “I never felt ashamed of having them as my parents. I was just stressed out whenever I saw them [in school] because it just emphasised the differences I had with my peers.”
However, Xiang Yun said she and Edmund understood their children’s worries and noticed they were stressed in school.
“Their classmates’ parents would gossip about us, and they would spread this gossip to my kids too. They would repeat what they heard at home,” she explained, adding her celebrity friends’ children went through the same in school.
Most of them were bullied, she claimed.
Yixin said she was ostracised but felt it was partially her own thoughts: “I withdrew myself away from a lot of people because I felt like they knew more about me than I know about them.”
Yixin would come home crying and Xiang Yun said she and Edmund didn’t know what to do.
They tried speaking to her teachers, but they said it was out of their hands.
“As parents we couldn’t scold other people’s children or question why they treated Yixin a certain way. We could only encourage her to ignore them,” said Xiang Yun.
Rebecca, who’s 39 and expecting her second child, remarked how it would’ve been harder for her and Edmund to go to Yixin’s school to raise the issue as they had an image to uphold, and she agreed.
“But what if you weren’t a celebrity?” asked Rebecca.
Xiang Yun didn’t miss a beat: “I would go and find out why. Why does my kid always come home crying? Can you tell me why?”
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