No glamour for Chinese star

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33067, 7 November 1972, Page 6

No glamour for Chinese star

(By

JAMES PRINGLE,

N.Z.P.A.-Reuter Correspondent)

SHANGHAI (China). As star of China’s most popular film, the “White Haired Girl,” 27-year-old Miss Shih Chung-Chin is instantly recognisable to most men, women and children in this country of 800 m people.

Though this gives her a bigger following than most top actresses in the West, Miss Shih knows nothing of expensive villas, television talk-shows, smart restaurants, or the international set. Life for a star in China is totally different from that of a stage or screen celebrity elsewhere. It certainly offers no material rewards.

Miss Shih wears a blue cotton jacket and trousers, and lives with other girls at the Shanghai Dance School, China’s leading dance college, where she is the prima ballerina.

Writing recently in “Chinese Literature,” a monthly publication, Miss Shih had this to say about the final scene in “White. Haired Girl,” when she emerges for the last time from the cave in which she had sought refuge from wicked landlords.

“As I played this part, the figures of millions of poor peasants rose before me, so that as I walked step by step out of that dank, gloomy cave my eyes were brimming with tears.”

A still picture of Miss Shih, holding a rifle fiercely aloft and wearing a realistic wig of pure white hair, is seen on hoardings outside cinemas and in homes and offices across China. With her warm, brown eyes and trim figure, she is the number one “pin-up” in the People’s Republic — though no doubt such a concept would offend her.

In a brief but rare interview here, the Chinese star revealed something of her life and lifestyle. In the background, about eight girls clad in red sweaters and blue shorts were practising exercises at the bar. Miss Shih said she earned only $l7 a month, rather less

than a factory worker. She hastened to explain she had an extra $4.29 for “nourishment” and free medical care.

She joined the school, founded in 1960, when she was 15 years old, the daughter of a worker in a Shanghai industrial plant. “Nowadays I spend most nights in the dormitory with the other girls,” she said, as a piano tinkled in the background to revolutionary ballet music. “Sometimes I’ll go home to stay a night or two with my mother and father.” SINGLE She is single and said she has no immediate plans for marriage. But, like most Chinese girls, she quickly steered the conversation on to other—and more ideological—lines.

She is now believed to be working on another film about China’s rural medical workers, known as “barefoot doctors.” “White Haired Girl” concerns the adventures of a girl who flees from greedy landlords into the mountains where, through hardship, her hair turns white.

Finally, she joins the People’s Liberation Army and saves the peasants from the landlords. She said she believed it was a theme with which the peasants who watch it can easily identify. Though she enjoyed the happiness of life in the new China, she had heard all about the hardships

of the old society, she said. Writing in “Chinese Literature” on the same theme, she said: “While rehearsing the part of the white haired girl, I went to see an exhibition of clay sculptures which reveal how cruelly a big Szechuan landlord exploited his tenant peasants.

“The exhibition gave me a more concrete and a deeper impression of the vicious savagery of the landlord class.

“As I danced I seemed to hear the groans of the old man, the wailing of the sick child, the mother’s weeping, and my heart burned with the longing for revenge as the shooting of this scene started.” Like other dancers, Miss Shih said she spent some time each year working in agriculture alongside the peasants.