Remembering Anita Mui, the Legendary Hong Kong Diva, Through 3 Films
December 30, 2014 marks the 11th anniversary of the untimely death of Hong Kong singing and acting diva Anita Mui. The legendary superstar died at the age of 40 due to cervical cancer but not before she had released 23 studio albums, acted in four dozen films, won five Jade Solid Gold Best Female Singer Awards, and set the record for the longest consecutive concert tour in Hong Kong.
Her career was impressive by any standard, but what makes it all the more legendary is how she got started. At the age of 5, the girl who would become the “Madonna of Asia” was singing on the streets of Kowloon.
She was the youngest child of an impoverished family, who never knew her father, who spent her childhood singing to help the family earn money, who dropped out of school at age 13. After winning the first ever New Talent Singing Awards in 1982, she was on her path to fame and fortune. After making it big, she never forgot her roots. She donated much to the poor, the elderly, the sick, and to rural schools in China.
If She Were a Man
Yet with all her success, she never found what she really wanted: a family and an ordinary life. “Many people have asked me which one I want to be: a happy ordinary person or an eminent star. If I could, I would choose to be a happy ordinary person,” she said. In the end, she wore a wedding dress to her final concert and “married” the stage.
If her the burden fate put on her shoulders was too much for her, she didn’t show it. She left the world with valuable lessons in her songs, her films and her spirit.
Many of her songs dealt with the tragedy she felt being a woman with men who didn’t give her the care she deserved.
The lyrics to “If I Were a Man” — “If I were a man and you were my girl, I would surely treat you with considerate tenderness … But I’m not a man, only you’re my man, never treat me to lazy mediocrity” — could have been aimed at any of her at least seven boyfriends who never married her.
This message comes off in many of her songs and films, but she’s not one to accept lazy mediocrity. She embodied various messages of femininity in a number of her films.
Rouge
The film she won Best Actress for at the Hong Kong Film Awards was Rouge (1988), an adaption of Lilian Lee’s novel. Mui played Fleur, a courtesan from the 1930’s who came to 1980’s Hong Kong as a ghost looking for her lover, the Twelfth Master, who was supposed to die with her in a suicide pact.
It starts out as a traditional tale of a socially oppressed courtesan being cheated by a carefree playboy, but in the end Fleur is shown to have the real power. When Fleur finds the Twelfth Master living, destitute, in the attic of a cramped studio where he works as an extra, she tells him, “Thanks for remembering me. I’ve held onto this rouge for 53 years. Now I’m giving it to you. I’m not waiting any longer.”
As the old man begs her to stay, she slips away while singing the haunting words of the film’s theme song.
A Better Tomorrow
She was no flower vase, not just there for looks, she herself said in an interview with Ming Pao. Instead she took active roles as a warrior spy (Kawashima Yoshiko), a super heroine (The Heroic Trio) and a gangster (A Better Tomorrow III).
About Kawashima Yoshiko, Mui said, “Also Kawashima Yoshiko liked to dress like a man. I have confidence in that and I look handsome as a male. This is the similarity between us.”
In A Better Tomorrow III, Mui takes the dominant role, playing Kit, a gangster in 1974 Vietnam. She saves two men from enemy gangs and takes them under her wings in the final days of South Vietnam.
Eighteen Springs
In Eighteen Springs, Mui plays a character who is both a victim and a collaborator to oppressive gender roles in 1930’s Nanjing and Shanghai. Like the young Anita, the character she plays in the film, Manlu, has to work in the entertainment industry to support her family. Manlu is a nightclub hostess who has trouble pursuing the man of her dreams and ends up marrying a wealthy playboy. Her sister, Manzhen, even can’t marry the man who loves her, Shijun, because Shijun’s family looks down upon Manzhen’s sister’s profession.
The attitudes of 1960’s Hong Kong were not much more enlightened. The real life Anita was quoted in one biography as saying, “In the past, singers were not respected. They were ‘sing song girls.’ So my classmates’ families didn’t allow their children to play with me. I was a lonely girl.”
Manlu can’t bear children, so she arranges for Shijun to rape Manzhen, bearing her a son that Manlu took as her own. In the end, many people are dealt a bad hand, and there is little they can do about it. Whether it is because of social views or because of fate, we are constrained within a small range of possibilities. Young Anita was dealt a bad hand, and did more than most people could ever dream of, but in the end, she could never fully triumph.
At her final concert, she left us with this gem of wisdom: “I want to tell all of you, the sunset is beautiful, but in one second it becomes the past. So we have to treasure every minute, every second.”
Mitchell Blatt is a columnist, author, and editor. His writings are available atwww.ChinaTravelWriter.com and he tweets at https://twitter.com/MitchBlatt. Subscribe by email at www.ChinaTravelWriter.com to receive updates when he publishes new articles.
