By Brian Hu
By the time I knew who actress Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia was, she was already unofficially retired, a full-time wife and mother, and an icon of Hong Kong cinema's last golden age, already in decline as it entered its post-1997 era. In action films like Bride with the White Hair, Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain, and Swordsman II, as well as Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and Ashes of Time, she embodied the energy and glamour of late '80s, early '90s Hong Kong film.
Like me, Los Angeles-based Japanese movie reporter Akiko Tetsuya discovered Lin after she left the film industry in 1994. And like most everyone who made contact with the gender-bending screen beauty, Tetsuya fell in love. She decided to write a book on her newfound idol, but encountered several important setbacks in realizing her dream. First, Lin now famously refuses to grant interviews, preferring a quiet domestic life separate from the gossip-crazy world of Hong Kong entertainment culture. Second, Tetsuya is not a native English speaker and the problems of editing made it difficult for her to get the book published. Her efforts to defy these setbacks made her project a highly anticipated one for Lin fans, as it would be the first serious glimpse at Lin's post-marriage life to hit the shelves. In 2005, Tetsuya's interviews with Lin, obtained through a persistence which impressed the star, along with interviews with Lin's friends and associates, became The Last Star of The East: Brigitte Lin Ching Hsia and Her Films, self-published by Tetsuya herself and available only online and at various specialty stores on the west coast.
The book could easily have been an exploitative exclusive report, but it never falls into such traps because Tetsuya smartly presents the book in a question/answer format, allowing herself to be as prominent a character as Lin herself. In fact, what makes Tetsuya's book surprisingly moving is not Lin's story, but Tetsuya's journey in trying to write a dream book about her idol. That's not to say the book is narcissistic: rather we come to understand Lin's powerful effect on her fans through Tetsuya's own enthusiasm and dedication. And by not inserting her own opinions, except through dialogue with Lin, Tetsuya modestly sheds any pretensions of being an “expert” on her favorite actress, instead sticking to the position of a “fan” that was lucky enough to meet her idol. That said, I wouldn't doubt for a moment that of all the writers who have ever covered Brigitte Lin, none have paid as much effort as Tetsuya in doing research at archives, seeing and buying films, and compiling the definitive Brigitte Lin filmography in both English and Chinese.
Tetsuya organizes the book into two parts: the first comprises of her interviews with Lin beginning in 1997, and the second is made up of interviews with directors, filmmakers, critics, and friends. As I zipped through the book (it's truly a delightfully quick read), I found Lin transforming from a screen legend of Marilyn Monroe-type proportions, to a grounded, normal human being who isn't an icon as much as a friend, mother, and wife. Such is the paradox of Brigitte Lin that the book presents. One of the recurring themes in the book is whether Lin is a beauty or an actress first, and the issue is left unresolved, reflecting Lin's very unique screen persona, going from teenage beauty in Qiong Yao's '70s teen melodramas to androgynous demigod in Tsui Hark-type wuxia spectaculars, as well as the fact that she was never just an actress at any point in her career. The book also asks whether she was that “accidental” star discovered on the streets of Taipei during the beginning of her career, or the enduring timeless beauty in the latter part.
Tetsuya's interviews with Lin are among the more enlightening interviews with a Chinese superstar that I've ever read, mostly because Lin has left the industry and therefore has nothing to lose. Previous books and interviews with Lin (especially those written in Chinese) are primarily gossip-heavy or works publicizing her latest releases. Here, Lin can be openly critical of directors Wong Kar-wai and Wong Jing, as well as her late friend Leslie Cheung. She also has no problem telling us which of her films she doesn't particularly care about and why. Yet it never reads like a tell-all exposé, partly because Tetsuya respects Lin too much to ask scandalous questions, but mostly because Lin's comments shed new light on filmmaking in Hong Kong during the late '80s and early '90s, a period currently understood either in terms of salacious and misinformed gossip or in terms of Hong Kong film scholarship, which concerns itself more with postcolonial issues than industrial or behind-the-scenes research.
The book also fills in some important holes in the English-language literature on '70s Taiwanese cinema. Lin was the face of "Qiong Yao fever," a period in Taiwanese popular culture when the novels of Qiong Yao and the films they spawned dominated the youth culture industry to the point that even distinguished “art” directors like Lee Hsing filmed Qiong's adaptations. Lin's face was used on book covers, and to feed the demand for more films, she often worked on three or four Qiong Yao-type tragic romances at one time. Lin describes the period as the lowest in her life, a period where she, an unknown, suddenly launched into transnational superstardom and became subjected to non-stop labor and the scandal-hungry Chinese media.
We're told in some detail how she was discovered in Taipei, how she was auditioned, how her contracts were signed, how she was groomed, and how the mafia played an important role in film production -- all topics which we can't count on gossip columnists to present factually, and which historians of Chinese-language cinema have yet to consider seriously. The interviews with Lin's childhood friends, with director Sung Tsai Hou and producer Yu Chen Chun of Lin's first film Outside the Window, with author Qiong Yao, and with director Yang Chia Yun continue these examinations of Lin's early career and provide new insights into the practice of filmmaking in '70s Taiwan.
The interviews with Brigitte Lin are consistently interesting and increasingly moving as we sense Lin's defenses dropping as she starts to consider Tetsuya a friend. The interviews in the second half vary in quality, the worst being Law Kar and Ann Hui's short and rather obvious comments on why they think Lin is wonderful. These interviews also unfortunately tread laboriously over some of the same grounds as the first part -- my main criticism of Tetsuya's book -- repeating such stories such as that of Lin's eyes becoming injured during the shoot of New Dragon Inn. However, the interview with acclaimed Taiwanese playwright Stan Lai (who directed Lin in her only stage performance) says new things about Lin as an actress and is easily among the book's best, as are the interviews with Lin's costume designer William Cheung Suk Ping and Lin's friend Yon Fan, who directed Lin in her only post-1994 performances as the narrator to his films Bishonen and Peony Pavilion.
The interviews with Ronny Yu and Tsui Hark, who directed Lin in some of her most famous films, don't tell us much about Lin that's not covered elsewhere in the book, but they do provide great behind-the-scenes access for fans of their films. Interviews with critics and scholars Law Kar and Peggy Chiao put Lin in a larger historical framework, but by not going into detail as the other interviews do, don't fully serve their function. Besides, the other interviews already contextualize Lin the person, albeit more subtly. For pure entertainment value, there are short comments by Wong Jing (who criticizes Lin for being a poor businessperson) and the great cinematographer Christopher Doyle (who, while getting tipsy on wine, proclaims that Brigitte Lin is the Hong Kong Grace Kelly).
Tetsuya's interviews with Lin were all conducted in English, which isn't the mother tongue for either. Tetsuya wisely leaves in the moments when Lin and Tetsuya stumble over their English and instead try to communicate using Chinese characters, which tells us about the dynamics between the two. Since Tetsuya published the book herself without a professional editor, there are occasional typos and grammatical errors scattered throughout. But rather than seeing them as the book's limitation, I see them as part of the book's charm. These errors aren't "errors" per se, because they reflect the truth of Akiko Tetsuya as a fan of Japanese ancestry living in the United States. They hardly get in the way of the book's readability, and in fact become reminders of the love and energy Tetsuya put in to circumvent the usual procedures of publishing and get her dream book made. For that is ultimately the book's main point: Brigitte Lin may just be a human being who happened to play the bride with the white hair and “Asia the Invincible,” but she's captured the dreams of her fans from around the world. In an interview, Law Kar writes that Brigitte Lin would be as big as classic actress Linda Lin Dai if she had a “legendary story," but as the book shows, the legend of Brigitte Lin does have a story: it's Tetsuya's.
The website for The Last Star of The East: http://host308.ipowerweb.com/~akikospa/book01.html
The book is only available at specialty stores such as Drunken Master (http://www.drunkenmaster.tv/) in Los Angeles, and at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0976487128/qid=1128489242/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-0737801-3407004?v=glance&s=books) and YesAsia (http://us.yesasia.com/en/PrdDept.aspx/pid-1003994023/code-w/section-books/)