The hotel room was cold, xiao jie.
Three hot-blooded males and I entered the suite in Hong Kong’s Four Seasons for a quick interview with Lin Chi-ling ( 林志玲), Taiwanese model-turned-actress who is voted one of Asia’s most beautiful women.
The guys naturally found her hot; I thought her impossibly nice.
She occasionally pulled the shawl across her strapless black-and-white print sheath of a dress.
We’d met in Cannes – her first outing – last year to promote Red Cliff, John Woo’s historical epic.
Critics and netizens were not kind. Adjectives ran the gamut from “soulless” to “empty vessel”.
She was just 30, playing the teenage beauty from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms. The casting incensed fans of the classic.
“But she is inexperienced!” they protested. They doth protest a tad too much. She was nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Newcomer for Red Cliff. Humbled, honoured, peers, yadda-yadda.
We met again in July this year at a Louis Vuitton party in Singapore.
She’d completed filming the Chinese action blockbuster The Treasure Hunter.
Cluelessly, I’d asked if she was the treasure being hunted.
Squeals of unadulterated delight. “Oh, that is so nice, nobody ever said that to me before!”
The Chinese media wanted her sound bites, her minder led her away, but not before she sweetly said: “If you have any more questions, you can come and ask me any time.”
So here we were in Hong Kong, Chi-ling is the VIP guest at the launch of LG Electronics’ Chocolate phone in its Black Label series, and we can have 15 minutes with her.
Again the squeal: “Oh, how are you, nice to see you again!”
But enough about me.
Lin Chi-ling (nicknamed “ice cream”) is 35 this week, 1.76m in her stockings. She left her native Taipei at 15 for further studies in Canada and majored in Western art, history and economics at the University of Toronto.
So she speaks pretty decent English, xie xie.
She returned East and in five years, 1999 to 2004, made her million New Taiwan dollars from catwalk shows and TV commercials and endorsements.
These last three years, FHM’s (Taiwan) polled her the sexiest woman. This year Jolin Tsai and Megan Fox are runners-up.
On being a sex symbol, she said: “It can take a lot of maintenance, but I think it’s not the dress you wear, but how you talk, confidence.”
If your parents won’t let you have a copy of FHM, you can always get the 2010 desktop calendar of Lin Chi-ling.
Flavour of the year, out of favour on the Net?
That’s where she’s been accused of having had a bust job because she was seen coming out of hospital (she’d fallen off a horse), and rumoured to have had family debts cleared by then-boyfriend Jerry Yan (of boyband F4).
So are you really a damsel in distress in real life, like the characters you play? No, no, the little girl voice fended off. “Movies are unconventional (existence), you discover a different side of yourself. Opposite, I am always saving people in real life.”
Like bailing out her brother when his cosmetics business went into the rouge? Could you please ask her about the LG Chocolate, the agent/manager/minder interrupted. Oh-okay, a girl like you, into gadgets at all? (One of the boys asked).
Oh yes, very much, she enthused, careful to look in the direction of her people when she named the iPod et cetera as well as her Chocolate.
And admits to a sweet tooth for white chocolate.
Watch yourself
And on this new handphone you’ll actually be able to watch yourself in the movies! (Look out, here comes another baby- voice squeal.)
Like The Treasure Hunter, how was Jay Chou to work with?
Chi-ling and Jay are currently two of Taiwan’s hottest headlining names. The Treasure Hunter, which opens in cinemas here on 31 Dec, is an action flick about buried treasure (no!) and the map keeper (no, really?) and his mentor’s daughter.
If you’re thinking Lara Croft: Tomb Raider... close.
“Jay’s nice, he’s a joker, I didn’t have many stunts to do, but it was challenging,” she said of the action set in the desert.
(If you study the movie poster, you’ll notice she has very big feet!) According to media reports, she’ll be singing the ending theme song of the movie, titled Fly Me Away – music by Jay, lyrics by Chi-ling.
Jay – who also produced and played the Inner Mongolian instruments used in the song – decided to let her flex her vocal chops after hearing her hum away on the set.
Mr Wu Dun, chairman of Chang Hong Channel Film & Video, which produced the film, had said: “Chi-ling is a girl who’s very serious about her work.
“Everyone felt her first recording was already very good. Jay also gave his okay, but she felt she sounded like a baby, so she requested to record once more to change the ‘baby voice’. She’s very professional.”
In defence of her second acting job, The Treasure Hunter’s director, Kevin Chu, has reportedly said she is “not a flower vase” (Chinese equivalent of “not just a pretty face”.)
Her third acting gig will be in a comedy. Personally she wants to work at getting rid of the vase label, pointing to the self-reliant Zhang Ziyi as role model.
If you could wish for an award, what would you like to win? (Another of the guys asked).
A flick of the tresses, a brief think: “I think I would like to have the happiness award.”
Awww, our turn to shriek.
At a recent Golden Horse Awards event which she co-hosted, the audience got a dose of her girliness.
She’d asked Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Andy Lau (separately) if she could give them a hug. Would you turn her down? Boyfriends?
Giggle giggle, no time, and the minder called time out.
Talk is that the low-profile boyfriend is one Scott Qiu, a 36-year-old Taiwanese businessman – their families go back years, she’s fallen for him and he wants to marry soon.
The Qius are in sanitation, he’s been dubbed the “prince of toilets”. Win Lin Chi-ling and that’s a royal flush.
Source: Diva Asia
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