Award-winning Taiwanese singer-actress Rene Liu Ruo-ying has returned from a soul-searching trip to Sri Lanka with some harrowing tales to tell. Liu has taken the past year off to recover from knee surgery and recently made a short trip to the ravaged nation.
'It was my first trip to Sri Lanka, a place that was physically and mentally torn apart by the 2004 tsunami and the [long-running] civil wars,' said Liu, 40, the star of film director Sylvia Chang Ai-chia's Siao Yu (1995), 20 30 40 (2004) and Run Papa Run (2008) who is affectionately known as 'Milk Tea'.
'Many homes destroyed by the tsunami are still yet to be rebuilt,' she said, 'many people are still homeless, some live on the streets, some live in those landfill-like slums with no sanitary facilities.'
What was it like meeting the locals?
Although many of them live in poverty, I could see a sparkle of hope in their eyes. I met an 11-year-old girl named Farzana at Friends' Centre [a centre for street children run by World Vision] in Colombo, capital of Sri Lanka. Her family has problems and her parents sent her to the centre, where she gets to study and live, instead of on the streets. She visits her parents every fortnight. Farzana is extremely bright and talented. She showed me some of her beautiful paintings and songs, which were all about love. I can't imagine how someone like Farzana, who is growing up in such an environment, can write these loving songs. In one she expresses her dream to live freely and happily with mum and dad when the civil war is over. She is more talented than I was when I was her age. I only wrote my first song when I was about 20.
You haven't lived with your parents since young either. How was your childhood?