Towards the end of Wang Quanan's new film, Apart Together, one character, the pensioner Qiao Yu'e, is seen reminiscing about the day in 1949 which changed her life forever. It was on a wintry afternoon that she waded through the crowds to reach Shanghai's Wusong pier, as she attempted to bid farewell to her husband Liu Yinsheng, a soldier who was being evacuated to Taiwan by the Kuomintang authorities on the eve of the communist takeover of the city. Supposedly a temporary separation, she did not realise she would only see her husband again 60 years later, when a thaw in cross-strait relations reunites the couple, who have both remarried since then. It's a story Lisa Lu Yan, the veteran actor who plays Qiao, is familiar with. But rather than being the one left behind on the quay, Lu was the one who sailed away, as she set off for Honolulu to further her studies in 1947. 'I remember my neighbours, with whom I studied together, came to see me off on the boat and they cried and cried,' says Lu, who was 20 at the time. 'I think they were planning to come [to America] to study after they graduated. They just wished I wasn't leaving them.' Most of her friends never got to join her in the United States, and Lu found herself unable to return home when she eventually finished her business administration degree at the University of Hawaii. 'When I left China I was hopeful - I went to study and I was thinking, after four years I'd come back to my country and serve the people,' says Lu. 'I didn't know I was moving to the States; I thought I was going to study there and then I'd go home.' She was lucky: her mother had accompanied her to the US and they both stayed. Yet they were isolated. If they tried to get in touch with friends and family on the mainland the latter might get into trouble, especially in the 1950s when 'they would persecute you to death if they said you had relations abroad. [Our communications] had to go through Hong Kong and we did not mention anything else, we just said we were fine and did not say where we were, as if we were in Hong Kong.' Her involvement in Apart Together - a homecoming of sorts, Lu says, as it is the first film which required her to speak Shanghainese all the way through - brought back memories of her own return to China in the mid-1970s, after diplomatic relationships were established between the mainland and the US. 'That's when we could officially get a visa to go back. And when I got off the plane [immigration control officers] asked me which department invited me. I said nobody invited me as I was there to see my godmother. So they asked me, 'What do you do?' I said, 'I'm an actress'. And they said, 'Okay, so you belong to the cultural department!'' Lu says, laughing. 'Everyone was thinking, 'Why did you want to come back?'' Her friends' drab lives during those years contrasted wildly with hers: after spending her first five years after graduating working in the financial sector, Lu moved to Los Angeles in 1956 to study drama at the Pasadena Playhouse. She began working in films, and became the first mainland-born actor to secure a significant role in a Hollywood production in 1960 with The Mountain Road, in which she starred opposite James Stewart. Appearances in television series followed, and the 1970s saw her making a critically acclaimed move to Chinese-language filmmaking with films such as Tang Shu-shuen's The Arch (in which she plays an oppressed widow) and Li Han-hsiang's The Empress Dowager (the first of her many turns as the Dowager Cixi), both of which earned her best actress titles at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards. Today, the 84-year-old continues to make her presence felt in American cinema (she can be seen in the independent family drama Dim Sum Funeral and as a Tibetan refugee in Roland Emmerich's blockbuster 2012) as well as Chinese-language films such as Ann Hui On-wah's Shanghai-set The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, Benny Chan Muk-shing's action thriller Invisible Target and a cameo in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. There is also her life-long work promoting Chinese opera in the US - she has published several volumes of work translating classic pieces into English - as well as her stage appearances in the long-running De Ling and Emperor Dowager Cixi. Lu has certainly travelled a long way since those days after the second world war when her family lost everything (including her father) and had to stay with the legendary Chinese opera master Mei Lanfang, a mentor of Lu's mother, a Chinese opera actor. And gone are the days when she tried to reinvent herself as an actor in the US while already a mother of three, at a time when Chinese actors were nearly non-existent, and Chinese women almost always appeared as exotic 'dragon ladies' in American films. 'When I started out, my family supported me,' Lu says. 'It's a wish you work so hard towards, but you cannot control it - it's not how hard you work and how well you prepare for your work. It depends on how people feel about you and whether you fit into their plans; it's very frustrating.' Her exasperation extends to the way she remains ambivalent in her feelings towards America concerning her early career. When asked about which place she considers home now, Lu reflects on her links with Taipei and Hong Kong - and only considers the US when she's prompted. 'It's a different atmosphere,' the Los Angeles-based star says. 'Everybody's so busy and so far apart. And I don't drive that far anymore - so it's just communication by telephone.' And Shanghai, of course, remains special to Lu, who grew up in the city after moving from Peking (now Beijing) when she was little. She has established a scholarship at her alma mater, the Shanghai Jiaotong University, and remains a supervisor of the school's American cinema research centre as well as a consultant of its media and design school. 'The buildings in Shanghai are the same, but the people are different,' Lu says. 'I loved those days because everybody seemed to want to work for the betterment of China; they didn't have any self-ambition, it was all for the country. In the theatre as well - they were not thinking how famous they could be, they were thinking about how to make the play good, they rehearsed and worked hard to polish the play until everybody was satisfied. 'Time and money was no concern then - I loved that spirit. But nothing's like that any more.' Apart Together screens tomorrow, 10.30am, at the Hong Kong Science Museum as part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival
