On a recent October morning, Sylvia Chang Ai-chia is speaking about the inadequacies of speech. Chang – a Taiwan native whose 50-year career path, in rough outline, proceeded from radio presenter to singer to actress to director to screenwriter – has carved a professional life out of words in three languages. She is doing this interview because she is the narrator of a theatre work called Spirits , presented by Zuni Icosahedron. It is a live-streamed Covid-19 production, which means she will read poems, in Mandarin, in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, and pianist Yen Chun-chieh will accompany her with classical works by, among others, Maurice Ravel and Franz Liszt, from Taiwan. Chang did her first narrative collaboration eight years ago, Liszt’s Lenore , also with Yen, and it opened her ears to classical music. “I had zero knowledge, I thought, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to do it?’” She had sung Mando-pop but definitely not spoken the Chinese translation of a German ballad set to the music of a 19th century Hungarian composer. And yet, the combination worked like a dream – so much so that, in 2015, Taiwan’s National Symphony Orchestra asked her to do the same thing with Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on New Year’s Eve. She read all 14 characters. “Like listening to the best storyteller who’s ever lived,” raved an online music website. The experience seems to have been a mind-meld. “Music opens up the possibility of imagination rather than just looking at what’s in front of you. You close your eyes and see more.” What she saw was the gulf between music and words. “You know, I read a book about how poetry was written and it said the most beautiful thing cannot be written by words. I agree – 100 per cent!” Chang, 67 years old with a sharp pixie cut, claps her hands and laughs. In her, earnestness coexists with a girlish enthusiasm. It is the same with directing, she says: you can imagine the most wonderful scene, you can try to pin it into place, yet it is not enough, “and then, sometimes, you catch the moment, which is not what you have written and it is unexpected and it is beautiful”. She describes a final scene from her 2017 film Love Education , for which she and co-writer You Xiaoying won Best Screenplay at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards. (She was also nominated, for the same film, in the Best Actress and Best Director categories.) In it, Chang plays a wife and mother, sandwiched between two generations of women, thoroughly exasperated with – and suspicious of – her husband, played by Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang (nominated for Best Actor). Theirs is a marriage that has long lost its tenderness. “When I did my scene with Tian Zhuangzhuang in the car, it was the most difficult, the one I kept refusing to shoot, because I didn’t know how to shoot it,” Chang says. “Even though I remodified the script, there were so many things I thought about. It’s late evening. And I know the lights must be on. And he’s driving his new car and telling me something very intimate. “This is the only time in the film I am with my husband, like, still in love … being very close to each other … telling him what’s bothering me and he’s telling me he wants to take me for a trip … but how should I do it? And I keep discussing it with the cameraman, Lee Ping-bing.” She recounts the physical details – should the car pull over? Should it be stuck in traffic? Maybe she should attach a camera mount to it? No, then the camera will be outside the window and there must be no division; it must be about closeness. Finally, she realised it must be shot from inside the car, from the back seat, only an outline of a husband and wife, talking. “And that’s how we did it. We just hit the sunset and at that one moment, the sun’s straight into the camera lens – pshoo! And when we finished that shot, the sun just left. And Lee Ping-bing said, ‘Don’t worry. We got it.’” The little tale ends, and we are no longer in a car in Taipei, but a room in Soho House Hong Kong with the PR from Zuni. A couple of journalists have just left; in less than an hour, the next publication will arrive for the next interview, the usual, expected media rounds. Unexpectedly, there are tears in my eyes. Chang’s calm voice, the cadence of her words, has conjured up a fictional husband and wife driving into a new relationship phase and how she got them there. “It just turned out to be beautiful,” says Chang. For a generation of Taiwanese, Chang’s voice encapsulates the idea of childhood. That was the name of an album she released in 1981 and the title track, with its lyrics about dragonflies and cicadas and the endless waiting to grow up, has a sweet poignancy. Yet I have read almost nothing about her own childhood. So in that storyteller’s voice, Chang begins: she was born in Taiwan, the youngest of three. When she was one, her father, who was in the air force, died. Her mother remarried, left, and the children grew up with their Kuomintang paternal grandparents. “My grandpa was a very, very strict person. He was like a hero against the Japanese but when they came to Taiwan in 1948, 1949, they sort of lost their power … they were put in jobs that are useless, you know. And they lost their son and they could not go back. There was a lot of anger, a lot of expectation which they could not fulfil.” A pause. “So we sort of grew up in a very, very … um … I don’t know. He beat us up. Whenever he was unhappy. But I never hold any grudge. Because I understand he wanted us to be good. No, really …” My face must be registering disbelief. “Really, I think it’s OK.” Maybe she thinks it’s OK now – but then? “I was very young, I couldn’t understand and all I wanted was to be with my mum.” For a time, her grandfather did not allow them to visit their mother’s house. They could see her once a week but it had to be somewhere outside. “It’s very funny, I never felt bad about it. I think it’s my character. Maybe it’s in my DNA, my blood. My mum was also very young at that time so she was busy. Sometimes she forgot.” When Chang was 10, her mother’s husband got a job in Hong Kong. The children begged their mother to take them with her and she did. Chang knew “zero” Cantonese. After a year, her mother’s husband got a job in New York and they moved to the Bronx. Chang knew “zero” English. She says it was “very, very hard”. Then she adds, “I never look at it in a negative way.” The cultural contrast could hardly have been more pronounced. In Hong Kong, she was chosen as the girl who could recite Mandarin poetry at school competitions. In 1960s New York, “I was quite attractive to a lot of Americans so I had too many boyfriends”. One of these was a lawyer. Chang was 14. (She is aware of Freud calling out her father-figure issues on that one.) Alarmed, her mother sent her back to Taiwan to stay with various friends but the attractiveness wasn’t geographically confined. Josephine Siao Fong-fong, one of Hong Kong’s great acting stars, remembers meeting her in a Kowloon coffee shop a couple of years later, when Chang was about 16. “Sylvia wasn’t yet in the film business,” Siao says in an email. “She was squeezing blissfully into a single armchair with her actor boyfriend, basking in love, blushing like a fresh peach.” “Sometimes I lived here, sometimes I lived somewhere else,” Chang says of those years. “In the end, my mother sent me to boarding school.” There she found the ultimate authority figure: God. “I almost became a nun.” She laughs. “When I was baptised at 17, I had a very lovely godmother, a teacher who was preparing to take her final vows as a nun. My mum was not there so she was like a big sister and a mother.” But her teacher was hesitating about taking the veil. Chang says she arranged a visit to a fortune-teller where the nun-to-be learned she would get married and have children (and she did). Perhaps it was an early example of how, with a bit of direction, life’s script can always be re-edited. Chang’s own vocation turned out to be secular as well. Her acting career began when she was spotted at 18, singing on television. She signed a five-year contract with Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest. Its boss, Raymond Chow Ting-hsing, who thought her peachiness “unphotogenic”, had known her grandfather. She disliked its old-school studio control but says he was “lenient” with her. In 1976, she won her first Golden Horse for Best Supporting Actress, in the Taiwanese film Posterity and Perplexity . In it, she plays a young woman, beaten by a step-parent, taken in by friends, then manipulated into having a child for someone else. The following year, she was in the Shaw Brothers’ Dream of the Red Chamber , playing frail cousin Lin Daiyu, who coughs fatally, mourns over fallen petals (she buries them in little graves) and surveys the world through lowered eyelids. When I remark that her personal history, and subsequent robust roles, do not make this obvious casting, she says, “Actually, the director, Li Han-hsiang, first cast me as Jia Baoyu.” Jia Baoyu is the dashing male lead and – as it is a huangmei version of the book – he is played by a woman. I said, ‘I don’t want to be a hooker or a China doll all my life.’ I still had a long way to go Sylvia Chang But Li changed his mind, swapped her role, and told her while he was giving her a lift to the airport. She was so shocked at the switch, she began to cry. Chang seems to have a thing for scene-setting in cars: she recounts their decades-old conversation now, back and forth. When she told Li she did not identify with Lin Daiyu, he chastised her for her “stiff” vision, lecturing her on how wrong she was about the character. “He said, ‘If you’re an actress, I think you should take the challenge to do something you are not imagining yourself as – you should come out of the safety zone.’” This strikes me as a wonderfully manipulative argument. In the end, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia played Jia Baoyu; from the incandescent second she appears, she tucks the film under her arm and runs off with it. When I remark how clever Li was at getting his own way, Chang grins: “Yes!” A big laugh. She did not see the result for many years. When it was screened, she was in Korea working with director King Hu on the twin peaks of Raining in the Mountain (on which she was an uncredited assistant) and Legend of the Mountain (in which she starred). And here is a cross-cultural insight: the same year those films were released, in 1979, she appeared in an episode of the American TV series M*A*S*H . She played a Korean prostitute. They asked her to stay on but once was enough. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be a hooker or a China doll all my life.’ I still had a long way to go.” That included marriage. Siao was present at her Las Vegas wedding to journalist Bob Liu, later Associated Press’ Hong Kong bureau chief and a friend of Siao’s husband. “There were five of us in a tiny ‘church’ that looked more like a film-studio set,” Siao remembers. “Never have I been to such a funny wedding. Sylvia giggled through the whole ceremony.” Two years later, in 1981, Chang won another Golden Horse, Best Actress for her role in My Grandfather . Those were highs, personally and professionally. Simultaneously, there were some spectacular lows: when she held a press conference, also in 1981, for Once Upon A Time , her first film as director, she was drunk, tearful and announced it was “awful”. Chow had asked her to step in when the original director was killed in a car crash, an inauspicious start. She was moving outside her safety zone into a yo-yo world of reversals. The cheerful marriage did not last, and it would be five years before she directed another film. (It was called Passion and at the 1986 Golden Horse Awards she was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and won Best Actress.) Passion , with its two female leads uncovering love’s secrets, held an echo of 1983’s That Day, on the Beach, which she’d produced and starred in. The story of two women looking back on loves’ vicissitudes in Taiwan was Edward Yang De-chang’s first feature film; in 2000, he would win Best Director at Cannes for Yi Yi . It was also the first film, as director of photography, for Christopher Doyle , who would go on to earn acclaim working with Wong Kar-wai . “We have Sylvia to thank, or blame, for everything I have or have not become,” emails Doyle from Rome, Italy, where he is working on a project with American director Gus Van Sant. “Edward wanted to make the first truly Chinese, truly ‘women’s’ film. I had absolutely no experience with feature films. Everyone went on strike against having this gweilo . Sylvia stood by Edward – and me – and insisted we do it his way.” They would work together again on the 1992 film Mary from Beijing . Chang was writer and director, the star was Gong Li. As for Chang’s acting, Doyle writes, “In Sylvia, there is a centre (dare I say ‘heart’?) which is true, which is not the role she is playing. It is why she is an actor. It is basic to who she is and that makes it ‘true’.” There is no greater joy for a cinematographer, he says, than an actress who is sure of herself “and yet fragile enough to appear to allow you into her inner self”. What is it like to split yourself in two, director and star? “Often, I write the script myself and I know the character so well that when I jump away from my directing seat, I’m there,” she replies. “Sometimes I see actors, actresses, try to be pretty and their soul is not there. I keep telling them, ‘Acting is life. It’s moving, everything is floating – you cannot always have your perfect side.’” Ever since she played a tough policewoman, earning her own stunt bruises, in the 1982 Aces Go Places comedy, she has been imperfectly real. She has grown up both on screen and behind the scenes, charting the ages of women; in 20 30 40 , which she wrote and directed, she is the valiant 40-something back on the dating scene (and was 50 when it came out, in 2004, the only Chinese film selected for that year’s Berlin Film Festival). In 2019’s The Garden of Evening Mists , she ugly-cries fearlessly, but you still glimpse the pert young woman she played 30 years earlier in Full Moon in New York, who also faced unpleasant family truths. That 1989 Stanley Kwan Kam-pang film was about three Chinese women – from Hong Kong, from the mainland and from Taiwan. Chang moves, apparently seamlessly, between all three places. When she wrote, and starred in, her 2009 stage play Design for Living , it toured China. (It was almost four hours long – no understudy, no safety zone.) So where is home? “I think home is where my family is and my family is here now, so it’s Hong Kong.” In 1991, she married a Taiwanese businessman, Billy Wong Ching-hung, who had two sons from his first marriage. Together they had another, Oscar. The name was a little award-winning joke (“I had my little Oscar,” she says), but this is where the tale becomes darker. In July 2000, Oscar, aged nine, was kidnapped by three men on his way to school in Kowloon Tong. He was held for 10 days while 15 ransom calls were made. When the police found him, in a suitcase, he was blindfolded. A plumber’s apprentice, who’d done some leak-proofing in the family home, had come up with the plan. (He was jailed for 12 years, his accomplices for 10. No money was ever paid.) In subsequent interviews, promoting her films, Chang made the best of the inevitable questions. Characteristically, she presented a glass-half-full angle: a bad thing had happened but she was the better for it. She said she used to worry about tomorrow, now she lived for today. She said her faith had helped her. She said that for life to continue as normal, the best therapy was work. A single glance at her list of films confirms this: she worked, constantly. She also travelled. She talks about World Vision, the charity with which she has been closely associated since 1993, when she went to Ethiopia and Somalia. It was her second trip to Africa. (When I ask her the date of the first, she begins counting backwards, quietly to herself, “Oscar was born in 1990 …”) That first trip, in 1987, was a hot-air-ballooning, safari-trotting cinematic dream of Africa. The second shocked her to the core. She says she has lost track of the trips she has done since. “We’re all human,” she says – African, Chinese, Syrian, women, men, the children she has met in refugee camps. “Some of those stories,” she says. “I’m sort of lost in words. The things you’ve seen strike you so much.” When we return to discussing her films, there has been a conversational shift. “You’re interested in my childhood,” she says. “I, also, am interested in people’s childhoods. That’s the first influence that will not go away. And it influences you the most, which you might not be aware of but it’s there. If there’s some trauma it might carry on later in life, which you have to get rid of.” Like Oscar, I murmur. “I didn’t realise until …” She stops. “I also thought that I’m quite OK with life. No matter whatever happened, I’d find a way to get by. Or – not get by but to recover and go on. But as I grow older I begin to feel that, no, there’s something there with which I need some help. And I’m also very lucky. Whenever I have some kind of sickness, no matter mentally or physically, always somebody pops up.” You had – almost – the worst trauma a mother can have, I say. During the court case, the defence stated the boy had been “showered with entertainment” – computer games and pillow fights – and was never ill-treated. But for those at home, that wait is unimaginable. (Oscar is now a grown man, with a creative agency and restaurants, not defining himself by 10 days of childhood.) She says, quietly, “Hmmm.” It is not just the beautiful moments that cannot be expressed in language. But she is listening. Earlier, I commented on how disciplined she must be and she said, “I’m hard-working as hell because I always think I’m not talented enough.” As the next journalist arrives, she says, “You used the word ‘discipline’. That word is becoming very important to my life now. I realise a lot of things. Chinese is better at words: yishu is yi – whatever talent you have – and shu – discipline. Put them together and you have art.”