Sylvia Chang. Award-winning actress, director, writer, producer, singer, wife, mother, competitive eater…and Christian? Although I’ve yet to come across anything definitive, if you compile the clues out there, the evidence semi-strongly suggests that she’s a Christian believer of some sort…maybe.
For instance, there’s the Chinese-language commercials for World Vision, the Christian relief organization, in which she sports a crucifix and pleads for donations while cradling a starving African child. There’s also her appearance in Forever and Ever (2001), a social drama about an HIV-stricken hemophiliac and his mother, which has strongly Christian elements. And now her appearance (with a totally different crucifix) in a trailer for what appears to be an evangelistic video biography about Liu Man Nok (a.k.a. Lok Lok), actor Liu Kai Chi’s youngest son, who passed away on April 5, 2006, at the age of five, as a result of leukemia-related pneumonia.
Because the trailer was unsubtitled and my Cantonese is extremely shaky, I’m not entirely sure what Ms. Chang was saying. Her Taiwanese-accented Cantonese didn’t exactly help, either, though it’s definitely more my fault than hers. However, I’m working on acquiring a copy of the video for further analysis and will let you know if she appears in it and makes definitive declarations either way, whether it’s confessing Jesus as Lord or pledging her allegiance to Buddha, the Kitchen God, and/or Karl Marx. I’ll also be writing more about Lok Lok later.
By the way, if Ms. Chang is a Christian, then she’s not of the fundamentalist variety; more likely of a mainline orientation with a strong emphasis on social justice.