Sheren Tang & Ada Choi: Ambassadors of Love
Courtesy of TungStar by way of ent.sina.com.cn (obviously)
Recently, Sheren Tang and Ada Choi made a joint promotional appearance on behalf of the Hong Kong Christian Council. They were promoting and raising funds for a charity project aimed at repairing damaged schools in the mountainous regions of Mainland China. Apparently, the Chinese name of the project can be roughly translated as the “Rebuilding Collapsing Schools Project.”
Indeed. Brutally descriptive and bluntly literal. Very Chinese.
Ta Kung Pao published an article about the event and solicited Tang and Choi’s thoughts on Chinese mountain folk (read: hillbillies). Here’s the relevant excerpt from Em’s translation at TVBSpace News Roundup:
After the event, Ada and Sheren went to a mock up of one of these schools to experience for themselves life for these children.
Sheren says that she visited the mountainous areas of Xian in 2004 [with World Vision] and it was very inspirational for her because it changed her outlook on life. During that time, it was at the peak of popularity for her ‘Yu Fei’ character [from War & Beauty] and the press were often asking her if [she] had made a lot of money, but there was also a lot of gossip. After hearing the stories of the people from the area, she felt that the people there are full of [vitality] and compared to the many miseries of city dwellers, it made her cry as she was overcome with emotion.
Although this is the second year that Ada has taken on the ambassador role, she is yet to go and visit the people in the hills because she does not have time. She can only listen to the stories from those who have been there, but she is often moved to tears by what she hears.
Some of my own thoughts…
Is it me or have Sheren Tang and Ada Choi been making more joint public appearances lately? They’re two of Hong Kong’s most outspoken and prominent Christian entertainers, but I can’t recall them publicly appearing together all that much in prior years. Yet now they’re hanging out together in collapsing schools.
I think it began in April 2004, when they were both bridesmaids at Kitty Lai’s wedding. Then, earlier this year, they and two other HK actresses embarked on a three-week evangelistic speaking tour of Europe, that Old World bastion of humanism, skepticism, fascism, Nazism, etc. Otherwise known as Agnosticism’s Mead Hall.
They visited London, Manchester, Barcelona, Rome, Milan, Lausanne (site of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization), Paris, Amsterdam, and Maastricht. (Another source of unknown dependibility listed Rotterdam and/or Tilburg instead of Maastricht. Frankly, my money’s on Rotterdam. Maastricht? Come on.)
In London, they spoke at All Souls Church, where John Stott, a prominent figure in evangelical Christianity, serves as Rector Emeritus. Hopefully, they met Stott. Hopefully, they hung out with Stott. Hopefully, they partied with Stott.
How crazy would that be? John Stott, author of such books as Basic Christianity, The Cross of Christ, and The Incomparable Christ (as well as the chairman of the draft committee that produced the Lausanne Covenant, “one of the most influential documents in modern Evangelical Christianity”) chilling with four Hong Kong actresses whose collective filmography includes such sketchy-sounding cinematic masterpieces as Rape Trap, Love & Sex of the Eastern Hollywood, Love & Sex Among the Ruins, Bloody Friday, Angel or Whore, and my personal favorite, Tsimshatsui Floating Corpse. John Stott partying with four HK actresses in swingin’ London. I can’t think of anything else that would advance the cause of Christ further than that. And at 177 years old, I hear that Stott can still drop it like it’s hott.
Interestingly, after England, Choi flew back to Hong Kong, purportedly to participate in some promotional events for her latest biennial TVB serial, which happened to be concurrently showing during the European evangelistic tour. Personally, I thought Tang and Choi were purposely separated because if they had gone down in a plane together, there’d be a 70% chance that the Gates of Hell would have prevailed against Hong Kong…or something like that. However, Choi only skipped out on Barcelona and eventually rendezvoused with the tour in Rome in what must have been a crazy marathon of plane flights boomeranging between Asia and Europe.
And now Tang and Choi are hanging out together in collapsing schools.