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    Cheng Pei Pei, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Actor, Dies

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    A trailblazer for women in Asian martial arts cinema, Ms. Cheng rose to fame in the 1960s in Hong Kong.Cheng Pei Pei, a trailblazer for women in Asian martial arts cinema and a star of the 2000 blockbuster “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” died on July 17 in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was 78.Her representatives at Echelon Talent Management confirmed her death in a statement. She was diagnosed in 2019 with a neurodegenerative disease similar to Parkinson’s, they said.Ms. Cheng was born on Jan. 6, 1946, in Shanghai. Trained in ballet and traditional Chinese dance, she began her acting career in Hong Kong in 1964 and became one of the stars of the wuxia genre of martial arts films. Her breakout role was in the mid-’60s kung fu classic “Come Drink With Me.”“Our mom Cheng Pei Pei wanted to be remembered for who she was: the legendary ‘Queen of Martial Arts,’” her family said in a statement. “She loved being an actress and knew, even with her hard work, how fortunate she was to have the career she had.”Ms. Cheng moved to the United States in the 1970s, where her four children were born.She played the villain Jade Fox in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” featuring in some of the film’s most memorable fight scenes.Ms. Cheng chose to keep her medical condition private, her management said.She donated her brain to the Brain Support Network, a nonprofit organization that supports people diagnosed with neurodegenerative disorders. More

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      What to Watch This Weekend: Come Home to ‘Expats’

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      Our TV critic recommends a Nicole Kidman-led family drama in which no one’s quite sure where home really is.Brian Tee and Nicole Kidman star as grieving parents in “Expats.”Prime Video“Prestige TV” is often synonymous with “show about rich people being sad,” and by that metric, “Expats” (Amazon Prime Video) is easily among the most prestigious shows. Early on, its silky misery feels hollow — trite, even — but over six episodes, that emptiness becomes less of a void and more of a vessel, holding elegant, complicated ideas about class, pain and mothering.Nicole Kidman, whose presence alone connotes wealthy woe, stars as Margaret, an American mother living in Hong Kong because of her husband’s career. When viewers meet her, she’s in a state of fragile, paralyzed mourning, though the specifics of her agony remain vague until the end of the second episode, leaving the audience in the uncomfortable position of hungering for something terrible happening to a child, just to get things moving already.Luckily — well, unluckily — things do indeed start moving. Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a Korean American young woman scrambling to find herself, or at least rent money, believes she’s cursed and accidentally catalyzes catastrophe. Margaret’s friend and fellow expat, Hilary (Sarayu Blue), has her own marital crisis, exacerbated by the fallout from Margaret’s tragedy. Essie (Ruby Ruiz), Margaret’s live-in housekeeper and nanny, mourns with her employers and misses her own adult children back in the Philippines. Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), Hilary’s housekeeper, both admires and resents her boss. Margaret says Essie is “family.” Puri calls Hilary her friend. In each instance, the woman’s peers try to correct her.Over and over throughout the show, mothers tell their children to “come home.” No one is quite sure where that is, though, geographically or psychologically. Isn’t home wherever you hang your violent resentments? Love and suffering pour forth in equal velocity here, with money or lack thereof as a stand-in for both. When mothering is reconfigured as paid labor, what happens to both mothering and labor?“Expats,” created and directed by Lulu Wang, and adapted from the novel “The Expatriates,” by Janice Y.K. Lee, is a story of overlaps. Money, pain, guilt, peace, agency — they all pile on top of each other, in Hong Kong’s dense high-rises and in the characters’ fraught family trees. B-roll of construction abounds, and every driving scene seems to be on a hill. In a clever, artful trick, dialogue from one scene often begins before the previous scene is quite finished, an argument starting up before we even know its combatants. Characters’ stories collapse into one another, iterations of one grand maternal conflict.Two episodes of “Expats” arrived Jan. 26, and the following four arrive weekly, on Fridays. The first and second episodes are fine; the third and fourth episodes are good; the fifth and sixth episodes are stunning. More

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      in Music

      New York Philharmonic, Pushing Cultural Diplomacy, Plans Asia Tour

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      Amid rising political tensions, the orchestra said it would perform in Hong Kong and Taiwan this summer and send a delegation of musicians to mainland China.The New York Philharmonic, saying it hoped to use culture to help ease political tensions, announced plans on Thursday for a summer tour in Asia, including stops in Hong Kong and Taiwan and a visit to mainland China by a small group of musicians.The tour will be the Philharmonic’s first visit to Asia since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when many countries in the region shut their borders. It comes amid rising tensions between the United States and China and concerns about the possibility of a crisis over Taiwan.Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s incoming president and chief executive, said the orchestra hoped to show that music could help strengthen ties between the United States and Asian countries.“At a time when communication and trust are on the decline, our firm belief is that cultural diplomacy is more important than ever,” he said. “Showing that we can span borders and bring people closer through music is at the heart of our mission.”The Philharmonic held a Shanghai residency in 2019. A delegation of nine players will visit the city this summer to lead chamber music concerts and teach classes.Chris LeeAfter a hiatus during the pandemic, American and European ensembles have in recent months explored returning to Asia, a booming market for classical music before the pandemic.The Philadelphia Orchestra, the first American ensemble to perform in Communist-led China, is planning to send a delegation of 12 musicians to Beijing and Shanghai this fall. (Last year, the orchestra canceled a tour to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its visit to the country in 1973, worried that China’s then-strict coronavirus protocols would create logistical challenges.)The Cleveland Orchestra is planning an Asia tour in 2025 that could include a visit to China, as well as Japan and South Korea. The Boston Symphony Orchestra visited Japan last year, the ensemble’s first overseas tour in four years.The New York Philharmonic’s Asia tour will include performances in late June and early July at the Hong Kong Cultural Center as well as performing arts centers in Taipei and Kaohsiung, a city in southern Taiwan. The orchestra will perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, featuring the violinist Hilary Hahn.Hong Kong is familiar terrain for the Philharmonic’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, who also leads the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.“I look forward to sharing the work of my New York musical family with audiences in both Taiwan and Hong Kong,” van Zweden said in a statement.The pandemic forced the Philharmonic to cancel three previously scheduled trips to China, where it has had a partnership with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra since 2014. Following the visit to Hong Kong in July, a delegation of nine Philharmonic players will go to Shanghai for six days, where they will lead chamber music concerts and teach classes.The Philharmonic is also working to strengthen ties with Taiwanese cultural groups; on Friday, it will present a concert at David Geffen Hall by the Taiwan Philharmonic.Ginstling said the orchestra was considering a full tour in mainland China in the summer of 2024.“It’s too early to commit to that,” he said. “But we’ve certainly made it clear to our friends in Shanghai that when the circumstances warrant and enable it, we will resume our visits with the full orchestra.” More

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      ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ Review: Hit and Run, Sleight of Hand

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      Wen Shipei’s first feature is a twisty and sophisticated debut whose best trick of misdirection is convincing us we’re watching a different kind of movie.If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that the cover-up is worse than the crime. For instance, if you accidentally hit someone with your van, don’t go back to scene, roll the body into a ditch, then drive away, as the protagonist of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” does. Things will not go the way you hoped.We know this, but if the premise of “Lonesome” feels a little familiar, the director Wen Shipei still manages to keep us guessing. Part exploration of the ravages of guilt, part homage to the stylish Hong Kong gangster flicks of the 1990s, “Lonesome” (written by Wen with Noé Dodson, Wang Yinuo and Zhao Binghao) wears its influences on its sleeve but is a stylish and sophisticated debut feature.An opening image of a bull escaping captivity seems at first to indicate that we have entered a world of easy symbolism. There we meet a prisoner named Xueming (Eddie Peng), who narrates a story of when he, a former air-conditioning repairman, committed a hit-and-run in 1997. As fate appears to have it, his victim was married to a customer (Sylvia Chang), who becomes an unlikely friend. And now we seem also to have entered a world of easy coincidence, or at least classical tragedy.Wen has great talent, however, for misdirection — not only with the plot, though he does that, too (not always as successfully; sometimes clever is just confusing). More important, he has fooled us about what kind of movie we’re watching. It is one in which the characters, even the bull, are subject not to the whims of gods and metaphors but to their own compulsions and machinations. Every action has its consequence, every phenomenon its cause.Are You Lonesome Tonight?Not rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      in Music

      Ray Cordeiro, a Voice on Hong Kong’s Airwaves for 70 Years, Dies at 98

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      Late-night radio listeners in Hong Kong associated Mr. Cordeiro’s sonorous voice with easy-listening standards and early rock. He worked until he was 96.HONG KONG — Ray Cordeiro, a familiar voice on Hong Kong’s airwaves who was one of the world’s longest-working disc jockeys, spinning records for more than 70 years, died here on Jan. 13. He was 98. His death, at CUHK Medical Centre, was confirmed by his manager, Andy Chow. Mr. Cordeiro, known to fans as Uncle Ray, worked until he was 96. His durability got him into Guinness World Records, though he later lost his title to a Chicago D.J., Herbert Rogers Kent.Countless Hong Kong residents associated Mr. Cordeiro’s husky, sonorous voice with early rock n’ roll and easy-listening standards, both when the songs were new and when they’d become sources of nostalgia.Mr. Cordeiro interviewed the Beatles, Elton John, Tony Bennett and other stars, cementing his stature as a local authority on Western popular music. But he was also one of the first D.J.s to introduce Hong Kong’s homegrown Cantopop to English-speaking listeners in the 1970s, said Cheung Man-sun, a former assistant director of broadcasting at Radio Television Hong Kong.“It’s rare and exceptional,” said Mr. Cheung, who did much to popularize Cantopop as a Chinese-language D.J. He said Mr. Cordeiro would translate the Cantonese lyrics into English for a weekly segment on “All the Way With Ray,” his long-running late-night show. “His spirit of loving music influenced the other D.J.s and raised the status of Chinese music,” Mr. Cheung said.Reinaldo Maria Cordeiro was born in Hong Kong on Dec. 12, 1924, the fifth of six children in a family of Portuguese descent. His father, Luiz Gonzaga Cordeiro, a bank clerk, left his mother, Livia Pureza dos Santos, and the children in 1930, according to Mr. Cordeiro’s 2021 autobiography, “All the Way With Ray.” Mr. Cordeiro attended St. Joseph’s College, a prestigious Catholic secondary school, where he credited a teacher with giving him a solid grounding in English. In his late teens, during Japan’s World War II occupation of Hong Kong, he spent years in a refugee camp in Macau, then a Portuguese colony, with his mother and sisters.After the war, the family returned to Hong Kong. Mr. Cordeiro briefly worked at a prison, then spent four years as a clerk at the bank where his father worked. To escape the tedium of that job, he played drums at night for a jazz trio. In 1949, Mr. Cordeiro got his first radio job: writing scripts for on-air hosts at a local station called Rediffusion. Within the year, he was hosting his first show, “Progressive Jazz.” His big break came in 1964, a few years after he’d become a producer for the city’s main broadcaster, Radio Hong Kong, which is now Radio Television Hong Kong. In London, where he’d gone for training at the BBC, Mr. Cordeiro interviewed rock bands like the Searchers and Manfred Mann — and the Beatles, who were coming to Hong Kong. “I heard it’s a swinging town, or city, or place,” Ringo Starr said when Mr. Cordeiro asked about their expectations of Hong Kong, according to a transcript published in Mr. Cordeiro’s book. Mr. Cordeiro’s stature at Radio Hong Kong skyrocketed when he came back and delivered tapes of the interviews to his boss. He said he was given all of the broadcaster’s pop music slots, which meant three other hosts had to be reassigned. Besides playing records, he hosted live music shows like “Lucky Dip,” on which local singers took audience requests. They mostly sang covers of Western hits, which had more cachet in Hong Kong then, but some of his guests — notably Roman Tam and Sam Hui — went on to become major Cantopop stars.In 1970, Mr. Cordeiro debuted “All the Way With Ray,” which he would host for more than half a century. He took requests; knowing that some callers saw his show as a chance to practice conversational English, Mr. Cordeiro often helped them with their pronunciation. Sometimes, so many people called in that the lines crossed and listeners found themselves talking to each other, said Dennis Chan, a longtime fan. He said he and some of the people he met that way struck up friendships.As the years went by, Mr. Cordeiro accommodated listeners’ requests for more contemporary music. But late in life, he shifted the emphasis back to the older music he preferred, always starting his show with Elvis Presley. As midnight neared, he would move further back in time, to the likes of Steve Lawrence and Doris Day. “He wouldn’t take too much time to describe the songs or their stories. Instead, he would let the audience listen to the music,” said Mr. Chow, Mr. Cordeiro’s manager since 1985. Mr. Cordeiro had open-heart surgery in 2010, but returned to the airwaves and kept up a five-nights-a-week schedule, from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., until he retired in 2021. In his book, he said he had the best job in the world. “No matter how bad I feel, once I walk into the studio, I’m full of energy — and ready to go,” he wrote.Mr. Cordeiro never married and had no children, and he outlived his five siblings. Mr. Chan, a 67-year-old retiree, said he had listened to Mr. Cordeiro since he was 12. He said Mr. Cordeiro knew his voice and would greet him by name when he called. “I would tune into the program after long days at work, and feel like my good friend was still with me,” he said. More

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      Hong Kong: Mirror Concert Accident to Be Investigated

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      Two dancers for the popular boy band were hospitalized, a local news outlet reported. Hong Kong officials promised an investigation.The Hong Kong authorities will investigate why a large, heavy video screen fell from the ceiling during a concert by a popular boy band at a government-run venue, injuring two dancers, officials said on Friday.The accident happened during a performance on Thursday night by Mirror, a 12-member band in the Chinese territory whose popularity has grown during the coronavirus pandemic. In footage from the concert at the Hong Kong Coliseum, audience members scream after the video screen lands directly on one dancer, edge-down, apparently striking his neck. The South China Morning Post newspaper later reported that one of the two male dancers had suffered neck injuries and was in intensive care. It said the other was in stable condition.Kevin Yeung Yun-hung, Hong Kong’s secretary for culture, sports and tourism, told reporters on Friday that one of the screen’s suspension cables had broken. Each of the screens for the venue’s four-sided projection system measures 5 meters by 3.9 meters, or 210 square feet, according to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which manages the coliseum. Emergency workers treated the injured dancers. Vivian/Associated PressJohn Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, said in a statement early Friday that he had asked the leisure department and other agencies to investigate the accident and “review the safety requirements of similar performance activities.”“I am shocked by the incident,” Mr. Lee said. “I express sympathy to those who were injured and hope that they would recover soon.”The Hong Kong authorities said in a separate statement that the government had contacted the concert organizers on Wednesday — the day before the accident — about “stage incidents in the past few days.” It did not elaborate, and the leisure department could not immediately be reached for comment.On Tuesday, a member of Mirror, Frankie Chan Sui-fai, fell off the stage at the Hong Kong Coliseum during the second day of the band’s scheduled 12-day series of concerts, The South China Morning Post reported. He fell about a meter and was not seriously hurt, according to the report.Makerville, the concert organizer, apologized for the Thursday night accident in an Instagram post early Friday, adding that Mirror’s remaining concerts at the venue would be canceled. The band’s management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mirror, which draws on K-pop as an influence, formed in 2018 through a reality show designed to manufacture a hit boy band. Its members sing in Cantonese, a Chinese language spoken widely in the former British colony. The band’s escapist lyrics have been a balm of sorts for an anxious population during a tumultuous period of Hong Kong history.In 2019, the city was consumed by months of mass protests triggered by a proposed law to allow extraditions to mainland China. Then came a thicket of pandemic-related restrictions that have battered Hong Kong’s economy, as well as a sweeping national security law that has curtailed freedoms with breathtaking speed.Mirror’s popularity soared as Hong Kong struggled. The band sold out concert halls, accounting for some of the city’s only large-scale events during the pandemic. Its members’ faces have been plastered on billboards, buses and subway ads.The coliseum where Mirror was performing on Thursday opened in 1983, according to the leisure department’s website. It seats about 12,500 people, the site says, and meets local demand for a “world class indoor stadium.”Zixu Wang More

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      in Movies

      Ni Kuang, Novelist and Screenwriter for Martial Arts Films, Dies at 87

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      Best known for fantastical thrillers that doubled as political allegories, he also wrote hundreds of martial arts films for Bruce Lee and others.HONG KONG — Ni Kuang, a prolific author of fantasy novels imbued with criticism of the Chinese Communist Party and a screenwriter for more than 200 martial arts films, died here on Sunday. He was 87.His death was announced by his daughter-in-law, the actress Vivian Chow, on social media. She did not state the cause but said he died at a cancer rehabilitation center.Best known for his fantastical thrillers, Mr. Ni wrote the screenplays for many of the action movies produced by the Shaw Brothers, who dominated the Hong Kong market. He also created the story lines and central characters for Bruce Lee’s first two major films, “The Big Boss” (1971) and “Fist of Fury” (1972), although the screenwriting credit for both films went to the director, Lo Wei.In the Chinese-speaking world, Mr. Ni was perhaps best known for the “Wisely” series, a collection of about 150 adventure stories first published as newspaper serials. The stories told of the title character’s encounters with aliens and battles with intelligent monsters, but they sometimes also contained pointed political criticism.Born in 1935 to a working-class family in Shanghai, Mr. Ni was given two names at birth, as was the custom: Ni Yiming and Ni Cong. Information on his parents was not immediately available, but it is known that he had six siblings.He began working in his teens as a public security official during China’s land-reform movement, believing in the Communist Party’s promise of a more egalitarian future. But he quickly grew disillusioned after being given the task of writing daily execution notices about landowners, who were blamed for China’s rural poverty and persecuted as public enemies. When he questioned whether they had committed other crimes to warrant a death sentence, his superiors rebuked him.Bruce Lee in “Fist of Fury” (1972), for which Mr. Li created the story line and the central characters. He did not receive screenwriting credit, but he did for more than 200 other martial arts films.Golden Harvest Company“That was the beginning of my distaste for the party,” he said in a 2019 interview with Paul Shieh, a prominent lawyer and television host, for RTHK, the Hong Kong public broadcaster.His troubles did not end there. While stationed in Inner Mongolia, Mr. Ni mated a crippled wolf with two dogs, then raised a pack of their cubs in secret. When the cubs attacked a more senior official, he was punished and made to write long essays of contrition. In public sessions where so-called class enemies were denounced, he got in trouble for giggling. He was also branded as an anti-revolutionary after being caught dismantling wooden planks from a footbridge to burn as fuel during a cold spell.A friend had warned Mr. Ni that he could face heavy penalties for his transgressions and helped him steal a horse so he could escape, Mr. Ni said in the RTHK interview. He returned to Shanghai, where he paid smugglers to help him stow away on a boat to Hong Kong in 1957.At first, Mr. Ni made less than 50 cents a day doing factory work and odd jobs. In interviews, he described in great detail the first meal he had paid for with his earnings: a bowl of rice topped with glistening slabs of fatty barbecued pork.Mr. Ni soon found a vocation as a writer of serialized fiction when The Kung Sheung Daily News accepted a manuscript he wrote, “Buried Alive,” about land reform in mainland China. He threw himself into writing full time, saying in interviews that at the peak of his career he wrote as many as 20,000 words a day. He published the first installments of the “Wisely” saga in the newspaper Ming Pao in 1963.“Back then, I wrote novels as a living, to feed mouths and get through the day, so I had no way of writing exquisitely,” he said, adding that he had time for neither research nor revision while writing. “I could only rely on what was in my head.”Although he never returned to the mainland, his early life experiences there often figured into his writing, even as his fiction became more supernatural. “Old Cat,” a “Wisely” novel first published in 1971, was inspired by a gray-blue Persian cat that had kept Mr. Ni company when he was locked in a hut as punishment. He had spent hours untangling its knotted, matty hair, he said in an interview. The cat in the novel battled aliens.In a speech at the Hong Kong Book Fair in 2019 about his legacy as a science-fiction writer, Mr. Ni argued that his work did not really fit into that genre as it is traditionally defined. He had once avoided writing about aliens, he said, but found them to be convenient narrative devices when he was stuck on a plot.“My science fiction is completely different from Western science fiction or what most people would consider ‘hard’ science fiction,” he said.Having completed only junior high school, he added, he lacked a proper understanding of science. He drew more from ancient Chinese myths and legends.Mr. Ni also brought his imagination to the big screen, earning screenwriting credits for movies that included “One-Armed Swordsman,” which broke Hong Kong box-office records in 1967.Mr. Ni married Li Guozhen in 1959. She survives him. His survivors also include their daughter, Ni Sui, and their son, Joe Nieh. Over the years, Mr. Ni did not hold back in his critiques of the Chinese Communist Party, and he described Hong Kong as a refuge for free thinking. But he was pessimistic about the city’s future under Beijing’s tightening grip.His 1983 novel, “Chasing the Dragon,” was widely cited as a prescient description of the political backdrop that prompted pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, followed by a sweeping crackdown.In the book, Mr. Ni writes about an unnamed metropolis that is reduced to a shell of itself:There’s no need to destroy the architecture of this big city, no need to kill any of its residents. Even the appearance of the big city could look exactly the same as before. But to destroy and kill this big city, one only needs to make its original merits disappear. And all that would take are stupid words and actions coming from just a few people.When asked by Mr. Shieh of RTHK what disappearing merits he meant, Mr. Ni said, “Freedom.”“Freedom of speech is the mother of all freedoms,” he continued. “Without freedom of speech, there is no other freedom at all.” More

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      in Television

      Brownface in Hong Kong TV Show Draws Outrage and Shrugs

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      The TV show “Barrack O’Karma 1968” fueled debate online. To many Filipinos, it was about racism and classism. Other viewers jumped to the actress’s defense.HONG KONG — The Hong Kong supernatural anthology TV series has an eye-catching name, “Barrack O’Karma 1968,” and an eyebrow-raising plot.A Filipino domestic worker, navigating deceit, discrimination and accusations of voodoo, is transformed by her seemingly well-intentioned employers into a Cantonese-speaking surrogate daughter.The TVB series not only chose a Chinese Canadian actress, Franchesca Wong, as the main character for a two-episode subplot. It also cast her in brownface. On the show, her skin grows lighter and she gains a new fluency in the dominant language of the city.After the first episode aired on April 12 and backstage footage emerged of Ms. Wong affecting a singsong accent — presumably meant to be Filipino — as she brushed dark makeup onto her legs, some viewers said they could not believe their 21st-century eyes.“I was really shocked,” said Izzy Jose, 27, a Filipino performer and educator in Hong Kong. “That morphed into feeling really angry and morphed further into feeling disappointed.”The footage quickly became a flash point of debate. To many Filipinos in Hong Kong, it was a twinned mockery — racism and classism. To some actors, it was an all-too-familiar dehumanizing and undignified representation, a reminder that minority performers are often locked out of roles that purport to portray people like them. To others, the brownface portrayal was another example of colorism rearing its ugly head.But another strain of reaction began bubbling up. Many viewers of the show — which first aired in 2019 and which also has elements of romance and drama — jumped to its defense. Chinese-language news media lauded Ms. Wong’s performance and her efforts at a Filipino accent. Others declared it a matter of creative autonomy. Some accused critics of crying racism without understanding the full context of the plot, which, they argued, portrays Ms. Wong’s character as a victim.It all boiled down to a clapback that asked: What’s the big deal?TVB defended Ms. Wong in a statement saying she had “successfully portrayed her character” with “professional performing techniques and sophisticated handling of role-playing.” Franchesca Wong, who wore brownface in the TVB show, apologized on social media last week.TVBEric Tsang, an actor and general manager of TVB, further denied that racism played any part in the show and insisted that brownface was crucial to the plot.“Actually the main character is Filipino, and then she turns pale,” Mr. Tsang told reporters at a TVB event last week. “That’s the tricky part,” he added. “You can’t find a Filipino to paint white, so you can only paint an artist black first, so that she can turn pale again. If we’re making movies about aliens, and we can’t find an alien to the play the part, are we discriminating against aliens? This is what the plot calls for.” TVB’s publicists said that Mr. Tsang was unavailable for comment.Using brownface in this way for a plotline and assuming that all Filipinos are a certain color perpetuate odious stereotypes, critics say.“It essentially is an exercise of privilege,” Christine Vicera, a Filipino filmmaker and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in an interview. “Franchesca, at the end of the filming, is able to remove the brown skin. Whereas, Filipinos or Southeast Asians or South Asians in Hong Kong, we don’t have that privilege of removing our skin color.”Jan Gube, an assistant professor at the Education University of Hong Kong who studies multicultural education and diversity, said that many local viewers lacked the historical context to understand why brownface is offensive. Professor Gube said that most students in Hong Kong’s public schools do not grow up interacting with peers who look different from them. Local schools did not teach cultural respect — let alone the context for brownface — in an in-depth way, he said.“You’ll see a lot of comments from social media and local media saying that the actress is being faithful to her role,” he said. “Not a lot of people are looking at it from a cultural point of view, which means they may not necessarily be aware that donning that kind of makeup means something else to other people,” he added.Brownface (and yellowface — imitations of brown and Asian people by light-skinned performers) evolved from the racist vaudeville tradition of blackface, a staple of American minstrel shows in the early 1800s. Mostly white actors applied dark makeup to play mocking caricatures of Black people. With few other representations of Black people onstage — and later onscreen — blackface performances helped reinforce dehumanizing tropes.Asian countries have had a history of perpetuating colorism, in which the preference for lighter skin is imbued in cultural and social mores. Cosmetic companies have been criticized for selling skin-lightening creams. In Pakistan, the TV series “Parizaad,” about the struggles of a dark-skinned laborer, the lead actor appeared to have darkened his face to play the role, drawing criticism from some social media users. But the show was a big hit when it debuted last year.“Brownface is always wrong because it constructs a racist stereotype. The underlying racist premise of brownface is that the essence of a person is embedded in their physical features, not in their character or actions,” said Jason Petrulis, an assistant professor of global history at the Education University of Hong Kong who studies race and politics in U.S.-Asia relations.“An actor who performs in brownface is suggesting that she can portray the inner character of a Filipina domestic worker by embodying her, by mimicking her skin color or speech patterns or hair texture,” he added.About 203,000 Filipinos live in Hong Kong, forming the largest non-Chinese ethnic group in the city, according to a 2021 census. About 190,000 are domestic workers. In the past two years, as Hong Kong has doubled down on Covid restrictions, the domestic workers have been singled out for mass testing and have been slapped with fines for violating social distancing rules that often exceed their entire monthly salary.For Filipinos who find work as actors in the city, the roles are often limited to clumsy maids, gangsters or bit players in ads for cleaning products.“I’ve always felt that our ethnicity and skin color is used as props to add creative value on set,” said Ray Yumul, a 29-year-old Filipino actor and headhunter. “It’s something that needs to stop and change.”Mr. Yumul said he once responded to calls seeking a Filipino actor in a commercial, only to learn that he would be playing a germ.Ricky Chu, who leads Hong Kong’s anti-discrimination watchdog, the Equal Opportunities Commission, said brownface cannot be the sole measure in determining discriminatory behavior. The watchdog would also have to consider whether the makeup is “very exaggerated” with accompanying “speech and gestures,” he said in an interview.As for whether Ms. Wong’s affected accent in the behind-the-scenes footage constitutes offensive behavior, he said a formal complaint would have to be filed before the commission could judge. (The commission, citing confidentiality, declined to say whether it had received complaints.)Mr. Chu did say that as a viewer of the TVB show, he was more concerned by dialogue that used phrases like “all you domestic helpers” that reinforced “negative stereotypes.”TVB, a 55-year-old broadcaster known for variety shows and serial dramas, has faced boycotts from pro-democracy protesters who accuse it of a pro-China bias. It has also drawn complaints for using racial epithets in a historical drama.The latest controversy intensified after the two episodes in which Ms. Wong appeared in brownface. The broadcaster has since removed those episodes from its streaming site, saying it would review their content.Ms. Wong, who did not respond to a request for comment, apologized on social media last week, saying that she had learned that trying to “analyze, interpret and act” was only part of the job.Many of her supporters responded that she had nothing to be sorry for. More

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      Jimmy Wang Yu, Seminal Figure in Kung Fu Films, Dies at 79

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      He changed the nature of Asian martial arts movies, which had been relying on sword fighting and fantasy, by bringing hand-to-hand combat to the fore.Jimmy Wang Yu, who in the 1960s, in movies like “The One-Armed Swordsman,” became the biggest star of Asian martial arts cinema until the emergence of Bruce Lee, died on April 5 in Taipei, Taiwan. He was 79.His daughter Linda Wong announced the death, in a hospital, but did not give the cause. Mr. Yu had reportedly had strokes in 2011 and 2016.As a seminal figure in martial arts, known for bringing hand-to-hand combat into the forefront, Mr. Yu paved the way for stars like Mr. Lee and Jackie Chan who found great success outside Asia. After Mr. Yu’s death, Mr. Chan said on Facebook, “The contributions you’ve made to kung fu movies, and the support and wisdom you’ve given to the younger generations, will always be remembered in the industry.”Mr. Yu worked in the 1960s for the major Hong Kong studio owned by the Shaw brothers, starring in their films “The One-Armed Swordsman” in 1967 and “Golden Swallow” and “The Sword of Swords” in 1968.In that period, Mr. Yu said in a 2014 interview with Easternkicks, a website devoted to Asian cinema, he was frequently in the news for getting into fights, often with police officers.“How did I get popular in Hong Kong?” he said. “I think one reason — it’s because I’m a street fighter.” He added, “I think maybe a lot of people say, ‘I see you fight in the movie, is he really a good fighter or not?’”Mr. Yu, left, played the title role in the hit 1967 Hong Kong movie “The One-Armed Swordsman.” Qiao Qiao played his master’s daughter.Film Society of Lincoln Center“The Chinese Boxer” (1970) — which Mr. Yu directed, and in which he starred as a man who takes revenge on Japanese thugs who have destroyed a Chinese kung fu school — was probably his most influential film. With its focus on hand-to-hand combat rather than the sword fighting and fantasy elements that were then commonplace in Hong Kong action movies, it helped transform the genre.In a 2020 essay on the website of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, Quentin Tarantino, who directed the martial arts films “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” (2003) and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” (2004), wrote that “The Chinese Boxer” was groundbreaking because it meant that “the hero taking on an entire room full of ruffians, whether it be in a teahouse, casino or dojo, would become as much a staple of the genre as the western barroom brawl or the fast-draw showdown.”“The Chinese Boxer” became a challenge to Mr. Lee, who had been working in Hollywood on “The Green Hornet” and other television series before moving back to Hong Kong, where he had been raised.“Jimmy Wang Yu was the biggest action star in Hong Kong, and Bruce had his sights on him,” Matthew Polly, the author of “Bruce Lee: A Life” (2018), said in a phone interview. “They didn’t like each other and had to be kept out of the same room.”He added, “In a way, Jimmy Wang Yu was responsible for Bruce Lee’s success, because ‘The Chinese Boxer’ established the template for the kung fu movie and Bruce used that as his model for ‘Fist of Fury,’ which is more or less a rip-off of ‘The Chinese Boxer.’” “Fist of Fury,” released in 1972, made Mr. Lee a major star in Hong Kong.Mr. Lee came out with only two more films before he died in 1973. His final movie, “Enter the Dragon” (1973), established him as an international star and secured his popularity to this day.Mr. Yu in the 1975 film “Master of the Flying Guillotine.”Pathfinder PicturesMr. Yu was born Wang Zhengquan on March 28, 1943, in Shanghai and moved with his family to Hong Kong when he was young. Before his movie career began, he was a swimming champion and served in the Chinese Army.After “The Chinese Boxer,” Mr. Yu tried to break his exclusive contract with the Shaw Brothers to make films elsewhere, but they sued him successfully, which effectively got him blacklisted in Hong Kong. He moved to Taiwan, where he resumed his career with Golden Harvest and other studios.In 1975, Mr. Yu starred in “The Man From Hong Kong,” also released in the United States as “The Dragon Flies,” in which he played a respected detective sent to Australia to extradite a dope smuggler.Reviewing “The Dragon Flies” in The Boston Globe, George McKinnon wrote that Chinese studio chiefs’ frantic search to find a successor to Mr. Lee might have ended with Mr. Yu, then 32. “Underneath that impeccable Hong Kong tailoring,” he wrote, “lies a ferocious dragon.” But unlike Mr. Lee and Mr. Chan, Mr. Wu did not become a star in the United States.George Lazenby, who co-starred with Mr. Yu in both “The Dragon Flies” and “International Assassin” (1976), had trained in martial arts for four months in anticipation of making a movie with Mr. Lee. After Mr. Lee died, Mr. Lazenby pivoted to working with Mr. Yu and performed his own stunts.“It was really more stunts than dialogue,” Mr. Lazenby, who is best known for playing James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), said in a phone interview. “Jimmy was a genuine fighter — if he hit you, you’d feel it. You just had to trust that he wouldn’t hit you.”Mr. Yu continued to work regularly until the early 1990s and, after a long hiatus, appeared in four films between 2011 and 2013.Mr. Yu in “Dragon” (2011). After a long hiatus, he appeared in four films between 2011 and 2013.RADiUS-TWCComplete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Yu received lifetime achievement awards from the New York Asian Film Festival in 2014 and the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan in 2019.After Mr. Yu’s death, the Academy Award-winning Taiwanese director Ang Lee told the China News Agency: “For many fans like me, he represents the vibe of a certain era. His films and his heroic spirit will be deeply missed.” More