20-year-old Li Yan recently attended a charity event of the Smile Angel Foundation as a volunteer and youth director, showing a calm, independent and relaxed state.
Li Yan, 20, appeared at the Yanran Angels Foundation’s charity parent-child summer camp, sitting in the audience; at first, no one in the crowd recognized her as the daughter of Faye Wong and Li Yapeng.
Once the news spread, the first thing that came to mind for many who have followed her for years was an indescribable sense of concern. Since birth, Li Yan has always been in the public eye:With parents who are both high-profile public figures and a congenital lip mark of her own, she has long been enveloped by public scrutiny and various labels. Countless people have quietly speculated about what kind of person this child, caught in the crosshairs of public attention, will ultimately grow up to be.
This concern, which had lingered for many years, finally began to subside after seeing how she was doing this time. The path of her growth, as perceived by everyone, was entirely different from what the outside world had previously anticipated. Although her parents divorced when she was young, the love and care her family gave her never diminished in the slightest:From a young age, she pursued her passion for painting with dedication; when she set her sights on the fashion week runway, she took concrete steps to make it happen. She has never allowed external expectations to dictate her life or force her to become someone else. Her journey has been smooth, culminating in her admission to an art school in London, and the various distractions and clamour from the outside world have never disrupted her own pace of growth.
On this return to China, her role is more distinctive than ever before.
She is not making a public appearance with her family as the child of a celebrity, nor is she seeking attention by leveraging her family’s name; rather, she is participating in activities as a volunteer for the Yanran Angel Foundation’s charitable parent-child summer camp and as a youth director of this public welfare project.
That day, she was dressed very simply—wearing no makeup and with no special styling—just a slightly worn, soft green T-shirt, black-framed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, and her long hair casually falling over her shoulders. She sat quietly in the audience, her attention focused entirely on the charity segment taking place on stage.Standing nearly 1.75 meters tall, she exuded an elegant poise amidst the crowd. She had long since shed the timidity of her childhood, and the post-surgery healing marks on her lips were barely noticeable. In her speech and demeanor, she carried the same effortless grace as her mother, Faye Wong.
She is no longer the child the outside world once described as having grown up in the shadow of her parents’ fame. Today, she is able to clearly define boundaries in her relationships with her family, dares to directly express her own dissenting views, and has channeled all the attention once projected onto her by the outside world into helping children who have had similar experiences to her own.
There has never been a standard answer to what
good parenting should look like. If there are children in difficult circumstances around you who need help, offer them a helping hand, give them the space to grow independently, and avoid forcing your own expectations onto them—that is the best gift you can give them as they grow up.
