He Saifei, an island-raised Chinese actress, overcame early hardship to become a Golden Rooster Award winner, infusing her roles with quiet resilience.
In 1968, on the coast of Daishan, Zhoushan, five-year-old He Saifei, with a hemp rope loosely tied around her wrist, watched as the boat carrying her mother, older sister, and younger sister gradually sailed into the depths of the waves, eventually disappearing from view. Her once-intact family was thus torn apart.
Her father, who had
previously spent his days practicing calligraphy by tracing models, turned instead to toiling day in and day out, gripping the coarse hemp rope used to haul stone slabs, all to raise her. Fearing that He Saifei might run off and get into trouble by the seaside,the other end of the rope was always tied to her wrist, stiff with cold, and wherever the father and daughter went, the rope followed.When she was six, He Saifei would stand on a low stool to reach the stove and add firewood; even when the flames licked at the strands of hair on her forehead, she didn’t dare to flinch. On winter nights, she would crouch by the well, scrubbing the family’s clothes, her little hands frozen solid like lumps of ice.whenever she looked up, she would see her father, by the faint glow of a kerosene lamp, teaching her to read the sheet music for the three-stringed lute. The ink marks left by the brush tip on the rice paper were warm, as if they could melt the white frost clinging to the windowsill—this was one of the few moments of warmth in He Saifei’s entire childhood.
It wasn’t until she was
seventeen that He Saifei finally got to see her mother one last time; they barely exchanged a few heartfelt words before her mother passed away.Later, people often saw He Saifei gazing absently at the moon in her spare time. When asked why, she simply said that her mother’s name contained the character for “moon.”
He Saifei poured all her tenacity into her artistic training. At sixteen, she auditioned for a Yue Opera troupe, and the moment she took her first step on stage, she caught the examiners’ attention.She later branched out into the film and television industry, infusing every character she portrayed with an unyielding tenacity. Privately, she has practiced calligraphy for nearly twenty years; in 2006, she formally became a disciple of Du Benji, a direct descendant of Xu Beihong, and devoted herself to studying the orthodox traditions of Chinese painting and calligraphy.
On the day she held the Golden Rooster Award for Best Actress in
2023, the flashes from the cameras below formed a dazzling, blinding sea of light—yet no one noticed the faint mark on He Saifei’s wrist, as if left by the loose rope that had once bound it in her younger days.From an orphaned girl on a remote island to Golden Rooster Best Actress, He Saifei has taken every step of her sixty-year journey with solid, steady determination.The hardships she endured and the tears she swallowed in her early years were ultimately woven into the characters she portrayed, becoming the most heartfelt essence of her performances. The adversities that failed to break her ultimately became stepping stones that propelled her toward broader horizons.
