[StraitsTimes]Mona Lisa smile
(蒙娜麗莎...orz, 是"慈禧秘史"別亂入成慈禧密碼咧~~)
Sep 25, 2006
YOU could say that Kit Chan was born to play the role of Empress Cixi in
the ongoing musical, Forbidden City: Portrait Of An Empress.After all, the
singer has channelled the scary, tyrannical Chinese ruler for more than 10
years in her illustrious Mandopop career.
In all her publicity photos, she emotes one of only three expressions:
pensive, haughty or grudgingly seductive.
With those perpetually glowering eyes and slightly-parted lips, she exudes
the cheeriness of a jailbird serving a life sentence.
And, posing for pictures for this interview in Passion hair salon at Palais
Renaissance, which is styling her hair for the shoot, she is starkly true to
form.
She approaches photo shoots with seasoned, steely aplomb. She knows the power
of a well-extended leg and the perfectly positioned elbow.
Her speciality is the moody, femme-fatale look, and she offers various shades
of it to chilling effect.
When the photographer asks her to place her arm a certain way and she says,'
This feels really uncomfortable’, you don’t argue - in case you get dragged
off to be beheaded.
But soon, it occurs to you that Chan, 34, tackles every shoot as would an
efficient, no-nonsense software engineer - get it done, shut down and go for
a coffee.
‘I need a drink,’ she chimes when the photographer is done.
Suddenly, she morphs from life-threatening Empress Dowager to chirpy,
personable lady-in-waiting.
‘You normally write about food, right?’ she says as we walk to a cafe
downstairs. ‘I'd looove to do that. I looove food.’
She pores over the menu and orders coffee and a chocolate, apricot and ginger
tea cake. They are later left untouched because, you realise, while she loves
to eat, she also loves to talk.
We have 11/2 hours before she has to rush to The Esplanade to prepare for the
night’s performance, but she chats as if she’s got all day.
The girl even makes you laugh.
She bursts into a rib-tickling impersonation of her British co-star Leigh
McDonald, who plays the Empress’ portrait painter in Forbidden City.
‘Heh-ow do you do it, Kit? Heh-ow do you keep singing like that night after
night? That voice must have come up from your ankles,’ Chan mimics with
relish.
Not suited for pop scene
UP CLOSE, she is far more attractive than her photos allow. She has creamy,
fair skin, sparkling teeth and appears thoroughly intelligent and
level-headed.
Dressed in an old Zara T-shirt, Martin Margiela leather jacket, DSquared2
jeans and Burberry heels, she is the on-the-go urbanite with sensible
designer leanings.
There were ‘a million reasons’ behind her retirement from pop music two
years ago, she says.
But topmost is this: While she was the first Singaporean singer to crack the
cut-throat Taiwanese market in 1994 and went on to make 20 albums, she was
never suited for the popstar life to begin with.
‘Like, I’ve taken a million photos and I still can’t smile,’ she says in
her polished, American- tinged English.
In the Chinese music industry, where a smiley, approachable image is
everything, it’s like saying you’re a race-car driver but you won’t do the
manual stick.
Why won’t she smile?
‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘It’s just really hard, lah. Maybe it’s
out of rebellion and not doing what I’m expected to do.’
She has brazenly short-circuited other industry standards, too.
Famously guarded, she hardly talked about her family background, boyfriends
or her private life to earn column inches.
And, even though it’s a rite of passage for all pop newbies, she hated going
on the banal Taiwanese gameshow circuit to promote her albums.
‘The hosts were very low class and very, very sexist,’ she says
unblinkingly.
‘If you’re flat-chested, they’ll talk about your being flat. If you’re
busty, they’ll talk about your being busty. And that’s just on screen.’
Her refusal to pander to the industry’s machinations has given her a cold,
aloof public image.
She muses: ‘Maybe it’s harmed my career, but it’s worked for me as a human
being. I’m very happy with how my life has turned out.’
Born to sing
BORN Chan Kit Ee, the third of four daughters of a Cantonese family had the
early makings of a singer while still a student at Raffles Girls’ Secondary
School.
She sang in the choir and headlined school productions like The Sound Of
Music and Aladdin And The Wonderful Lamp.
After completing her A levels at Raffles Junior College, she enrolled to
study drama at Lasalle- SIA College of the Arts.
But she was hijacked from the course when, at the age of 19, local record
company Ocean Butterflies spotted her when she sang in a songwriting
competition.
‘Her voice has a very clear and moving quality,’ says Mr Colin Goh,
managing director of the label, which went on to manage her for 10 years.
The bosses were so sure of her regional potential that they put down hundreds
of thousands of dollars to promote her in Taiwan, he adds.
At first, her parents were dead set against her entering showbiz. ‘Singing
wasn’t a proper profession in Singapore at the time,’ recalls Chan.
But they relented and soon had every reason to be proud of their daughter.
She was an overnight smash. Her 1994 breakthrough album, Heartache, sold
150,000 copies in Taiwan, a feat that ranked her among seasoned A-list
singers. The follow-up, Too Close For Comfort, shifted another 200,000 copies.
‘Her success was a combination of her voice, good songs and the publicity
that went into promoting her. She was always very professional and
hard-working,’ says Mr Goh.
Her hard-earned success paved the way in Taiwan for other Singaporean singers
like Mavis Hee in 1996 and Tanya Chua in 1999.
Chan went on to release four Cantonese albums for the Hong Kong market. She
sang opposite Jacky Cheung in the acclaimed musical, Snow.Wolf.Lake in 1997,
and starred as the late Teresa Teng in another Hong Kong musical, The Legend,
in 1998.
She also played a doctor in the popular Hong Kong drama serial, Healing Hands
II, in 2000.
But friends say she was never totally cut out for the schmoozey, dog-eat-dog
world of showbiz.
‘Instead of hanging out with people who could further her career, she’d
rather spend her free time with her family and old schoolmates,’ says Ms
Wong Tze Shiaw, 34, her close friend since Secondary 1.
‘She’d go in, do her work and come out. To her, it’s really just a job.’
Chan is gracious when asked how she feels about having her regional success
topped by Singapore’s current pop princess, Stefanie Sun.
‘I’m delighted,’ she says.
‘Progress, progress, progress. It would’ve been so sad if Singaporean
singers didn’t move forward after all the doors we’ve had to open.’
Since leaving the pop scene, she has taken time to learn French and enjoyed
an extended holiday in Boston, where her Singaporean banker boyfriend of five
years works.
She still co-owns Flowers In The Attic, a fashion boutique at The Heeren
she founded with Ms Wong, and is about to complete a correspondence degree in
popular music with Lasalle-SIA.
Last month, she turned author when she co-wrote and published the
semi-autobiographical book, Cathy And Jodie: The Princess And The Flea.
‘I have no other plans now. I have all these ideas of opening a cafe or
launching a make-up brand. But right now, I’m only thinking about finishing
my bloody thesis,’ she says.
But one thing’s for sure. No longer shackled by the burdens of being a
popstar, she cuts a vastly different figure from her former petulant self.
For the first time, she reveals that her parents are the owners of one of the
oldest and most famous provision shops in Chinatown, Chan Hong Kee in Sago
Street.
‘I never spoke about it out of protection for them. But they’re selling the
business and retiring next month, so it’s okay,’ she says.
‘Besides, with one foot out the door, my attitude about these things have
changed.’
The good girl
ONE thing that hasn’t changed is her disciplined work ethic.
For her vocally demanding role in Forbidden City - she belts out four solos
and countless duets, trios and group numbers nightly - she has eschewed her
favourite oily and heaty food with almost religious stoicism.
‘She’s a very good girl,’ observes Mr Gaurav Kripalani, artistic director
of the Singapore Repertory Theatre, which stages the show.
‘We’ve asked her out for drinks after the shows but she’s always said no,
she’s going home to rest her voice.’
Does she feel nervous before each performance?
‘Of course,’ she admits readily.
‘I pray to God every night. There’s just no way you can do this on your
own. You need a higher power.’
Earnestly, she goes on to reveal how she converted to Christianity at age
10 as a student in Fairfield Methodist Primary School. But lured by
existentialist theories and New Ageism in her late teens, she became a
free-thinker.
‘But when I was 28, I thought, no, cannot be. There must be a God. So I went
back. I found my faith again,’ she says.
Riding on this refreshing burst of openness, you ask if she has plans to
marry her 41-year-old boyfriend, whom she met on a plane on the way back from
the United States.
‘No. Things are just really stable and nice right now. Anyway, I’m
conservative in that he has to propose to me first, on his knee, with a ring,
’ she says.
You go for one more. What does he look like?
‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s a very fine-looking man indeed,’ she adds
sweetly.
Time’s up. She bids you goodbye with a little squeeze on your arm.
‘Hey, thanks so much for your time,’ she says. And, as she leaves, she
flashes you a big smile.
Say hi to the new Kit on the block.
tpaulin@sph.com.sg
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
flash back
‘I was a painfully shy kid, and I actually had a severe stutter up until
kindergarten. Parents today would have taken me to a child psychologist’
--Kit Chan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘She screamed at me and said I might as well be a‘gai’, On being compared
to a prostitute when she told her mother she wanted to be a singer. In
Cantonese, ‘gai’ is slang for prostitutes‘Making singing a respectable
profession in conservative Singapore’.
On her proudest career achievement‘Unlike making albums, nothing about
theatre is engineered. I love the fact that you can't cheat’On singing in
a musical.
--
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