BEIJING (SCMP): Award-winning Chinese actress Mao Xiaotong may be famous for her sweet and cute appearance, but she has a tough streak that has seen her walk away from toxic relationships with her father and ex-boyfriend.
Mao, 37, has won multiple awards, including the Magnolia Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Huading Award for Best Actress in Contemporary Drama.
She is widely recognised for playing independent and innocent female characters in Chinese television dramas, such as Nothing but Thirty and Light Beyond the Reed.
Her look is so famously pure that some compared her to memes featuring cute kittens.
In contrast, she has decisive characteristics that helped her break up toxic relationships.
Mao’s father, an alcoholic gambler, treated her badly because she was not a boy.
Her mother divorced her father when she was two years old, changed her surname to her own, and raised Mao alone.
Mao’s mother worked on several part-time jobs to support her dream of pursuing the arts.
She had already appeared on stage by the age of four and began studying Latin dance in Beijing at 13.
At 17, she decided to study performing arts at the Central Academy of Drama and was admitted after one attempt in 2005.
Mao made her first major career breakthrough for a role in the hit 2011 drama Empresses in the Palace.
In 2018, her father, who disappeared from her life when she was two, appeared on a television show and demanded 50 million yuan (US$7 million) from his “big star daughter”.
He also sought a villa and a car like Mao gave her mother.
Mao never openly responded to her father. Online observers supported her, encouraging her to not succumb to blackmail.
Around the same time, Mao also openly broke up with her boyfriend, singer and actor Chen Xiang, after she found him with another woman at their home.
Chen’s fans attacked Mao after seeing Chen acting frustrated following their break-up. But Mao fought back by publishing the surveillance footage from the lift of their building.
The footage showed Chen entering the lift with an actress just before Mao came home.
It also showed that it only took Mao three hours to pack her things and leave, ending a relationship that had lasted for years.
Many praised Mao’s decisiveness in leaving the toxic relationship.
Mao once said in an interview: “Never underestimate a woman’s courage to solve problems.”
She said she learned her independent spirit from her mother, whom she considers to be an “iron lady”.
Mao’s social media account now has 22 million followers.
“She is the most beautiful, strong yet tragic Chinese actress I know. I can see a great girl’s power in her,” said one online observer. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
