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| Brossard's Christy Chung demonstrates the positive, negative, religious and fake orgasm, the last of which involves knocking over the interviewer |
Brossard's Christy Chung has seen her fame decline somewhat since her meteoric rise from local obscurity to top superstardom in China, as motherhood has taken her away from her A-list acting career, but Chung is still alive, as demonstrated in this clip where she explains the four types of female orgasm..
I had the pleasure of interviewing Chung in late December 2001, when she was at the height of her fame as China's top female star.
Here's the article I ended up writing, in which she reveals her surprising rise to fame, her ordeal giving birth in Montreal during the ice storm and her failed audition for a job as MusiquePlus VJ.
Hong Kong Handover
Miss Chinese Montreal 1992 is the most famous movie star you’ve never heard of
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
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| Chung seen here being crowned Miss Chinese Montreal 1993 |
Chung says she’s still surprised by the twist of fate that has vaulted her to the top of the Hong Kong star firmament since 1993, earning her top billing in films alongside such megastars as Jet Li.“I never thought I’d become an actress, I really feel that everything came like a dream. Sometimes I m sitting down and I can’t believe it. I feel that I was very blessed and have this destiny laid down to me, it’s amazing.” Chung’s serendipitous rise to glory started in 1992 when as a Marketing student at Ecole Polytechnique her boyfriend brought her along on a visit to Miss Chinese Montreal organizer Ruth Koo Lam. The boy was trying to land a singing gig at the upcoming pageant but Lam’s eyes were on Chung, who she eventually persuaded to enter the contest.
After bagging the crown, Chung was entered into the Miss Chinese International Pageant in Hong Kong. At the time Chung, who had once failed an audition as a VJ at Musique Plus for being “too shy,” was in the process of being hired as a TV weather reporter at Radio Canada. “That was a point in my life to decide to stay in Montreal and be a weather girl or go to Hong Kong and try to make my fame,” she says.
Chung’s wanderlust won out. “It was my first trip away, I had never left Montreal. I was in awe of the buildings, I was just happy to be here,” she says in a phone interview from Hong Kong. And to her surprise she won the bigger title. “I never through in a million years I d win the title because at that time I couldn’t speak Cantonese. When they called my name, I didn’t realize it. The girl sitting next to me had to explain ‘you just won the title.’”Although Chung’s film experience consisted of a mere10 second appearance as a gum chewing prostitute in Love and Human Remains, she found herself immediately getting top billing in Hong Kong films, a rarity in a system that generally requires actors to apprentice in afternoon soaps. “I was a foreigner, a westernized woman, here I was suddenly doing movies, it was pretty awesome considering that I didn’t speak the language at all,”
says Chung who reports that her language skills have improved somewhat since.
After making Asian crowd pleasers as Bodyguard from Beijing and Aces Go Places, Chung - who shuns limos, fancy clothes and makeup and dreams about “driving a Winnebago around the Maritimes” - found herself hounded by the gossip-mongering Hong Kong press. Her spot in the Asian film firmament is apparently high enough to merit wild rumours about her romantic life and getting tailed around Montreal by Hong Kong reporters, one of whom was apparently unprepared for our cold climes. “I felt sorry for him, he wasn’t used to the weather, he got very sick.”
Eventually Chung returned to give birth with now-ex-husband Glen Ross at the Royal Vic, during the famous Ice Storm no less and amazingly, without regrets. “I’m definitely going to go back if I have another baby, Canada has the best services and I just feel very relaxed there,” she says.
But Chung soon learned that the Hong Kong tabloids don’t consider giving birth a brilliant career move. “They couldn’t comprehend why I went to have a baby, they thought I was at the top of my career and now I’d have to just shoot mother roles. I’m trying to change this misconception, I feel that mothers don’t lose their appeal, that’s why I’ve been working hard for three years, even though I’m a mother, I’m still the same,” she says.Her attack on the maternal stereotype has entailed a break from her squeaky clean past roles for more off-the-beaten path stuff, including the Thai-shot filmJan Dara, set for an upcoming Canadian release. It’s about a young man’s doomed quest to find deeper answers through sensual relief. Chung plays the boy’s temptress in a role described by the Bangkok Post as “magnificent,” particularly in what it calls “the now-famous I'm-so-hot-please-rub-ice-on-my-sexy-back sequence.”
But Chung also wants to administer a few screaming high kicks in the future, as she bemoans that her martial arts are featured in only two of her flicks. “I love fighting, a lot of actors here don’t. It’s very hard. You get very tired and all bruised.” Although Chung squandered an invite to star in Rumble in the Bronx because she was busy shooting a film where plays a helpless rich chick, she’s set to appear in Jackie Chan’s upcoming High Binders, (retitled The Medallion) set to be the most expensive ever Hong Kong production. “All the female actors who work with Jackie complain of getting bruised and falling off trains but I’ve always wanted to work with him.”
Chung, who has also recently served as the Asian Lara Croft, says part of her heart remains in our city under the cross in spite of her being the focus of seemingly unlimited Hong Kong adulation. Though she “can’t stand the minus 30 degree days,” Chung misses the poutine and outdoor terraces. “Montreal is very trendy,” she says. “The energy is really very good. Montrealers are so hot, I tell people if you want to go to see the beautiful people, don’t go to Toronto or Vancouver, go to Montreal.”