Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Xiang Yun: Girls are harder to parent than boys

SINGAPORE — You’d be hard pressed to find anyone as motherly as Xiang Yun, but even the most kindly of veteran actresses balks a bit at the thought of having half a dozen daughters.

SINGAPORE — You’d be hard pressed to find anyone as motherly as Xiang Yun, but even the most kindly of veteran actresses balks a bit at the thought of having half a dozen daughters.

Mediacorp TV Channel 8’s upcoming new long-form drama, Peace And Prosperity, revolves around her character’s trials and tribulations as the matriarch of a family of six girls, played by Belinda Lee, Tong Bing Yu, Dawn Yeoh, Tracy Lee, Julie Tan and Michelle Wong. On top of that, she also juggles a career as a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioner.

“Having six daughters would be quite a headache,” Xiang Yun mused. “In the show, they get along, but in my family, there are four girls, and we fought from childhood into adulthood!”

In real life, she has a son and a daughter. But, she recalled, it did not look like it was going to turn out that way at first. “When I married Edmund (Chen) and we had our fortunes told, I was told I would have four sons.”

She said she was slightly disappointed at first. “I wanted a girl because you can dress her up.”

Her first child, a boy, didn’t contradict the prediction. “When I was pregnant with my second child, I told Edmund, ‘It must be a boy’,” she said. “Every time we went for a scan, the baby’s sex couldn’t be seen, up until the fifth month. That was when we started buying blue clothes and linens. In the sixth month, the scan showed it was a girl. We both stared at the doctor, who asked, ‘You aren’t happy?’ We were thinking, ‘What are we going to do with so many blue baby things?’ So, my daughter grew up with a lot of blue things.”

Girls, she said, are harder to understand, so mothering six of them would be quite unthinkable. “Girls are very intricate; it’s difficult to understand how they think. They are more precocious, more sensitive and put more thought into things,” she said. “Boys, in contrast, are thick, straight lines — at least, in my house. Mothers get along better with sons, and daughters with fathers, because there is less of a personality clash.

“Still, I get along very well with my daughter. There are some secrets she only tells her dad, but I understand, because I am very close to my father, too. I also dote on my son. If I tell him I don’t feel like talking, he understands. You can’t do that with girls — if you ignore them, they get angry!”

Thankfully, it’s only on screen that she has to deal with so many daughters. The role is made more stressful, she said, by the fact that she has a lot of lines “and they are full of medicinal terms”. “My script is full of highlights. I indicate the level of difficulty of the terms with stars. The more stars, the harder to memorise.

“But I’m very thankful for this role because it has been many years since I’ve gotten a leading role. So, I’m going to work very hard on it,” she said.

She is also learning a lot about TCM, she said. “I have been passing on little bits of medical knowledge to my friends such as, ‘Try not to sleep in a draught’ or ‘If you’ve got a cough, a soup boiled with Chinese yam, wolfberries and lotus seeds helps to clear the passageways and aids in digestion’. If my kids don’t have much of an appetite, I’ll ask Edmund to buy some Chinese yam and we’ll boil it in a soup with lean pork, to boost their appetites and immunity. It’s very effective. These are things I never used to know.”

 

Catch Peace And Prosperity starting April 4, weekdays at 7.30pm on Mediacorp TV Channel 8.

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.