She is one of, if not, the greatest beauty to ever emerge from Taiwan. And 25 years after she quit showbiz, Lin Ching Hsia still looks every bit the glamorous movie star. But if you think there’s some deep, dark secret to her everlasting good looks, truth is, some people are just born with it.

The 64-year-old, who is back in the spotlight because her classic 1990 movie Red Dust has been the digitally remastered for the big screen, recently told Taiwan’s Apple Daily that she’s not someone who fusses over her looks. Not only that, she also doesn’t watch what she eats, admits to being a fast eater, like to take quick showers and is also fan of hotpots. But if there’s one thing she does that’s healthy, it would exercise.

The film icon says that she immediately changes into her workout clothes every morning after she wakes up because she goes hiking at the mountain near her house. She also plays badminton twice a week and attends Pilates classes and occasionally indulges in the odd tennis match. She’s says she’s a fan of table tennis and claims that the sport engages parts of the brain that people don’t usually use and so is a good exercise to prevent old folks from becoming senile.

During her free time, Ching Hsia says she enjoys reading and is known to lie on her bed for six hours straight with her face buried in a novel. She also likes to ask her friends out for a round or four of mahjong, which she insists helps one remain youthful. “Among the four Chinese art forms — lyre playing, chess, calligraphy, and painting — mahjong is considered a form of chess, you need to calculate and use your brains too!”

While the rest of us mere mortals have to seek out different dieting fads and be able to count our calories like a math prodigy just to look human, not Ching Hsia. She says after years of rushing through her meals on set, eating fast has become part of her lifestyle. It’s why she’s not a fan of Japanese fine dining, the kind where each dish is slowly presented to the diner. “When I see that, I feel like I don’t have that much time [to enjoy it],” she says.

She prefers fuss-free street food like danzi noodles and dumplings and, yes, hotpot. She also reveals that a nutritionist had advised her to cut down on her oil intake a while ago, “I did try to control for two days... but after that, I couldn’t be bothered anymore.”

The same goes for her skin care routine. While other female stars are super fussy and militant about skin care, Ching Hsia cheekily says: “I'm too lazy to apply anything on my face.”

So how does she feel about watching herself in Red Dust, which won her her only Best Actress Golden Horse award, almost 30 years later? “I only realised that I looked not bad in the past and I questioned why I didn’t treasure how I looked then,” she says. “I was too busy and didn’t appreciate myself. I never took the time to appreciate my own movies.”

She says she still doesn’t really watch her movies, even though she has 60 of them stored on discs — a gift from Hongkong fashion entrepreneur Jimmy — lying around at home. “My daughters don’t watch my movies too. They have no interest in them,” she laments. “They don’t want to be my fans, they believe that a mother should be like a mother.”

She admits life hasn’t been easy for her kids, simply because their mum is one of Asia’s most famous movie stars. “My family, because my husband married a famous wife, and my daughters are the kids of a famous person, they have had to make a lot of sacrifices. They don’t have a lot of freedom, and they don’t like to be exposed in the media, and this is what I feel most guilty about.”

She says that her husband of 25 years, billionaire tycoon Michael Ying, is a very easygoing man and that he is very forward-thinking. She describes him as being like, of all things, an alien. “He’s very quick on his feet, quicker than me by a thousand times,” she laughs. As for rumours that they're headed for divorce, she simply says that just last December, she had thrown him an advanced 70th birthday bash. “I’m very blessed and contented, my family is very happy,” she adds.

She starred in Red Dust opposite her ex-boyfriend, Taiwanese matinee idol Chin Han. And rumour has it that last year, amidst all that alleged marital trouble in Ching Hsia’s life, she had reconciled with Chin Han and that they, believe it or not, got registered for marriage. When asked about this, Ching Hsia burst into laughter, saying: “This is too funny, I don’t think anyone will actually believe it. It’s really ridiculous.”

Maggie Cheung (right) also starred in Red Dust, and she won Best Supporting Actress for her role in the epic at the 1990 Golden Horse Awards.

The outfit Ching Hsia wore to Red Dust's 2019 premiere earlier this week was the same outfit she wore to her hubby's 70th birthday party.