Taiwan Today

Early in his acting career, Sun Yueh (孫越) became known for playing tough-guy roles. He was the sleazy, brutish gangster or the evil communist agent who looked mean enough that young moviegoers got scared just by seeing his face on the screen. And like the characters he played, Sun lived a mean life. He cared little about the quality of films he played in. He was only after fame and fortune. By his own admission, he was a self-centered drinker, gambler, and womanizer. And he was foul-mouthed and quick-tempered. “I did everything a man could do,” he says.

Compared to that man, the Sun Yueh of today is barely recognizable. He is a devout Christian who studies the Bible every day and refuses even to jaywalk. When he is not busy pro­moting social issues—from anti-smoking, anti-drug, and anti-child prostitution campaigns to blood dona­tion drives, help for the eld­erly, and environmental causes—he is preaching about the need for love. No longer is he part of the shady entertainment indus­try. There may be time for making public service an­nouncements or giving in­spirational radio talks, but there is no time for movie or TV roles. He is too busy living up to his new leading role as one of Taiwan’s first full-time, high-profile philanthropists and most avid volunteer workers.

From the public’s perspective, the change in Sun Yueh’s life that came about in the mid-1980s was sudden and surpris­ing. Not only did he go through an amazing character transformation, but he gave up acting just when he was at the height of his career. Several years earlier, he had shifted into comedy roles and been a hit both in films and on a popular TV variety show, fi­nally proving his versatility as an actor. And in 1982, he went further, landing his first leading role in a high-quality dramatic film, Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? Sun put in a memorable performance as a re­tired soldier who collects wine bottles to make a living and devotes his life to raising an adopted daughter. Those who saw the film will never forget the look on his face when the daughter, as a newly discovered singing star, denies in public that this rag­ged old man is her father.

Just a few months after the role won him a Golden Horse Award (Taiwan’s version of the Oscars), Sun announced that he was mak­ing a change in his life. He would now spend only four months a year making mov­ies. The rest of the time would be devoted to volun­teer work. At first, many people didn’t take the an­nouncement seriously. It sounded like just another ac­tor’s publicity stunt. But Sun not only kept his promise, he eventually went beyond it. Six years later, after several more acclaimed dramatic roles, he called a press con­ference and announced his complete retirement from the screen. “Actor Sun Yueh shall become history,” he said. “From now on, you will see only charity volunteer Sun Yueh.”

Now 64, Sun continues to live up to his commitment. He spends his days giv­ing speeches, helping to raise funds for various charity groups, and meeting with other volunteers to discuss what else can be done to help the public. He is a volun­teer-for-life with the John Tung Founda­tion, a local anti-smoking organization, and with two major Christian charity groups, World Vision and Cosmic Light. Working with these two organizations, he was instru­mental in setting up a major drug rehabili­tation center, Operation Dawn, ten years ago. He has also given much time to the Blood Donation Association, establishing himself as a role model by donating his own blood more than fifty times since 1983.

Sun does not limit himself to charity work in Taiwan. He has traveled through rough mountain terrain to visit refugees from Mainland China who have settled in remote and barren villages of northern Thailand. Last year he organized a team of Cosmic volunteers to take food to fam­ine-stricken areas in southern Africa. And this May, he was invited to speak at the First Conference on Smoking and Health in Shanghai.

Although his now amiable face and magnetic voice continue to appear on television ads, he is hired because of his respected philanthropist image. He never fails to use the opportunity to deliver a special message—and the money he is paid, sometimes as much as US$75,000, always goes to charity. In one memorable coffee ad made in the mid-1980s, sharing was his theme. After taking a sip of the coffee drink in the midst of a friendly get­-together, he turns to the audience and says, “Good things should be shared with good friends.” In a recent commercial sponsored by a local construction com­pany, he encourages the elderly to have a positive attitude toward life and to enjoy their later years. And in one public service announcement, he offers a concerned ad­monition to wayward teenagers: “Go home, children. The night is late.”

Since 1984, Sun has also been host­ing his own radio program, called Sing For You, and is often invited to talk on other radio shows. He always begins with what has become his trademark line: “Hi, everybody. This is your good old friend Sun Yueh.” Then he talks casually about some daily incident that has been a moral inspiration for him, talking as if with his closest buddies. In the end he never for­gets to remind listeners about the impor­tance of helping others.

Whether delivering a TV ad, hosting an anti-smoking benefit, or telling chil­dren’s stories, Sun comes across as every­ body’s friend—an image that the public believes in. It’s not uncommon for stran­gers to greet him on the street, “How ya doin’, Uncle Sun?” And Uncle Sun in­variably responds with a smile and a friendly reply. As evidence of how far he has come from that early gangster image, a poll by the China Times newspaper last Christmas showed that people saw Sun as the Taiwan celebrity who most resembles Santa Claus. His competitors included the president and several other high-profile political figures. In his modest and opti­mistic fashion, Sun interprets the findings as proof that everyone has altruistic po­tential. “If someone like me can accom­plish what I have over the past ten years,” he says, “anyone can do it.”

Sun was born in 1930 in Zhejiang province in eastern China. As a child he dreamed of becoming an actor, but there were few opportu­nities at that time, especially after the civil war broke out. At sixteen, he joined the army to fight the Communists. After the war was lost in 1949, he followed the Na­tionalist government to Taiwan, along with hundreds of thousands of other young sol­diers. Soon after arriving, he joined a mili­tary theater group and got his first chance to appear on stage. In 1960, he began working for Taiwan’s first TV station, Taiwan Television Enterprise (TTV), and three years later had his first film role. By the time he left the industry, he had appeared in more than two hundred movies. During those early days, he never imagined he could be happy in any other career. “I found life on the stage and it shall end there,” he used to tell his friends.

Initially, Sun’s appearance limited the kinds of roles he was given. He didn’t have the looks of a Paul Newman or the style of a Humphrey Bogart, but a short, stooping figure, brutish features, and a prominent nose. He was usually cast in supporting roles as a one-dimensional vil­lain, and quickly became typecast. His easily recognizable face became synony­mous with that of the bad guy. Many girls associated him with one scene he played as an evil Communist agent trying to rape a helpless young woman. Even his own young daughter and son were ashamed to have him as a father, and they often re­fused to talk to him.

In the late 1970s, Sun got a chance to break out of his villain role with an offer to join a weekly TTV variety show. His comic talents came to the fore and the farce-like show got a wild response. The success prompted the station to produce Taiwan’s first major comedy-based vari­ety show, a weekly program called Rhap­sody of the Little Guys, in 1980. Sun teamed up with another comedian, David Tao, and actress Hsia Ling-ling and was a hit with viewers. Meanwhile, his film ca­reer had also begun to take off. Beginning in 1978, he was being offered leading roles, although most were in slapstick comedies and soapy melodramas.

Over the years, Sun seemed to be achieving exactly what he had wanted: money and fame. But still he was dissat­isfied, and often depressed about his ca­reer. In a book of recollections that he published in 1986, called Sun Yueh Chats With You, he writes, “After I became fa­mous, I acted in a lot of films that I could not be proud of. I was constantly acting but I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so disgusted with myself that I wished I would get hit by a car on the street. Life became meaningless. I felt empty inside.” At one point, he even contemplated sui­cide. He tried turning to inspirational books and to philosophy and various reli­gions, but found no comfort.

In 1979, while working on a film be­ing shot in Korea, he became even further disillusioned. And without his family to keep him in line, he lived a more wanton life than ever. He was deeply unhappy, but didn’t know why. Finally, he decided that what he needed was to take his work more seriously, to try to make his mark as an actor. After returning to Taiwan, he vowed to accept only challenging roles in quality films. With that goal in mind, he also left TTV in 1982. The same year, he landed his award-winning role in Papa. Can You Hear Me Sing? After that came several more memorable roles. He was an old retired soldier who, desperate for companionship, buys a young bride from a poor aboriginal family in Old Mo’s Second Spring (1984). He was an aging ho­mosexual father figure who takes care of young runaway gays in The Outsiders (1986). In People Between Two Chinas (1988), he was a man torn between two women: a wife left behind in Mainland China after the civil war and a second wife married later in Taiwan. All of these movies offered themes relevant to real­-life society in Taiwan, and in all of the roles, the actor’s own identity came through. Like himself, each was an aging veteran who had come to Taiwan from Mainland China, a lao-o-a in the Taiwan­ese dialect. And each was a confused but caring older man—a person of human foi­bles and failings.

Even before Sun changed direction in his film career, his personal values were al­ready undergoing a dramatic shift. It started in 1981 with a fundraising TV program that he and David Tao were invited to join by Cosmic Light. After a well-received com­edy performance, Sun remembers sitting backstage waiting for his pay. Finally, a man appeared and handed him a thick book titled The Searcher’s Footsteps.

The actor went home feeling annoyed. He repeat­edly flipped through the book thinking that his money must be stuck somewhere between the pages. Later that night, unable to sleep, he thought he might as well look at the 500-page collec­tion of essays about life and Christianity. He figured it would be sure to put him to sleep. But when the sun came up the next day, he was still completely absorbed. He finished the book that morning in an ecstatic state of mind. “All my doubts about life were answered through that book,” he says. “I felt a new strength com­ing up from inside.” A few months later, he was baptized as a Christian and started at­tending church regularly. He also began to volunteer for charity events. “Religion taught me that there are others besides my­ self,” he says. It also inspired him to stop drinking, gambling, and swearing.

Two years later, when Sun an­nounced his new plans as a charity volun­teer, he went to visit the man who had given him the book, Lin Chih-ping (林治平), director of Cosmic Light. “I had heard about his story but didn’t take it se­riously at the time,” Lin recalls. “After all, he was an entertainer who would know how to promote himself.” When Sun asked to join a Cosmic trip to visit Chinese refugees in Thailand, offering to pay his own expenses, Lin initially tried to dissuade him. He warned Sun that the trip would be to a remote and destitute area where it would be easy to become ill, and also that smoking would be strictly for­bidden. Despite his nearly forty-year habit—Sun was chain-smoking even as he stood in Lin’s office—the actor begged to be given a chance.

A week before the departure, Sun had to check into the hospital because of a serious bladder problem. But he still wanted to go. While the group was leav­ing, he prayed to God to help him make it. As soon as he left the hospital, he flew to Thailand to join the Cosmic group. A month later they returned to Taipei, and he was one of the very few members who had not become sick during the trip.

Nowadays, Sun likes to tell friends that it is his belief in God that has given him the strength to overcome many prob­lems, including his smoking habit. He had tried to quit many times, but even after the forced abstinence in Thailand, he took it up again. But while working on Old Mo’s Second Spring in 1984, shortly after his religious awakening, he suddenly realized that the selfish nature of his smoking habit went against the teachings of the Bible. He has not touched a cigarette since, and has even become an ardent promoter of the anti-smoking movement.

Perhaps the hardest thing for Sun to overcome during the first years of his career as a charity worker was pressure from peo­ple in the entertainment industry. They did not want to let him retire while he was still profitable. Film producers got upset when he rejected their highest-paying of­fers. There were even people who threat­ened his life. “It’s no secret that show business in Taiwan is 100 percent control­led by underworld society,” Sun says. “But you know something? They start to respect you when they realize you can­not be bought at any price. Eventually, they stop ap­proaching you.”

Many of his old acting friends also started keeping a distance. Some even be­came like strangers. They felt that the old joke-telling Sun they had known was now full of nothing but bor­ing, high-minded talk about morality, unconditional love, and charity work. “You’re no fun any more,” he remembers one TV ac­tress telling him. His wife complained as well, saying that he was continually trying to convert her and always preaching to the children. Even some of the public started to think that Sun was going overboard. One time he was giving a talk in a Taipei park when someone in the audience spit in his face.

But having spent his youth as a soldier and his working life in the cutthroat enter­tainment world, Sun found this kind of an­tagonism comparatively easy to deal with. He knew he could survive it. ‘‘I’m good at anything if survival is the issue,” he says.

Looking back on those days, Sun says he also had reason to be overly en­thusiastic in his new attitudes. “As a per­son coming from show business,” he says, “it is far more difficult for Taiwan society to respect and accept you as a genuine charity worker. I had to repeatedly remind myself that anything I said or did should not give people the impres­sion that I was either promoting myself or that I had personal interests in doing the things I was doing other than helping others.” It was not until recently that Sun began to take a more laid-back approach. “I feel I can afford to take things easier now,” he says.

Still, he is serious about what he is doing, and he believes in doing the right thing in every aspect of life. He even fol­lows traffic rules as if they were religious teachings from the Bible. People walking with him are often embarrassed when Sun stops them from jaywalking. And when the government encourages the public to conserve water during droughts, he has a contest with friends to see who can use less water. Friends say that Sun has al­ways been serious about his work, even when he was an actor. “Whatever he does, he does it with a first-rate professional at­titude,” says Cosmic Light’s Lin Chih­-ping. “He often says that an actor should play a character as if he is that character. Now charity worker is his role.”

Others believe that what sets Sun apart is his capacity for caring about oth­ers. Popular radio host Chu Yun (楚雲) interviewed forty people who knew Sun before inviting him to talk regularly on his program. From them he learned that Sun’s caring attitude comes not only from his belief in God, but even more so from his mother, who died when he was fifteen. “From my understanding, she wasn’t his biological mother,” Chu says. “But the love she gave him was incredible. The ef­fect it had on him has lasted all his life.”

Sun himself believes that the real is­sue behind all social problems is a need for love. “There is too little love for others in our environment,” he says. “If there is love at home, children won’t become problem kids. If there is love, parents won’t have the heart to sell their daughters to brothels. If there is love, people won’t do things that they wouldn’t want others to do to them.” His ultimate goal as a charity worker is to encourage people to be generous with their love. “I believe happy people are found only in a loving society,” he says.

Sun also believes in taking a positive approach to the problems he sees around him, rather than simply offering empty criticism. And friends say he tries to take a balanced and optimistic look at every issue. While many people complain about the poor quality of local television pro­grams, for example, Sun has this to say: “It’s true we have TV programs full of vio­lence, sex, and messages that are danger­ous influences on young children. At the same time, I see programs every day that are both entertaining and enlightening. These two phenomena tell me something: that audiences get bored easily, but when something unhealthy develops to an ex­treme, a counteraction will appear. So I’m not pessimistic about the quality of our television programs—just as I’m positive that we can find love in our society if we look carefully.”

Since Sun starting setting an example a decade ago, it has become a trend for entertainers to contribute their time, tal­ent, and money to philanthropic activities. Few, however, are anywhere near as com­mitted as he is, and many do it primarily to boost their public image. One of those who has followed faithfully in his foot­steps is Chen Shu-li (陳淑麗), a former fashion model and actress. Seven years ago, after seeing Sun’s TV ad appealing to the public to donate blood, she was in­spired to start devoting her own time to charity work. She is now no less active in her volunteer career than Sun, whom she regards as her mentor.

But while Sun has influenced Chen in many ways, he has not been able to convert her from Buddhism to Christian­ity. “Once he said in public that his big­gest frustration in life is that he cannot make me into a Christian,” Chen says with a laugh. But the difference in religion has never been a problem between the master and his disciple when they are in­volved in charity service. As David D. Yen (嚴道), chairman of the John Tung Foundation, says, “Uncle Sun is not af­fected by religion, politics, or any per­sonal interest at all when it comes to helping society.”

Sun even proposed a project in which different religious groups got together to discuss ways to keep teenagers from go­ing astray. He also gave up his member­ship in the Kuomintang (KMT) in 1989, after having been a devoted party member since the age of sixteen, because he didn’t want to alienate anyone with different po­litical beliefs. “It wasn’t for political rea­sons that he left the party,” Yen says. “But without that party label on his back, he knows he can do his job better.”

Most people are still amazed at Sun’s dramatic change from a self-centered ac­tor into a religious charity worker. When they talk about him, they especially like to point out that even his face has changed over the years: from a mean, hardened one to a sincere, good-hearted, and per­ceptive one. Children aren’t scared by him any more. On the contrary, they love to get close to their “Uncle Sun,” who recently released a series of storytelling tapes about great people in his­tory. Sun himself believes that the change in his looks is the best answer to people who remain curious about his motivation or wonder if he misses his old life. “Which one looks happier to you?” he says. “The Sun Yueh ten years ago? Or the one you are talking to now? Handsome is as handsome does.”