Yong Mei 咏梅
At 49, Yong Mei won the Silver Bear for her first leading film role. In the drama So Long, My Son, she and Wang Jing-Chun played a couple who lost their son and stayed together for several more decades. By then Yong Mei was already well known from Chinese TV series, even though she had come to television from a foreign trade company and had never trained as an actress. After Berlin, she kept choosing roles just as carefully. One of her most notable works was Like a Rolling Stone, in which she played a woman who sets off on a solo journey for the first time at fifty.
Yong Mei was born on February 14, 1970, into a Mongolian family in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. Her birth name was Sengjidma. Her Chinese name, Yong Mei, was given to her by her father, an electrical engineer. He loved music, often played records of Chinese classics and Russian songs at home, and whenever he saw his daughter he would usually ask her what she was reading. The girl spent a lot of time with her grandmother. The latter later wondered why her granddaughter would want to become an actress when she already had a good profession. Yong Mei regretted that her grandmother never saw any of her work that might have changed her mind.
She left to study in Beijing. The University of International Business and Economics recruited students for its "business management" program from areas where ethnic minorities lived. Getting in was so hard, Yong Mei said, that she gave no thought to choosing a major. After university she worked at a foreign trade company and spent some time living in Shenzhen. Back in her student years she became interested in rock and appeared in a music video by the Beijing band Black Panther for the song Don't Break My Heart. Her husband Luan Shu also played keyboards and sang in that same band at various times. Yong Mei said she herself decided not to have children. Together with her husband she sometimes takes the stage herself: at one of the New Year's concerts of the Beijing Symphony Orchestra they sang "Yi Jiang Shui."
Yong Mei got into television thanks to an acquaintance, the host Xu Ge-Hui. When the latter was offered a role in the series The Man Herding Clouds (牧云的男人), she recommended Yong Mei. The creators of the series were looking for a woman who looked as if she had worked in an office. All Yong Mei had to do was show up to the audition looking the way she usually did, but she had to learn to work in front of the camera on set. Then came other series, among them Beijing Love Story and Meng Kai Shi De Di Fang. People began recognizing her on the street after Chinese Style Divorce (2004), in which she played Xiao Li, a woman who survived her husband's infidelity. Even many years later Yong Mei called this role one of the dearest to her on television.
Television remained her main work for a long time. In the family series Son in Mourning (2006) she played Xie Yan, and in the spy series The Brink (2012) she played Sun Yuejian, the wife of an underground operative. In film she was more often given small roles. She appeared in Ocean Paradise and Aftershock (both films came out in 2010), and after Young Style (2013), in which she played the mother of a high school student, director Liu Jie recommended her for a role in The Assassin by Hou Hsiao-Hsien. There Yong Mei played the mother of the main heroine. The film came out in 2015 and brought Hou the directing prize at Cannes.
By that time Yong Mei was already acting far less often. In 2013 her mother died, and a year later her father. The actress took their deaths hard, slept poorly and, by her own account, changed so much in appearance that Hou could not use the footage shot with her during the reshoots of The Assassin. She took up yoga and gradually came back to herself. The break was also connected to how television had changed. Yong Mei said that on set there was sometimes no time even to discuss a scene with a partner. She read the script of So Long, My Son, which was sent to her, in full — for the first time in several years.
Wang Liyun, Yong Mei's character in Wang Xiao-Shuai's film, loses her only son. The film shows her family across different years, and the actress had to play Liyun at different ages — from youth to old age. The British makeup artists took so long applying her ageing makeup that they tried to shoot in order, moving from one period of her life to the next. To prepare for the role, Yong Mei spent twenty days with her three-year-old nephew. By the end he had grown so attached to her that he burst into tears when they parted at the airport, and during shooting she asked for time off to go and see him. According to her, the separation helped her imagine, at least in part, what Liyun feels. With Wang Jing-Chun, who played her husband, she quickly found a common language. Both preferred to show the couple's relationship through the little things that spouses no longer need to say after so many years together.
In February 2019 the Berlin Film Festival awarded Yong Mei and Wang Jing-Chun Silver Bears for Best Actress and Best Actor. In November both received China's Golden Roosters. That same year, television aired A Little Reunion, in which Yong Mei played Liu Jing, the mother of a high-school graduate who tries to grow closer to her son and learns that she has cancer. The role earned her a nomination for the White Magnolia Award. In 2023, in the box-office thriller No More Bets, she played a police officer investigating a fraud case. After Berlin she also launched a project with the publisher Imaginist, in which she talked about what she had been reading. Books on the position of women held a special place there: Yong Mei noticed that many of her viewers were young women.
Li Hong, the heroine of the drama Like a Rolling Stone (2024), grew up in a family where she always had to give way, and grew used to doing the same in her marriage. By the age of fifty she decides to get behind the wheel and leave home. Yin Li-Chuan's film is based on the story of Su Min, who after leaving began to talk about her travels on the internet. Yong Mei read about her at roughly the same time as the director and screenwriter, and immediately wanted to play this woman. She said she had seen plenty of such Li Hongs around her. At the Silk Road International Film Festival Yong Mei received a Best Actress prize, and in 2025 she joined the jury of the main competition at the Shanghai Film Festival. At a press meeting she said she was interested in spending time among people with a different professional view of cinema and hearing what they notice in films.
