Christina Hai Qing 海清, 黄怡
For a long time, Christina Hai was known in China as "the nation's daughter-in-law." The nickname stuck after her family dramas Double Sided Adhesive Tape, Dwelling Narrowness and A Beautiful Daughter-in-Law Era. She could play both a woman who quarrels with her mother-in-law over every little thing and one who spends years saving up for a flat of her own. Later Hai played a war correspondent in Operation Red Sea, and for Return to Dust she moved into a village in Gansu Province. While shooting that film, even her own assistant once failed to recognize her.
Huang Yi, known as Hai Qing, was born in Nanjing on 12 January 1977. The entry on the Chinese film portal 1905.com gives 1978. On her mother's side she comes from the Nanjing Gan family, which for generations performed in traditional kunqu opera. Hai recalled that as a child they lived modestly. When her uncle bought her a blue polka-dot umbrella, she felt too precious about it to use it and still walked in the rain without one. She began dancing before school, and at twelve she enrolled in the Jiangsu Drama School. Later she worked at the provincial song and dance troupe. She decided to give up her steady job for an acting career when she spotted an advertisement for preparatory courses in a newspaper. She attended classes between rehearsals and sometimes managed to eat lunch only on the move, right on her bicycle.
In 1997 Hai entered the Beijing Film Academy, in Huang Lei's class. She sat in on classes for cinematographers and directors, studied films frame by frame and acted a great deal on the student stage. For a graduation production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Huang Lei wanted to lay the stage with red brick. The students had no money for brick, so they got it from a neighbouring building that was being demolished. Hai recalled how they washed the cement off the bricks in the rain and passed them from hand to hand all the way to the theatre. After the academy she worked at the National Theatre Company of China. One of Hai's first notable roles was Zhong Ning in the series Yu Guan Yin (2003). After the series she began to be offered parts as similarly forceful heroines. She turned them down and, while waiting for new roles, read a great deal, ran and went to the park to practise with a sword.
The role that made Hai's name was offered to her by Teng Hua-Tao. He had already seen her in Yu Guan Yin, and Huang Lei helped him get in touch with the actress. The investors in Double Sided Adhesive Tape (2007) initially doubted whether Hai was well known enough for the lead. She waited several months for a final answer. Her Hu Lijuan, a Shanghai native, tries to settle into family life after her husband's parents arrive from northeast China. At first Hai herself asked the director why he hadn't cast a Shanghai actress. On set she tried to catch how people in the city switch from Shanghainese to Putonghua. Hai recalled that in some of the family-quarrel scenes the actors would start with lines from the script and then move into improvisation, and Teng was in no hurry to switch off the camera.
Double Sided Adhesive Tape was followed by Wanggui & Anna (2009) and Dwelling Narrowness (2009). In Dwelling Narrowness, Guo Haiping spends years saving for an apartment, and Hai decided the heroine's clothes should show it. Out of more than forty outfits prepared by the costume team, she chose the four most worn, including a vest that the costumier herself had worn. Hai later said that she, too, had to spend her savings on a Beijing apartment in order to bring her parents to live with her. In A Beautiful Daughter-in-Law Era she played the nurse Mao Doudou, who after marrying has to get along with two mothers-in-law at once. The role brought her the audience award Golden Eagle in 2010 and the Feitian award in 2011.
Hai has said little about her home life. She has a son. While he was small, she took him to his classes herself on her bicycle. Hai recalled how he urged her to overtake an electric scooter. She wanted her work to seem as ordinary to him as the work of his friends' parents. With Huang Lei she twice played spouses who argue about their children's future. In A Love for Separation (2016) they decide whether to send their daughter, played by Wendy Zhang Zi-Feng, to study abroad. In A Little Reunion (2019) their characters have the same names and are now anxious about their son's final exams. The second series has a plot of its own.
Between these series, Hai appeared in Dante Lam's Operation Red Sea (2018). Her Xia Nan is a French military journalist of Chinese descent who finds herself alongside a naval special forces unit during an evacuation. The role was a sharp departure from the ones audiences were used to seeing Hai in. Lam shot the main scenes in Morocco, and during that time Hai's son was injured at home. She recalled how hard it was for her that she could not return to him.
In the summer of 2019, at the closing of the FIRST Film Festival in Xining, Hai stayed at the microphone after presenting an award and spoke about how few varied roles are offered to actresses of a certain age. She invited several colleagues onto the stage. Hai later said she had not arranged it with them in advance and that she had spoken on impulse. To the reproach that actresses simply do not want to play mothers, she replied that she had always had plenty of such roles and had taken them on willingly. What she wanted was for heroines of her age to have a life of their own beyond the family as well.
In Li Rui-Jun's Return to Dust (2022), Hai played the peasant woman Cao Guiying. Her partner was Wu Ren-Lin, a local resident and relative of the director who had never trained professionally as an actor. Hai arrived in Gansu ahead of time, lived in his house, worked in the fields, fed the animals and learned to understand the local dialect. Shooting was done in five stages so that the seasons would genuinely change on screen. According to Hai, on the third day of filming an assistant walked past without noticing her, and in the wide shot the cinematographer could already barely tell her apart from the locals. In one episode Cao brings her husband warm water, having hidden the bottle under her clothes. Hai clamped a flashlight under her arm in order to get the bottle out. She remembered how its beam passed through the water and lit up her partner's face. The film was shown in the main competition of the Berlin Film Festival. In the autumn, after a successful theatrical run, it disappeared from Chinese streaming platforms. Why it was taken down was never publicly explained.
In The Magnificent She (2023), Hai played Zhang Guimei, the founder of a free school for girls in a mountainous county in Yunnan. She traveled to see Zhang several times and watched how she talked with her students. After the film's release, viewers argued over the way the family of one of the schoolgirls was portrayed. They pointed out that in the well-known account of the real student it was the father who drank, while in the film it is the mother. Hai responded that while preparing for the shoot they had met similar families and had wanted to show a mother who herself needed help. In 2025 she played Lucy in a new production of Sartre's Dead Without Burial at the National Theatre. It was the first play Hai had seen on a professional stage, back in her first year at the film academy.
