Return of the 'auntie killer'
Mak Mun San
The Straits Times
Publication Date : 21-07-2008




Many people knew Ling Xiao only after he appeared in the 1998 Channel 8 drama serial Facing The Music.
In his acting debut, he portrayed an over-the-hill singer opposite actress Ann Kok, who played his daughter.
Although the 58-year-old bachelor has never been married, the series mirrored parts of his real life then.
Before he landed the part, he was at the lowest point of his career--singing in small bars in far from glamorous places such as Bencoolen Street and Middle Road.
It was a far cry from his heyday in the 1970s when he was a singing heart-throb with more than 100 Mandarin albums to his name and screaming fans greeted him everywhere he went.
To add insult to injury, the singing in bars was just a side show. He also had to sit with the patrons and his main income depended on the number of bottles of liquor he could persuade them to buy.
"I had to drink with them. So I would be singing for 30 days and drinking for 28 days. I couldn't hit the high notes and the band had to go one key down for me," he recalls in Mandarin.
His fortunes changed with a phone call in late 1997. A TV producer was looking for someone who could sing and Ling's name was among a few 1970s crooners who were being considered for the role.
The other two were reportedly Huang Qingyuan and Qin Huai.
As luck would have it, Ling was the first on the list to be invited for an audition. He jumped at the chance although he had no acting experience save for some amateur performances in skits.
"I was very nervous during the audition, my heart was beating so fast. But I gritted my teeth and went for it. I had nothing to lose," he says.
Three days later, MediaCorp told him he got the role.
Taking a sip of coffee at a cafe in Suntec City, he recalls: "It was the second spring of my career."
His TV foray did indeed revive his career. Singing offers started pouring in as audiences hankered for the nostalgic 1970s.
He cut an album in 1999 with an original song Ji Dan Gao (Mandarin for cake, the catchphrase of his character in Facing The Music), written specially for him by songwriter Eric Moo.
Ling's last TV appearance was in 2004 but he has kept himself busy with teaching singing classes, hosting commercial shows, performing in concerts and holding his own gigs.
The man, dubbed Auntie Killer by the Chinese press, marked his 40th anniversary in showbusiness last year. His peers include Huang, Sakura Ting and Lisa Wong, who are still singing but not as prolific or high profile as he is.
His manager Keith Sim, 33, says: "He is very hardworking and doesn't mind doing new things, such as hosting. He used to trip over his words all the time, but he keeps learning and improving because he knows this is the only way he can survive."
At a concert two Saturdays ago, the bulk of the audience were middle-aged female fans such as Madam Tan Yeow Khing, 54. She has been a loyal fan since he began singing in 1967.
She says: "He is like a friend and a brother to us. He will cook for us and will give a copy of his new CD to everyone."
She and other fans will be there to cheer him on when he performs again this Saturday at the HDB Hub as part of the Singapore Heritage Festival.
With a laugh, he says: "They probably chose me because I'm an antique. There aren't many of us left now who are still active in the scene."
Only removed eyebags
Even when seen up close, Ling does not look like an antique.
The skin on his face is so fair, smooth and wrinkle-free that many men his age--and maybe some women too--would pay an arm and a leg for it.
He says he has not had any Botox jabs or face-lifts. The only plastic surgery he has done was to remove his eyebags more than 10 years ago. "I don't even apply make-up, see?" he says, rubbing his hand on his cheeks to prove his point.
How does he maintain his boyish looks? "I don't do any maintenance," he says. "The only thing I do is apply some night cream before I sleep. But if I'm too tired or too drunk, I'll skip that."
His body has not gone to seed either. The 1.75m-tall star weighs 63kg and can still fit into all his old stage clothes, albeit "a bit tight lah".
But mention his hair and his smile disappears, even though it still looks full and thick.
"Can't you see it has thinned a lot?' he almost wails, lowering his head to show his crown. For the record, it really does appear respectfully well-covered.
"I have to rub hair-loss products onto my scalp every day, to help my hair to grow or at least slow down the balding process," he says, sounding like a teenager fretting over an acne breakout.
So would he mind wearing wigs, I venture gingerly.
He replies with an embarrassed smile: "I already do, on stage." He started donning wigs two years ago "as I look much nicer with one" and currently owns two. "But I don't wear them unless I'm performing. It's very hot, you know?"
Ling lives in a five-room flat in Bukit Merah with a younger sister, who also sings for a living. And when he describes himself as a homebody who enjoys cooking and watching Hong Kong and Korean drama serials, his minder helpfully adds that he is a 'lao zhainan'.
Zhainan is a Chinese term borrowed from Japanese culture and refers to a man who likes to stay at home. Lao means old.
Ling turns to the minder and protests: "Why can't you just say zhainan? Why must you add lao in front?"
There is another taboo subject: His love life.
The only time he touches on it is when he tells you how much he hates it when he hears people say "I love you forever".
At the TV station, he'd hear fans shouting to actress Jacelyn Tay and telling her that they love her forever--"Zheng Xiuzhen! Wo yongyuan ai ni!"
"I'd walk right past quickly. What do they know about yongyuan (forever)?" he says.
Sounding slightly agitated, he continues: "I always tell my friends, nothing is more foolish than to kill yourself over love. Instead of dying, you should lead a better life than the other person, to show him you are better off without him."
But surely there have been admirers who have shed tears over him? He purses his lips and replies good-naturedly: "Let's skip this. Next question."
Shy and introverted
Born Tan Choon Huat, he has an elder sister and a younger brother, as well as two adopted younger sisters.
His mother, a housewife-cum-nanny, adopted the girls when their parents abandoned them. His father worked as a bus driver.
He was a shy, introverted boy who did not enjoy playing with toys--not that he had any--or other kids. All he wanted to do was listen to Rediffusion, getting lost in the songs he heard on the cable radio station.
When he passed his Primary School Leaving Examination and got into New Town Secondary School, his mother asked him what he wanted as a present.
He asked for a turntable and spent many happy hours spinning records of his favourite singers such as Tsui Ping, Yao Li, Jing Ting and Cliff Richard.
Yet he never dreamt of becoming a singer. When he was 17, two of his classmates wanted to take part in a singing competition organised by Rediffusion and signed him up as well. That was when he gave himself the Chinese stage name, Ling Xiao, which means rising high.
As with most such stories, his classmates did not make it past the first round while he found himself in the final.
During rehearsals on the big day, the boss of Happy Records spotted him and liked what he saw. "The rest of the contestants were chatting loudly and playing the fool backstage, but I, being shy, was sitting quietly by myself. That was what my boss was looking for, the goody-two-shoes type," he says.
His boss-to-be offered him a two-year singing contract with S$200 for every album he cut, regardless of whether he won the competition.
Ling finished second in the final. "The champion cut one album and vanished. In life, you don't have to be first in everything to succeed," he says.
He shot to fame with his second album and the title song Ku Qing Hua (Melancholic Flower) remains one of his biggest hits.
While he was doing his national service, he would record an EP album almost every month during his free time, doing mainly cover versions of popular Mandarin songs, which was the norm in those days.
When asked how good he was as a rookie singer, he replies without thinking: "Awful. I didn't know how to use my voice at all. It was so thin, like this."
He starts humming a few lines, his voice unsteady and tightly stretched, before switching to a rich, bassy voice to show how much he has changed.
"I don't listen to any of my old songs. I can't stand being reminded of how lousy I was. But I have people telling me all the time how much they want me to sing the way I did.
"I tell them, if you want the 'old feeling', listen to my albums. If I still sing the way I did 40 years ago, that would mean I haven't progressed at all!"
Spendthrift's wake-up call
After national service, he became a full-time singer, travelling occasionally to Hong Kong to perform and to take lessons in singing.
Back home, he was a regular face in Taiwanese-style theatre halls such as Hai Yan. Curiously, his parents never watched him perform live, even though one venue was just a stone's throw away from their Jalan Besar home.
"They had no problems with me being a singer as I was supporting the family," he says. "But they just didn't like these places of entertainment, I guess."
His father died in 1986 of cancer and his mother eight years later of a heart attack.
In the 1980s, live theatre shows ground to a halt and the singing offers stopped coming. At one point, he had just S$5 in his bank account.
"I was a spendthrift. When I liked a pair of trousers, I would buy 10 pairs at one go. I was also very generous and picked up the tab whenever I went out with friends," he says. "I ran out of money very soon without realising what was happening."
Things got so bad that he did not even have money to buy an air ticket when an offer to perform in Indonesia came along one day.
When his younger sister, who was herself strapped of cash, learnt about his predicament, she told their mother, who refused to lend him any money unless he asked her personally for it.
He refused. "It is bad to speak of her this way when she is already dead, but I was very hurt. I had been giving her money and yet, when I needed help, she made things so difficult for me," he says bitterly.
"That episode taught me that you can depend only on yourself. When you are broke, even the person who is closest to you will not help you."
To get by, he swallowed his pride and began his new life as a singing social escort of sorts, although he stresses that no hanky panky was involved, just lots of hard drinking.
"At night, I often walked past the corridors of shophouses and I saw all these people, drunk and lying on the floor. I wondered to myself, 'Will I end up like this one day?'" he says.
"It was a wake-up call. I told myself I had to save or I could be sleeping in the streets too."
He is now so thrifty that he insists on taking only buses and trains. He does not gamble and says his only vice is having a drink with his friends at the neighbourhood hawker centre.
Despite TV giving his career a much-needed boost in 1998--he went on to act in nine other serials--the offers dried up after the TV producers he worked with left the station and returned to Hong Kong.
He was offered only cameo roles and he rejected all of them. "I was not starving. Why should I waste one whole day playing someone who appears for maybe just one minute on the screen?"
His last acting role was that of a dance instructor opposite veteran singer Maggie Theng in the straight-to-DVD movie Fortune Shines released during Chinese New Year.
"I don't dare to say I'm very talented, but I was good in everything I've done," he says.
"During my concert that day, I told my fans, 'I will sing for you until I'm 80. Just make sure you will last as long'."