Loving your idol is a no-brainer
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail Shanghai Daily, July 29, 2013
"I never thought I was so successful in China until I saw lots of fans at the airport. I wanted to meet with my fans, but I couldn't manage and the police came. I thank all my fans at the airport," the actor told Shanghai Daily.
 |
|
Andy Lau, a Hong Kong superstar.[File photo] |
In Japan, Chinese fans spotted and pursued the actor.
"I don't feel annoyed or scared when I'm spotted. Nothing negative. I'm more thankful to the people who notice me. It's a good thing," he said.
But for Andy Lau, a Hong Kong superstar, being chased by obsessed fans is sometimes a sad, heartbreaking story.
Yang Lijuan, 36, from Gansu Province, is a Lau fan. She quit school at the age of 16 to follow her star wherever he went. She has no job and no friends. Her father Yang Qinji, 68, even planned to sell one of his kidneys to support his daughter, but he was refused by a hospital.
Yang once told media, "I've been dreaming that he (Lau) wearing a hat and a black suit holds my hands. I ask him if he loves me. He says 'yes.' Which is more important - to live or to see him? For me, it is to see him."
In 2007, Yang and her parents finally reached Hong Kong using 11,000 yuan they had borrowed. They even rushed to the Hong Kong government building and tried to send a message to the governor, begging for help and access to the star.
Finally, she was admitted to the fans meeting and had her picture taken with Lau. The next day, the father drowned himself in the sea, leaving a 12-page suicide note that read, "You (Andy Lau) treat my daughter the same as other fans. It's not fair. You should have talked to her. Save her, please. Her world has nothing but you."
After the accident, Lau responded, saying, "I'm so sorry. If a girl hurt her family so badly just because she loves me, I'm sad. No one can understand how sad I am."
"A fanatic's passion for one person or one thing is usually unstable, irrational and blind," says Shen Yongqiang, psychology professor from Shanghai Normal University. "Yang exhibited symptoms of paranoid-type mental illness."
Professor Gu, however, expresses understanding of the "brainless fans."
"I once watched a video of a Hong Kong singer's concert. At the end of the show, he took off his shirt and kind of flirted with the female fans. How can a young girl resist this? It's no wonder she would imagine to be his lover," Gu says.
The professor says his daughter was once an adoring fan of Hong Kong singer Alan Tam, who was in his heyday in the mid-1980s.
The professor gave her 1,000 yuan, quite a large sum of money at that time, to enable her to go to Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, to attend Tam's concert. Earlier she went to a fans meeting in Shanghai where she presented Tam with a picture of him that she had painted, but she had to climb over a wall to bypass security.
Unconditional love is pure and precious, Gu says. "It could be the best thing happening to teenage children. Why stop it? What the parents should do is to cherish this love and guide him or her to transfer the passion from one person to art itself," he says.
However, it's not easy to control and guide a fan.
In 2010 during the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, hundreds of fans crowded in front of the performance venue of South Korean boy group Super Junior, fighting for free tickets. It turned into a stampede in which some people were pushed to the ground, trampled and injured.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)