Did He Ruin Lin Hao, the Earthquake's "Little Hero" — or Make Him? | "Ten Years" ⑪

In the political climate after the earthquake, was the "pairing" of Tian Wanliang and Lin Hao an accident, or was it inevitable?

In August 2008, all eyes were on the Beijing Olympics. Riding on Yao Ming's shoulders, Lin Hao appeared as a flag bearer for the Chinese delegation.

In the ten years since, whenever "earthquake hero" Lin Hao has turned up at an event or given an interview, an older man has stood beside him — a man Lin Hao calls "dad."

Early this year we contacted Lin Hao and this man, and arranged to meet the latter at the Lin Hao studio he runs in Chengdu's Qingyang District.

At the start of the interview I asked whether he would rather speak Sichuanese or Mandarin. "Either is fine," he said readily. For the first two minutes I asked my questions in Sichuanese and he answered in Mandarin.

Once I noticed, I switched to Mandarin too.

He recounted his career in exhaustive detail: a village boy who made it to college, a newspaper job, musical theater production, talent management... Whenever I asked about how Lin Hao grew up, or why he wasn't in Yingxiu during the 2008 earthquake, he would gesture for me to be patient and let him finish.

On the wall facing the studio door hung a framed photo of him shaking hands with former U.S. president Bill Clinton.

Fifteen minutes in, I finally couldn't help asking whether he really was Lin Hao's father. He grinned. "Sorry, sorry, I'm not Lin Hao's dad," he said. "My surname is Tian."

By 2008, Tian Wanliang — the man who would become "Papa Lin" — had left his hometown of Bengbu, Anhui, and had been living in Chengdu for seven years, where he had built his own media company. One of the performers he managed, Deng Changcheng, was signed to Jackie Chan's talent agency, and that connection won him the job of hosting Jackie Chan when the actor came to the disaster zone after the earthquake.

While shepherding celebrities around the disaster zone, Tian Wanliang met the boy who would become his star "son" and call him "dad": Lin Hao. Lin Hao was then a second-grader at Yingxiu Primary School; news reports said he had carried two classmates out of the rubble on his back during the earthquake, which earned him the title "earthquake hero."

Over the three years of post-disaster reconstruction, from 2008 to 2010, Tian Wanliang took Lin Hao on more than 200 flights around the country to attend earthquake-related events. "Only a second-tier domestic actor travels that often," Tian Wanliang said. But he also stressed that, in the name of "passing on great love," he "never took a cent from the state" — he only sometimes accepted payment for events in the form of a "study grant" for Lin Hao, or a "red envelope."

From 2008 on, Lin Hao worked steadily in film and television, and as his manager Tian Wanliang pushed his fees higher.

By the end of the three-year reconstruction, Tian Wanliang was putting all his energy into managing Lin Hao and Deng Changcheng. The musical theater business he ran had shut down over a copyright dispute.

As the Wenchuan earthquake faded from public view, Tian Wanliang set about repositioning Lin Hao, and settled in the end on "actor."

In 2010, Lin Hao appeared with Ni Ping, Jiang Qinqin and others in Big Sun (《大太阳》), one of the films released to mark the Communist Party's 90th anniversary. In 2013 he was in two TV series, Killing Japanese Invaders All Over the Mountains (《满山打鬼子》) and My Special Battalion (《我的特一营》). By the end of 2013 he had appeared in as many as 10 films and TV shows.

The peak came in 2014. That year, Tian Wanliang says, he took calls from more than 100 production crews, and some were willing to pay 1 million yuan for three months of Lin Hao's time on set.

In 2016 his partnership with Deng Changcheng ended, and Tian Wanliang became Lin Hao's full-time manager.

Tian Wanliang calls Lin Hao "the first moral role model in the history of the Republic." An acting career, then, had to grow out of "public good," "kindness," "serving the people" — words that come up constantly in his own speech, and in Lin Hao's. In fact the two sound so alike that you can barely make out the difference in age or outlook between them. Tian Wanliang is nearly 20 years older than Lin Hao.

For his three years of high school, Lin Hao attended Sichuan Vocational College of Art and trained as an actor. Between February and April 2018 he sat the arts entrance exams at the Central Academy of Drama, the Beijing Film Academy and the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and was called back by none of them. No examiner recognized the earthquake "star," and no one took note of the film and TV work that had eaten up so much of his time.

After that, Lin Hao threw everything into the gaokao, applying to study acting. But according to reports his score this year fell short, and he is now planning to study in Japan.

What exactly is Tian Wanliang to Lin Hao? Without him, and without everything that followed, what kind of life would Lin Hao have had? Who can say whether he would be better off, or worse?

And another question: in the political climate after the earthquake, were Tian Wanliang and Lin Hao inevitable, or an accident?

What follows is Tian Wanliang's own account. It will tell you more about him.

In May 2008 I first "met" Lin Hao on the TV news. I first saw him in person in the disaster zone in July, but I wasn't thinking along those lines yet. After the earthquake he went to Shanghai and studied there for half a year; at Chinese New Year 2009 he came back from Shanghai to Chengdu, and he never left Sichuan again.

Back then Lin Hao's parents were very simple people. The sky had fallen in — so many people in Sichuan had died — and here were kind companies and kind people inviting their son to events. You buy the plane ticket, I'll go stand on the stage, whatever I can do. At that stage taking Lin Hao out cost nothing.

But you can't keep hauling a child around like that through the whole reconstruction. His parents had no income — what were they going to eat, what were they going to drink? His father had to work, so who would look after the boy? And society still needed the child then. His dad knew I was in this line of work, that I knew how to deal with the media, that I had dealings with Jackie Chan's student. In February 2009 his father came to find me. We talked it over in a teahouse and he said, "Look after the boy for us — if there's an event, take him along."

There was no signing back then. Once people get to know each other, it comes down to trust. We had no contract then and we have none now. It runs on the trust between us.

His parents are simple people, farmers from the mountains around Yingxiu. Put it plainly: write them a contract and they wouldn't know all the characters in it. Plain, simple people — so plain they let the boy run free and handed him over to me completely.

At first nobody paid Lin Hao anything, so I did all of it for free. But you know you can't do volunteer work forever; people have to eat. Looking after him informally was no long-term solution.

So in 2009 the Lin Hao studio came into being. We needed a professional team, so that doing charity work with Lin Hao would get more people helping others the way he did.

Look, I'm a Communist Party member myself, so my consciousness runs a bit higher than most. But I hadn't thought that far ahead, and I certainly never imagined Lin Hao would end up taking the actor's road.

Tian Wanliang is quick-tongued and rarely pauses.

Several times during the interview he mentioned the central media outlets or the well-known Sichuan newspapers he had dealt with. He clearly has his own method for handling a journalist's questions: he reacts fast, but he rarely answers head-on. Asked why his contract with Deng Changcheng ended, he said a person should "look at himself" rather than blame the other side.

In May 2009, on the first anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, there was a gala with more than a hundred well-known performers. I watched Lin Hao — not the least bit afraid among all those big stars, answering everyone smoothly, behaving like a star himself, even patting Bai Yansong on the shoulder. I saw that in a setting like that he had no stage fright with people at all. He was quite able.

Second, he expresses himself well. Third, whatever move you asked him to make, whatever the host told him to do on stage, he did it naturally. Whether someone has a gift for performing, you can tell from how he stands in front of a camera. Lin Hao feels more at ease in front of the camera than out of it. His looks aren't idol material, but he doesn't freeze up, he comes alive in a crowd, and he's a good talker.

Over the three years of reconstruction we took more than 200 flights, basically every weekend, to all those charity events around the country. Two hundred flights — that frequency is what a second-tier actor in China does.

Honestly, the pressure was heavy at the start, because I was managing both Lin Hao and Jackie Chan's student and nobody was paying me a salary. Neither of them earned much for the work they did outside, since in the three years after the Wenchuan earthquake it was almost all charity events.

Most of the invitations for Lin Hao came from governments and charities. The cultural world and the charity world are where you're likeliest to meet people from every layer of society — entrepreneurs, celebrities, journalists, all sorts. But you meet them through charity work. I'm not an entrepreneur and not an official, so people who didn't know any better called me "Mr. Lin."

At first Lin Hao called me "Uncle Tian," then "Papa Tian," and in the end just "Dad." So in public he called me "Dad," and plenty of people had me saved in their phones as "Mr. Lin" or "Lin Hao's dad" — many called me "Papa Lin" straight out.

For these ten years it's as if my surname has been Lin. Lin Hao and I look a bit alike. At first I'd say, "No, no, my surname is Tian," but after a while I thought, oh, fine, Mr. Lin it is, and I stopped bothering to explain.

And back then we turned down every endorsement. As Sichuanese, as Chinese people, there was a kind of moral purism at work: "How could the little hero take a few million yuan in endorsement fees from somebody?" "You'd use the nation's name to do that?" People's feelings were raw at the time.

Then from 2010 on, endorsements and events picked up, because a lot of reconstruction publicity needed doing, and publicity needs content. But it was still the reconstruction and everyone was poor. Lin Hao's family was quite poor too, renting their home; when they came back to Chengdu in 2009 they had no place of their own. Still, life goes on — the boy had to go to school, pay tuition, buy clothes, pay rent.

When it comes down to survival, if someone offers you a thousand or two thousand yuan for your labor and your time, and the thing also helps the recovery, would you go? You'd go. So I'd think up ways around it. When a company wanted a commercial event dressed up as public-good marketing, I'd talk to them: "Look, how about you just give Lin Hao a red envelope? We won't call it an appearance fee — what would we need an appearance fee for, right?"

Sometimes it was three thousand, five thousand yuan. Once a central media outlet used up two days of Lin Hao's time filming, and I never raised the subject of money; they brought it up themselves: "How about this — after we finish shooting we'll give Lin Hao a 3,000-yuan red envelope and call it a study grant."

For this installment of the "Ten Years" series, we began our reporting with the second-graders at Yingxiu Primary School at the time of the 2008 earthquake. Of the 70 second-graders there, only a dozen or so survived. Lin Hao was one of them.

Eight years old then, most of them are 18 or 19 now. By the sixth student we interviewed in Yingxiu, still nobody had Lin Hao's contact details.

Whenever we brought up Lin Hao, most of them turned evasive. Some didn't want to talk about him; others declined to comment, saying they had lost touch.

After returning from Shanghai to Sichuan, Lin Hao went to school in Chengdu and came back to Yingxiu Primary School only for the memorial events on the anniversary of the May 12 earthquake. Yang Yuerui, now 19, last saw him in 2011, when Wen Jiabao visited the school and Lin Hao was invited back. Yang Yuerui remembers Lin Hao saying to him: "Is anyone still daring to bully you? If so, tell me and I'll send my bodyguard to sort him out right away."

We reached Lin Hao in the end through Chai Zhengdong, one of the classmates news reports said Lin Hao had "rescued." The other was Zhou Yuye. They are among the few Yingxiu Primary School classmates still in touch with him.

To Zhou Yuye, Lin Hao "has always been pretty warm-hearted; he's the same with us as he used to be."

Chai Zhengdong's feelings about Lin Hao are more complicated.

As Chai Zhengdong remembers it, when the earthquake struck, Lin Hao came down on top of him. Around six or seven that evening, Chai Zhengdong's grandfather pulled Lin Hao out of the rubble first and then went back for him. "Lin Hao happened to be lying on top of me. To get me out, they had to get Lin Hao out first," Chai Zhengdong said. "After my grandfather pulled him out, he ran into a reporter nearby, and a helicopter took him away."

"He [Lin Hao] definitely didn't save me," Chai Zhengdong added.

Over the past ten years, whenever a report about Lin Hao comes on television, Chai Zhengdong's family grumbles about it at the dinner table.

Yang Yuerui, who grew up in Yingxiu after the earthquake, says Lin Hao's family has seldom been back since. "Everyone in Yingxiu knows he's a fake hero, just a piece of hype from a special time. If his family came home, someone would curse them. So they mostly don't come home, and they don't dare to."

Chai Zhengdong said much the same: "The locals in Yingxiu all know. They don't dare come back to Yingxiu."

Lin Hao has grown practiced at handling such doubts. Asked for details of the rescue, he usually answers that too much time has passed and his memory is blurred, or that he was small and frightened and has forgotten.

Lin Hao likes to stress that he stands for "the people of Sichuan," yet Sichuan people don't seem to understand him. "I, Lin Hao, am simple. I act on my conscience; my original intent is simple. I hope to build my Chain of Love Fund bigger... to widen the reach of charity, to represent Sichuan, to carry Sichuan people's gratitude to the outside world. Maybe it's something I'll do for the rest of my life," Lin Hao said. "But in the end all I get is people saying we've pocketed who knows how much out of it... it really does leave me cold."

On the fifth anniversary of the earthquake we held a meeting in Beichuan. A government official there suddenly slammed the table and shouted that plenty of comments online said Lei Feng was fake, Qiu Shaoyun was fake, Lin Hao was fake — that every model hero the Party had put in the textbooks over the years was fake. He pounded the table and said an anti-Communist force had been stirring up trouble in recent years, and he told all the young survivors gathered in Beichuan: "You have to be brave enough to be yourselves."

When Guangzhou Daily interviewed Lin Hao on the eighth anniversary of the quake, he said: "I didn't save anyone. Go on, say it, say it — I just didn't save anyone." Now Lin Hao can answer far better. He says: "The innocent need no defense. Go and ask around."

There's a Chinese saying: a man fears fame the way a pig fears getting fat. Especially in a place like Yingxiu — there are still malignant growths there, a flaw deep in Chinese culture, and it showed itself sharply in the period after the quake: people can't stand to see you do well. You were as wretched as the rest of us back then, so why, two or three years later, are you suddenly such a big deal? They couldn't take it.

Let me tell you the truth today. The talk out there, especially among Yingxiu villagers, is that the Lin family has over 10 million yuan. That's easy to say when you're not the one carrying the load. Go and look up everything about Lin Hao online — most of it is charity work. Only later, when he started taking films, did the fees reach five and six figures, and even then we didn't set the price; the production companies did.

His parents are very simple, very simple people. His father works for someone else's company. They have always rented — over 2,000 yuan a month in rent — they can't afford to buy.

One thing is how the locals behave, which is plain enough. The other is netizens all over the country, and that I call pathological. At that stage a lot of people picked at us, because they had this moral purism: the hero they wanted neither ate nor drank. You couldn't touch commerce; the moment you touched commerce you were no longer pure.

What Lin Hao did in the three years after the disaster was really "rebuilding himself." First, he never took a cent from the state. He gave up huge amounts of playtime and study time; while other children went out to play on the weekend, his weekends went on catching up with schoolwork. He gave up that much of his childhood.

Was he going out there for himself? Every one of those flights stood for the people of Sichuan. But who thinks of it that way? Most people think you're doing it for yourself, for fame, for money — how much are you making, right? Very few see what the boy was really doing it for. It was a heart of great love, passing on great love, a heart for the public good, standing for the people of Sichuan. Hardly anyone sees that.

All they ever see is profit, the stink of money.

Some people use commercial earnings to fund charity. We were poor people, people in financial straits, and we did a lot of charity work, but at some point the rhythm felt wrong — we had to stay alive. That was when I began thinking Lin Hao needed to change direction, because staying alive still means going to school, right? And it isn't only the boy who goes to school. We have families too, we have children and wives, we have parents to support. So making money is something to be proud of.

But in the minds of a lot of people online, making money seemed vulgar, contemptible — as if taking Lin Hao out to earn money was crass, unbearably crass.

A reporter from a central media outlet came to dinner once and said: "Teacher Tian, managing an ordinary performer is easy. Managing Lin Hao is hard." Because there is no second moral role model in the history of the Republic — ten years of doing all this, and all of it under pressure.

Lin Hao wanted to make films, be a brand ambassador, sign contracts — so he was something new. The hard part was public opinion, that moral purism: you can't do this, the fee is too high, that's not allowed, this isn't allowed either.

It's like holding an umbrella in a northern winter with the wind straight in your face: you walk into it, so you walk slowly.

And a manager turning up at Lin Hao's side was also something new to the public. Fans of his once cursed me viciously online and said what they'd do to me — simply because a manager had appeared next to someone like Lin Hao, I was a dangerous animal, a monster. I was even in danger of being attacked, you know?

This time in Shanghai, many of the people who cursed me online back then came up on their own to hug Lin Hao and take him to dinner. Why? Because they saw it — how he comes across on camera, all the things he's done. They used to worry the boy would be ruined by that monster, that dangerous animal, but after all these years he's turned out very well.

With this one adult beside him, I went from "monster" to "dangerous animal" to, in the end, "a warm-hearted guy."

Lin Hao doesn't talk like a 19-year-old student. In some ways he sounds very much like Tian Wanliang.

His speech is peppered with big words: "gratitude," "great love," "original intent," "conscience," "positive energy," "firm belief"...

The line dropped a few times during our phone interview, and each time we reconnected he would quickly correct his earlier wording. Extremely careful.

"I, Lin Hao, am someone who will never forget gratitude. Everything I do is because others once helped us — this is what I ought to do... More than anything, I want people to understand that even though society has a lot of negative energy, in our hearts we must firmly believe society is good."

"Honestly, a lot of people drilled into me that I was the little hero, that I carried a certain responsibility, that I was a Sichuan person — a whole series of labels stuck onto me. At first I resented those labels; they pinned me down. An actor's worst fear is being typecast. But the labels cut both ways — you have to look at both sides of a thing — and I found they kept pushing me to be a responsible person, a grateful Sichuan person."

"What we do is very pure. We act on our own conscience. There's no so-called marketing angle, no doing things against our conscience for the sake of profit."

When we interviewed Fan Meizhong, another "star" the Wenchuan earthquake produced, he described Lin Hao this way: "You'll find that as he grew up, Lin Hao was swept along by the mainstream ideology, even alienated by fame and money, so that he can no longer bear any true voice from inside himself — he may not even have one left. Anything written from talking to him carries no information. You read his answers and feel there's no meaning in them at all."

Interviewed in 2008, Lin Hao said his goal was "to get into Tsinghua University, become an architect and build houses that earthquakes can't bring down."

Just four months after the quake, at nine and a half, he began acting in films. After 2013 his goal changed to "getting into film school." "I found that making films can help people too, because I'm a left-behind child myself, and I want to call on society to care for left-behind children. Film became my dream, the thing I love," Lin Hao said.

In the second half of 2009 I began thinking about changing Lin Hao's direction. I work in this industry and my instincts are fairly sharp; I could tell the earthquake as a subject would slowly fade. Once it faded, you couldn't hold earthquake-related charity events every day, and no events meant nobody would invite Lin Hao. So I asked him: "Do you still want to live this kind of life?" What kind of life? First, every year a lot of people need you — you are needed. If you still want that, I'll tell you how to get it. Second, your schoolwork can't fall apart: who invites someone with terrible grades to an event? Nobody. Third, you need a skill of your own. "I'm telling you right now, you can do this, because I've seen you have a gift for performing."

I said, Haozi, when you choose a career, choose what interests you. Never choose it because it makes money. Never let banknotes hold your life's interests hostage.

If you love it, choose it — but acting is a hard road, you know? And there was something I left unsaid: his own qualities weren't ideal. Even then we could see that Lin Hao probably wouldn't rise very high; his looks aren't idol material. Who was his idol all along? Zhang Hanyu — that was the kind of screen presence he wanted to grow into.

All I can do is help the boy make something of what he likes, because the best education is education built on interest. If the boy likes it, you help him make the dream real. See, everything I think comes back to: I'm his dad, I'm his dad, I'm his dad, I'm his dad.

In 2010 we took the part in Ni Ping's production. Actually we'd already shot one back in 2008 — just a walk-on — and shot something in 2009 as well. So 2008, 2009, 2010, right through to 2013, there was a production every year.

We never promoted ourselves for any of the film offers, never went to talk to directors. Why? Because plenty of people were asking every year, through his first, second and third years of high school. My Special Battalion and Killing Japanese Invaders All Over the Mountains were both wartime dramas; you could turn on the TV the same evening and find one on one channel and the other on the next.

In 2014 alone I took no fewer than a hundred calls — a hundred production crews looking for Lin Hao.

That didn't surprise me. Why? From a media point of view, distributing a film means manufacturing attention. A quasi-actor with no professional training, like Lin Hao, brings a certain amount of attention just by joining a production, because he's a crossover, someone straying outside his proper line of work. Readers and reporters alike have an appetite for the odd and the new, so Lin Hao would bring a production a lot of traffic at its launch press conference and through distribution — traffic an ordinary performer can't generate.

In the winter of 2013 I negotiated several times with the producers of My Special Battalion, and I talked them into paying a substantial fee for a child. Argument one: in 2010 Lin Hao had visited Taiwan with Sichuan's Party secretary, Liu Qibao, and Taiwanese coverage of him was extensive — his profile on the island was high. Now here was a TV series showing the Kuomintang's war effort in a positive light, with the little hero everyone in Taiwan knew, Lin Hao, in an important guest role; and at the end the whole Sichuan unit of the Nationalist army is killed, leaving one seed behind — Lin Hao. That's the hope of China's revolution, the passing on of it. That draws a great deal of attention.

Lin Hao's fees have been six figures for years now, and we never set them; we'd be embarrassed to ask. It was through shooting Big Sun in 2010 that we slowly learned productions were privately treating Lin Hao by second-tier-actor standards — meals, cars, hotels. A professional production draws up a chart: first-tier actors stay in five-star hotels, second-tier only get three stars.

One production was willing to pay a fee of 1 million yuan, on condition that Lin Hao stay with the crew for three months. In these ten years someone even offered 200,000 yuan for a single appearance — sing one song in a bar, 200,000 yuan.

As far back as 2014, as director of the management committee of the Lin Hao Chain of Love Fund and chairman of Shenzhen Chain of Love Cultural Industry Co., Ltd., Tian Wanliang was already describing his grand plan: registering "Chain of Love" as a trademark.

He imagines every trademarked product carrying an element of public good. "You buy clothes; later, once you've grown and can't wear them, we take them back and give you a voucher. At the same time we send the clothes to a child who needs them, with the original owner's details inside — whoever gets your clothes will write you a letter," Tian Wanliang said in a 2014 interview.

Tian Wanliang says he has already obtained trademarks in more than a hundred product categories; later in the interview the number became two hundred. He calls all of it his "intellectual property layout."

The Lin Hao Chain of Love Fund was set up in August 2013. It's a very professional fund, a dedicated fund under the Sichuan provincial government.

Why a professional fund? Because Lin Hao was growing up. At first the two of us were together every day, but as he got older we might see each other only once every ten days or two weeks. What does he do in that time? I don't know. He could slip up without meaning to; children go wrong easily these days. So what do you do? To keep Lin Hao from straying as he grew up, we hit on a method: just set up a fund for him, a public-good fund in his own name.

So the fund's first purpose was to keep the boy company as he grew, to keep his life from going off course. Second, to build some real public-good projects.

First we made Zero-Yuan Rental (《零元招租》), a film about caring for elderly people who live alone, with Lin Hao in a small role. It won more than 30 awards in Hollywood, Hong Kong and on the mainland. I flew around collecting them; what I spent on the flights alone could have paid for another film. Making a film costs money, but this time, instead of soliciting sponsorship in the company's name, it was the Chain of Love Fund raising money for a good cause.

Third, build a film aggregation platform, to help more young filmmakers make their dreams real through it — you could say it's Lin Hao helping more young people. In our first year alone more than a thousand films were submitted. I can now use the rights to those thousand-odd films to build a video site.

I've already registered the three words "Chain of Love" as a trademark in more than a hundred product categories. The aim is simple: so the Chain of Love Fund won't have to depend on other people's donations from now on. Instead we do more public-good projects and let it generate its own funding.

Waiting for donations is the more traditional kind of charity. We're disruptive: we create more public-good projects, so companies can get advertising value through the charity platform while our projects solve their funding problem. These days it's called designing a "capital pathway."

What is a "capital pathway"? In a few years Lin Hao may be the boss of a listed company. Further down the road there may be a Chain of Love shopping mall, with Chain of Love phones, Chain of Love backpacks, stationery, drinks — I already hold trademarks in more than two hundred product categories.

Before Chinese New Year a venture capital firm watched our pitch and decided that this pile of plans and trademarks alone is worth 10 million yuan. Once Lin Hao graduates from college, he'll be the one doing the choosing.

Lin Hao was the only student in his whole high school to submit an application to join the Party. He's now a probationary Party member. Why? To encourage him to advance ideologically — though he was already advanced enough on his own. It's just that I think someone like him has any number of possible futures. Acting is only one of his interests; we're using the arts exam to test whether the interest can become a career.

This probationary Party member could go and be a village official, say, or a poverty-alleviation secretary in a poor area. All of it is possible.

After watching Feng Xiaogang's film Youth (《芳华》), I felt that Liu Feng and the real Lin Hao are very alike. When I say Lin Hao could be a village official, that's not out of thin air; for these ten years that's the kind of person he is — he likes serving people. When I take him out, in public I serve him. Back at the hotel he serves me: washes my socks, buys things for me. That's how we divide it. On stage I serve you; off stage, sorry, you carry the bags.

After Tian Wanliang's divorce, his own child stayed with the mother. Lin Hao played the part of his "son," and for ten years Tian carried the surname Lin.

This star "son" describes their relationship this way:

"My relationship with Papa Tian isn't by blood, but between us blood is thicker than water."

"What I see in him is a man who can fight and dares to fight, a truly great man."

"Papa Tian has been like a lamp in my life. In '08 and '09 I was struggling, as if I'd sunk into a swamp, not knowing what to do — and that's when Papa Tian appeared. It was a stroke of fate, too."

My degree was in computer applications, but I had the seed of the arts in me from childhood. My music won prizes in competitions, and my calligraphy sold too; in college I lived off selling my writing and painting. The gift for music and art is in my bones, I was born with it.

I share my own growing up with Lin Hao. I tell him the ability to learn matters enormously: look at me, I never studied musical performance, never studied how to plan a musical, and I've made a living from it for more than ten years. I never studied journalism either. Back when I was a reporter at the East China Travel News (《华东旅游报》), I taught myself entirely from a few books. I read them and thought, oh, so that's how reporting is done, and I picked it up.

So why, when I'm so much older than Lin Hao, can I be his brother and his friend? Because every time he comes to a hurdle he can't get over, I tell him how I handled it at his age.

I tell him I had a defect. From seventh to ninth grade I wet the bed, and the whole school, teachers and students, looked down on me for it. My family was poor, so after wetting the bed I had no dry clothes to change into and went to school in damp ones. During the day, in class, our room would have a really bad smell in it. So through those years of middle school, my childhood, my self-respect took a huge blow, and in seventh and eighth grade my marks were near the bottom of the class in almost every subject.

I told Haozi: once I got to ninth grade I made a decision that even now I can hardly believe. If I had drifted through ninth grade because of that defect, I'd probably have spent my life farming the land. Not wanting to be a farmer, I made a big decision: every night, after the other students had gone to sleep, I'd secretly light a candle and study on my own, one candle every night, burned down to the end.

One of our class's teachers later opened a small shop, and to this day, when we go back home to visit our teachers, people say, "Ah, that's the one who used to light a candle every night."

I became a well-known figure at that school.

I said, Haozi, look: back then nobody tutored me, my family was dirt poor, and with that willpower alone, one candle a night, I changed my fate. I got into college. Now, looking back over ten-odd years in this trade and the things I've done — Haozi, I can hardly believe it myself. A boy from the countryside: how did I do all this over the years? When I go back to my village and tell the villagers about it, they say, "Sure, keep talking. There's no way you did all that. You're bragging."

Nobody dares believe that I, Tian Wanliang, could accomplish so much through my own effort.

Cover image/wangyi, baidu