Latest news with #British-Chinese
The Star
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
SG actress Rebecca Lim says husband brought her peace, security she's never had
Rebecca Lim married Matthew Webster, a Singaporean of British-Chinese descent, in 2022. The couple now have a 1½-year-old son. Photos: Rebecca Lim/Instagram Singaporean actress Rebecca Lim never had the desire to become a mother. Not once in her past relationships did she entertain thoughts of starting a family with her partners. But the 38-year-old star began thinking she could be a parent after marrying Matthew Webster. She married Webster, a Singaporean of British-Chinese descent, in 2022. The couple now have a 1½-year-old son. Lim opened up about her life struggles in a candid interview on the podcast Who We Are With Rachel Lim . The hour-long episode with the co-founder of local fashion brand Love, Bonito was streamed on YouTube and Spotify on Aug 12. '(Matthew) gave me the peace and security I never had, and it made me think maybe I can have a family with this man,' Lim said. The actress also discussed her ongoing issues with mum guilt when she returned to the entertainment industry to film a long-form English drama in July 2024. Her son was then about seven months old. Filming went on for nine months, and Lim found herself crying and struggling with inadequacy in the initial weeks. Besides not being able to memorise her lines because of 'brain fog', she felt stressed because 'physically, you don't look 100%'. 'Then while I'm at work, I don't feel 100% a mother because I'm leaving my son at home,' she said, adding that she was 'not here, not there'. 'I felt terrible, guilty and inadequate as an actor and as a mother then. It took me a few months to slowly get back into the swing of things. I think what motherhood has taught me is to be 100% present.' Lim, who recently hosted the variety show With Love, Becks (2024), also addressed the image pressures she faced post-partum, especially when she made her first public appearance at Star Awards 2024. 'It was two months after giving birth, and you face your female colleagues who all looked gorgeous,' she recalled. 'Why do I still look like that? Why can't I find a dress to fit into? I underestimated the stress of having to turn up looking good for the event.' Lim admitted that, in hindsight, she should not have emphasised how she looked and stressed herself out. She has now found a 'new equilibrium' as a mum, and also learnt to embrace ageing gracefully. She said: 'That sense of insecurity will never go away because you're constantly exposed. But what's important is how you snap out of it.' – The Straits Times/Asia News Network
Straits Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Actress Rebecca Lim says husband brought her peace, security she's never had
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox SINGAPORE – Local actress Rebecca Lim never had the desire to become a mother. Not once in her past relationships did she entertain thoughts of starting a family with her partners. But the 38-year-old star began thinking she could be a parent after marrying Mr Matthew Webster. She married Mr Webster, a Singaporean of British-Chinese descent, in 2022. The couple now have a 1½-year-old son. Lim opened up about her life struggles in a candid interview on the podcast Who We Are With Rachel Lim. The hour-long episode with the co-founder of local fashion brand Love, Bonito was streamed on YouTube and Spotify on Aug 12. '(Matthew) gave me the peace and security I never had, and it made me think maybe I can have a family with this man,' Lim said. The actress also discussed her ongoing issues with mum guilt when she returned to the entertainment industry to film a long-form English drama in July 2024. Her son was then about seven months old. Filming went on for nine months, and Lim found herself crying and struggling with inadequacy in the initial weeks. Besides not being able to memorise her lines because of 'brain fog', she felt stressed because 'physically, you don't look 100 per cent'. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Business Singapore banks face headwinds in rest of 2025, but DBS is pulling ahead: Analysts Singapore HSA seeks Kpod investigators to arrest abusers, conduct anti-trafficking ops Singapore Yishun man admits to making etomidate-laced pods for vaporisers; first Kpod case conviction Opinion The 30s are heavy: Understanding suicide in Singapore's young adults Asia Malaysia's anti-graft agency busts arms smuggling ring masterminded by senior military officers Singapore 4 taken to hospital after accident near Sports Hub, including 2 rescued with hydraulic tools Asia Mixed reactions among Malaysia drivers on S'pore move to clamp down on illegal ride-hailing services Singapore SG60: Many hands behind Singapore's success story 'Then while I'm at work, I don't feel 100 per cent a mother because I'm leaving my son at home,' she said, adding that she was 'not here, not there'. 'I felt terrible, guilty and inadequate as an actor and as a mother then. It took me a few months to slowly get back into the swing of things. I think what motherhood has taught me is to be 100 per cent present.' Lim, who recently hosted the variety show With Love, Becks (2024), also addressed the image pressures she faced post-partum, especially when she made her first public appearance at Star Awards 2024. 'It was two months after giving birth, and you face your female colleagues who all looked gorgeous,' she recalled. 'Why do I still look like that? Why can't I find a dress to fit into? I underestimated the stress of having to turn up looking good for the event.' Lim admitted that, in hindsight, she should not have emphasised how she looked and stressed herself out. She has now found a 'new equilibrium' as a mum, and also learnt to embrace ageing gracefully. She said: 'That sense of insecurity will never go away because you're constantly exposed. But what's important is how you snap out of it.'
Hindustan Times
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Year of the... dragon?: Yuan Yang's new book explores the flip side of China's boom
What is it like being part of the 'China story', one of 1.4 billion in an economy that has grown 3,000% since the 1980s? Street art in Chongqing. 'There is growing uncertainty, particularly among the urban middle-class,' says journalist, author and UK MP Yang. 'An idea that, even with greater effort, the returns will be lower.' (Getty Images) What do survival and success look like? How does young China cope with the added weight of a regime that treats resistance as treason? What lessons could their experience hold for the rest of us? British-Chinese writer Yuan Yang, 35, investigates these questions in her book, Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China (2024). A former Financial Times (FT) journalist, Yang was born in China and lived there, with her grandparents, until she was four. In 1994, she joined her parents in the UK. She only returned to the country of her birth about two decades later, in 2016. Living there as a journalist, over the next six years, she reported on the economic revolution, of course. But she also noticed 'private revolutions' unfolding, she says. There wasn't always space for these stories in FT, so she eventually picked four of them for her book. The women she profiles — June, Leiya, Sam and Siyue (names and certain personal details have been altered, to protect them from reprisals) — were picked, she says, to represent different backgrounds and economic classes. Siyue was raised amid immense pressure to excel academically. She has built a life as an English tutor but feels like a disappointment to her parents, and worries about her future. June, raised in abject poverty, brought great pride to her parents, as the first girl in her extended family to go to university. She built a life in Beijing as a tutor, but amid new government rules against rote learning, had to reinvent herself. She now runs her own start-up. Leiya dropped out of school in 2001 and found work as a factory worker. The harsh conditions pushed her to become a labour activist. She worries that her work is doomed to fail, and could see her end up in detention. Sam is a labour activist at the other end of the class spectrum. She is wealthy and driven by idealism. She heads a labour-activism blog and worries about the repercussions she and her family could face. (Inigo Blake) As China's juggernaut of an economy slows and changes shape, 'there is greater uncertainty,' says Yang, who, incidentally, was elected to UK's Parliament last year. Excerpts from an interview. You've said that a text from a friend kicked off this book… In 2019, amid a crackdown against student activists in China that had lasted months, with several of the students going missing and others appearing in 'confession' videos, a friend messaged me saying she couldn't meet up anymore. She was going quiet for a long time. In that moment, I really felt that these stories, which the world had not heard, needed to be expressed. We've watched the boom play out. What can you tell us about the flip side, as you saw it? What's interesting about the last decade of China's development is that while there has been an unprecedented explosion in wealth and incomes, especially for the university-educated, the urban middle-class appear to feel very burdened by the increasing competition for status. This is expressed, I think, in the intense competition for school admissions, the struggle to afford housing in the cities, and the pressure to advance in one's career by 35, which is widely considered a cut-off for success. All this leads to what, in recent years, is being called an involution: the idea that even with far greater effort, the returns will either be the same or lower. You say the problem, and growing disparity, reminded you of some of the crises of the Global North… The situation in Beijing, where a generation of young professionals can't afford housing, felt very similar to the situation of my friends in London. There is similar competition at the high end of the university education spectrum as well. China, like so many countries, in the Global North and South, has grown in uneven and unequal ways. How has this arc played out differently for women? That gets at something really important. Leiya, for example, describes how in a lot of women moved to the cities in the '80s, where a lot of new factories were opening, because they felt there was little for them in the countryside. Rural China is much more patriarchal. In a way, those with ambition were forced to do something new because of the lack of opportunities for them at home, and the fact that daughters get no inheritances in a traditional Chinese family. In some ways, this was greatly challenging; in others, it was also freeing. What about civil liberties, censorship… it is often hard to see clearly into China. What did you observe, in your time there? Individuals in China do face much harsher penalties for their speech and political action than I do, for instance, in the UK. Within those constraints, people are creative. But the constraints are very real. People in China still speak in different voices to different groups of people: trusted family vs friends vs colleagues vs officials. Meanwhile there is also the anxiety of losing one's footing, in this newly hypercompetitive world… If you're at or near the top of the ladder in China, you have quite a long way to fall. That does create the fear that one's children may not make it to the same rung as you. Parents fear that an 'average' child might not be able to compete to get the social status and support they may need from a state organisation or government body, or even get the respect they would like from, say, the police. What kinds of difficulties did you face, as a foreign journalist in China? It's difficult to say what kind of surveillance one is under in China, but I certainly always assumed that I was under online surveillance there. Sometimes there was physical surveillance as well. When visiting villages as a foreign journalist, I was viewed with a great deal of political suspicion. People were wary. Officials are really worried you might see something that goes against their narrative that, for instance, they have won the war on poverty and poverty has been 'eradicated'. Of course, it hasn't been, unfortunately. That is a long and a difficult fight to 'win', in any country.
The Age
16-06-2025
- Politics
- The Age
Britain's MI6 ‘Q' steps out of shadows to become first female spymaster
British spy agency MI6 has named an insider as its first female leader, after her rival for the role was criticised for being too soft on China. Blaise Metreweli, 47, a Cambridge University graduate who once rowed in the women's Boat Race, currently holds the position of 'Q', the head of the service's technical branch, made famous by the James Bond franchise. The appointment of a woman as 'C', the head of MI6, formally known as the Secret Intelligence Service, is a case of life imitating art. Dame Judi Dench has played 'M', the head of the SIS in the Bond franchise, in many of the recent 007 films. Metreweli will become the international spying agency's 18th chief and its first female leader. She joined MI6 in 1999 and has spent time in the field in the Middle East and Europe. She won the appointment despite her rival, Dame Barbara Woodward, being seen by some as the front-runner. Dame Barbara was the British ambassador to China between 2015 and 2020, and criticism emerged in recent weeks suggesting that she had been too soft on the Communist country. She was dubbed 'Beijing Barbara' in some reports, in what some observers saw as a campaign to try to block her candidacy. Critics included Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, who said that she had been 'less than robust' about the Beijing regime's track record on human rights and freedom. The UK's stance on China has hardened in the last decade after the so-called 'golden era' of British-Chinese relations when Lord Cameron was prime minister and George Osborne was chancellor. Donald Trump's return to the White House has put new emphasis on Britain's position on Beijing, with Keir Starmer trying to improve relations, especially on trade, with China.
Sydney Morning Herald
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
Britain's MI6 ‘Q' steps out of shadows to become first female spymaster
British spy agency MI6 has named an insider as its first female leader, after her rival for the role was criticised for being too soft on China. Blaise Metreweli, 47, a Cambridge University graduate who once rowed in the women's Boat Race, currently holds the position of 'Q', the head of the service's technical branch, made famous by the James Bond franchise. The appointment of a woman as 'C', the head of MI6, formally known as the Secret Intelligence Service, is a case of life imitating art. Dame Judi Dench has played 'M', the head of the SIS in the Bond franchise, in many of the recent 007 films. Metreweli will become the international spying agency's 18th chief and its first female leader. She joined MI6 in 1999 and has spent time in the field in the Middle East and Europe. She won the appointment despite her rival, Dame Barbara Woodward, being seen by some as the front-runner. Dame Barbara was the British ambassador to China between 2015 and 2020, and criticism emerged in recent weeks suggesting that she had been too soft on the Communist country. She was dubbed 'Beijing Barbara' in some reports, in what some observers saw as a campaign to try to block her candidacy. Critics included Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, who said that she had been 'less than robust' about the Beijing regime's track record on human rights and freedom. The UK's stance on China has hardened in the last decade after the so-called 'golden era' of British-Chinese relations when Lord Cameron was prime minister and George Osborne was chancellor. Donald Trump's return to the White House has put new emphasis on Britain's position on Beijing, with Keir Starmer trying to improve relations, especially on trade, with China.
