China actress Mao Xiaotong abandoned by dad, rejects his cash demands after becoming famous

Award-winning Chinese actress Mao Xiaotong may be famous for her sweet and cute appearance, but she has a tough streak that has seen her walk away from toxic relationships with her father and ex-boyfriend.\nMao, 37, has won multiple awards including the Magnolia Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Huading Award for Best Actress in Contemporary Drama.\nShe is widely recognised for playing independent and innocent female characters in Chinese television dramas, such as Nothing but Thirty and Light Beyond the Reed.\n\nHer look is so famously pure that some compared her with memes featuring cute kittens.\nIn contrast, she has decisive characteristics that helped her break up toxic relationships.\nMao was born prematurely in 1988 in northern China’s Tianjin municipality, when her mother accidentally stretched her belly while running a stall during pregnancy.\n\nMao’s father, an alcoholic gambler, treated her badly because she was not a boy.\nHer mother divorced her father when she was two years old, changed her surname to her own and raised Mao alone.\nMao’s mother worked on several part-time jobs to support her dream of pursuing the arts.\nShe had already appeared on stage by the age of four and began studying Latin dance in Beijing at 13.\nAt 17, she decided to study performing arts at the Central Academy of Drama and was admitted after one attempt in 2005.\n\nMao made her first major career breakthrough for a role in the hit 2011 drama Empresses in the Palace.\nIn 2018, her father, who disappeared from her life when she was two, appeared on a television show and demanded 50 million yuan (US$7 million) from his “big star daughter”.\nHe also sought a villa and car like Mao gave her mother.\nMao never openly responded to her father. Online observers supported her, encouraging her to not succumb to blackmail.\nAround the same time, Mao also openly broke up with her boyfriend, singer and actor Chen Xiang, after she found him with another woman at their home.\nChen’s fans attacked Mao after seeing Chen acting frustrated following their break-up. But Mao fought back by publishing the surveillance footage from the lift of their building.\nThe footage showed Chen entering the lift with an actress just before Mao came home.\n\nIt also showed that it only took Mao three hours to pack her things and leave, ending a relationship that had lasted for years.\nMany praised Mao’s decisiveness in leaving the toxic relationship.\nMao once said in an interview: “Never underestimate a woman’s courage to solve problems.”\nShe said she learned her independent spirit from her mother, whom she considers to be an “iron lady”.\nMao’s social media account now has 22 million followers.\n“She is the most beautiful, strong yet tragic Chinese actress I know. I can see a great girl’s power in her,” said one online observer.\n