A movie star whose meteoric rise gave hope to the masses has left the nation divided over his marital woes

Movie star Wang Baoqiang has filed for divorce - and half of China has an opinion on it.

That may be an exaggeration, but it's hard to deny that his family dispute has threatened to steal the thunder of the Chinese athletes at the Rio Olympics.

Celebrities are always fodder for gossip, with their romances and their fallouts, yet Wang is no ordinary movie star. He is an inspiration to a vast demographic.

His story is a classic tale of rags to riches. He didn't train at any acting school, and he doesn't possess movie-star looks. Yet at age 19, director Li Yang plucked him from a milling crowd outside Beijing Film Studio for a small but crucial part in Blind Shaft.

While the film was never officially released in China, it won rave reviews internationally, and Wang caught the attention of director Feng Xiaogang, who the next year cast him in a much bigger role in A World Without Thieves.

This blockbuster made Wang a household name, and he went on to appear in several TV dramas, all of them big hits.

The inevitable bombs came later, but his hit-and-miss ratio over a 13-year career has been much higher than most.

Plus, he did it with Forrest Gump-like serendipity. In almost all his signature roles, he has played a simpleton who is oblivious to worldly complications and treachery, and whose honesty and perseverance leads ultimately to triumph over adversity. This persona as a classic Chinese "peasant boy" is reportedly based on the actor's own personality.

That's why his meteoric rise is viewed as a symbolic success by society's grass roots. Many young people have derived a sense of vicarious fulfillment from his story, and when he married Ma Rong it was like the end of a fairy tale.

But fairy tales do not last in real life. In a statement on Aug 14, he talked about his loyalty to his family and the betrayal of his wife, who he has accused of having an affair with his agent, Song Zhe.

The statement has divided the nation. While millions switched from watching the Olympics on TV to launching a campaign to denounce the "unfaithful wife and cheating agent", the media's talking heads have overwhelmingly directed their criticism at Wang, saying he has dragged family skeletons from the closet into the open.

"It's not graceful to publicly shame the mother of your children," wrote one commentator.

The grass roots, who tend to leave short comments below online articles or celebrity blogs, and the commentators who write long posts rarely see eye to eye on issues of public interest - not in China, not anywhere in the world. But never has the chasm between the hoi polloi and the so-called elitists been so wide.

For the public, the case is open and shut: Wang is a superstar, a self-made man who doted on his wife and children. Even though he is no match for his wife in terms of looks, this was overcome by his fame and fortune. Meanwhile, the "cheating couple" had violated the golden rule for being a good wife and a good friend.

For the elitists, the root of this situation lies in Wang's lack of sophistication, as he was unprepared for a relationship with someone so obviously in another league, both in education and looks. The way he publicized the scandal is testament to his boorish upbringing, they argue.

One way to sum up this view perhaps is: "You can take a boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy." Wang may earn $4 million a year and own properties in Beijing and Los Angeles, they say, but he cannot shake his "bumpkin" persona.

It seems unnecessary, but I have to qualify my commentary by saying I don't personally know Wang, Ma or Song. Even if I were a friend, as many have claimed online, I wouldn't know everything that had happened. Spousal squabbles are common, and you'd have to listen to both sides.

Assuming everything Wang says is true, there are still crucial questions that puzzle me.

Was Ma in love with him in the first few years of their six-year marriage, or was she a gold digger from the start? Is Wang prone to violence, as Ma seems to suggest, or was he provoked into lashing out - if such violence even happened at all?

It may feel right to heap scorn on adulterers, but if you are Wang's friend, you may want to refrain from doing it. As the old saying goes, couples quarrel on one side of the bed and mend ties on the other. So you'd be a fool to bad-mouth one of them while the fight is still ongoing.

As for the elitist view - well, it's just too elitist. The assumption that Wang couldn't satisfy his wife intellectually or otherwise is simply reading too much into a couple they know nothing about, other than the schools they attended. It not only puts down Wang, whose success had a big dollop of street smarts and natural talent on top of the streak of luck, but also demeans Ma, essentially implying she was in it only for the money.

Why not leave them to sort things out? They can hire lawyers, marriage counselors or any form of professional assistance.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 08/26/2016 page22)