Chong Sit Fong, whose birth name is Chong Suk-neui, was born on 10 April 1932 in Singapore to a family from Jinjiang in Fujian, and trained in song and dance from childhood, making her stage debut on the getai at fourteen. At sixteen she formed the Pak Suet song-and-dance troupe, which toured widely and won her the nickname Fairy of Song; at twenty-one she put together a troupe of more than thirty, the Chong Sit Fong touring concert company, and led it across Singapore and Malaya, reaching the Philippines in 1956 to great welcome among the local Chinese. In 1957 she came to Hong Kong to make films, first taking a guest role in the Shaw Brothers Mandarin picture The Mysterious Beauty (1957) and then starring in the Amoy-dialect film Songstress (1958), which she also promoted on tour in Taiwan. Her success in Dragon Marries Dragon (1958), The Hot Girl (1958), Waiting for Her Husband's Return (1958) and The Foolish Man (1959) earned her the title Queen of Amoy-dialect Cinema. In 1958 she founded her own Chong's Film Company and produced a string of Amoy-dialect features, including its debut Seventeen, Eighteen are the Best Years (1958) and A Flower on a Dunghill (1959). After the Singapore-backed Temple of the Dragon Mountain (1962) she spent seventeen months touring Southeast Asia, singing in Mandarin, English, Thai, Hokkien, Cantonese and Malay and appearing in a Thai film in 1964. She briefly left the screen, then returned to Taiwan in 1969 for Mandarin films such as The Magic Umbrella Knight-errant (1972). She appeared in more than thirty films in all, and after marrying retired from the screen and settled in Singapore, where she has continued to perform for charity.
Chong Sit Fong was a symbol of the golden age of Amoy-dialect cinema in Singapore and Malaya and was dubbed its queen. A singer-dancer fluent in several languages, she formed her own troupes and production company and combined stage performance with film, touring Southeast Asia and helping make Amoy-dialect pictures mainstream entertainment for the Chinese communities there.
Achievements
- 1957 · Came from Singapore and Malaya to Hong Kong and took a guest role in Shaw Brothers' The Mysterious Beauty
- 1958 · Founded her own Chong's Film Company and produced several Amoy-dialect features
- 1962 · After Temple of the Dragon Mountain began a seventeen-month touring engagement