IN MEMORIAM

谭静

TAN JING

Some of you may have browsed my photo albums on this page. In the album "PTU File - Death Trap"are two stills of a young actress credited as Hanabi Kim   金妍智 . Her real name was Tan Jing and sometimes she would call herself Tracy. In one capture I wrote: "Whatever happened to her?"

On Monday night when I came home, exhausted from a trip to Berlin for a casting & some stunt training, I found a message from a Chinese colleague in my email box, telling me that Tracy had died about a week ago.

The cause of her death is still unclear. Fact is, she fell out of the bathroom window on the 30th floor of a Guangzhou high-rise apartment building. There has been a lot of contradictory guesswork about the actual circumstances leading to her fall. It's been all over the news and I'm not going to take any part in this. The official police report states that she was intoxicated and committed suicide. She was 23.

Countless irreverent and irresponsible stories have been written about her in the tabloids and Internet forums over the past few days. All I can say is that she was kind, intelligent & cheerful. She had studied singing and acting at the Guangzhou Drama Academy and she was extremely professional and focused on set. Once, I accidently kicked her very hard during rehearsals for a fight scene, a kick that lifted the tiny girl off her feet and catapulted her several feet through the air. I felt so bad & apologized frantically, but she just shook it off, never batting an eye. She seemed so tough.

It is hard to speculate how it has come to this. It is evident that she had problems. Serious problems. But nobody was there when she needed help.

Tracy, rest in peace. I shall never forget you.