Just A Kampong Boy In A Market

LI NANXING lives in a semi-D house in Holland V, honours his ex-fisherman dad by owning a fish farm in Lim Chu Kang, and remembers his late mum by cooking her dishes and shopping at Ghim Moh market. Which is where we spend an eye-opening morning with the evergreen star…

- Yip Jieying

IT’S 10 am at Ghim Moh Market and the produce-filled aisles bustle with aunties, uncles and domestic workers bearing bulging bags, some trundling shopping carts laden with groceries. The air is humid with the chatter of stall vendors and bargaining customers. In the thick of it all stands Li Nanxing, grasping a gleaming red snapper at the fishmonger’s stand with his bare hands. He is inspecting it like a seasoned housewife. “You see? This is good, because it’s shiny,” he informs us in endearing, heavily Singlish-accented English. He pulls back the head of the fish to reveal its gills. “Very fresh, ’cos it’s red”. He brings the creature close to his nose and sniffs it. “You don’t want it if it’s dried up or if [the gills are] pink”.

The son of a fisherman father and garment factory worker mother knows what he’s talking about. Especially since, unbenownst to many, he owns a fish farm in Lim Chu Kang.

Li Nanxing, veteran actor of 33 years, Ch 8 Ah Ge (“big brother”), is many things to many people. If you’re a baby boomer or a child in the ’80s, you’ll remember him as a scrappy juvenile delinquent in On The Fringe. Safe to say almost everyone knows him as the cool gambling god Yan Fei in the 1993 drama The Unbeatables. He even has millennial fans, thanks to his appearances in recent dramas like C.L.I.F 4 and Dreammakers II. “You’re so lucky,” sighed our 26-year-old cousin when she learned we were meeting LNX.

In real life, though, he’s always been a bit of an enigma. Those who have met him have remarked that he can be quite reticent, with an aura of melancholy that lends gravitas to the brooding heroes he plays on TV.