Living a simple and happy life, Chow Yun-fat plans to give his around $700 million fortune to charity, Hong Kong movie site Jayne Stars reported.
Chow Yun Fat was born in Lamma Island, Hong Kong, to a mother who was a cleaning lady and vegetable farmer, and a father who worked on a Shell Oil Company tanker. Chow grew up in a farming community, in a house with no electricity.
He would wake at dawn each morning to help his mother sell herbal jelly and Hakka tea-pudding on the streets; in the afternoons, he went to work in the fields.
His family moved to Kowloon when he was ten, and at 17, he left school to help support the family by doing odd jobs, including bellboy, postman, camera salesman, and taxi driver.
His life started to change after college when he responded to a newspaper advertisement, and his actor-trainee application was accepted by a local television station. He signed a three-year contract with the studio and made his acting debut.
Chow became a heartthrob and familiar face in soap operas that were exported internationally.
The 63-year-old Chinese actor said in an interview this year that he plans on donating his entire fortune to charity, China Daily reports.
Active in in the movie industry for over four decades — Chow is best known in Asia for his collaborations with filmmaker John Woo in the heroic bloodshed-genre films "A Better Tomorrow," "The Killer and Hard Boiled"; and in the West for his roles as Li Mu-bai in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and Sao Feng in "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."
One could be forgiven for thinking that with this vast wealth, Chow Yun Fat lives a luxurious lifestyle, that consists of expensive cars and sumptuous mansions.
Instead, Chow is shown to be fairly frugal – often opting to take public transit and doing charity work rather than spending money on himself.
Despite his massive wealth, Chow Yun Fat leads a very simple lifestyle, reportedly spending just $800 HKD a month on himself. That's a little over $100 USD.
He used his first-generation Nokia phone for over 17 years before making a switch two years ago to a smartphone – only because his Nokia stopped working.
Never ostentatious, Chow can often be seen shopping at discount shops. He expressed, "I don't wear clothes for other people. As long as I think it's comfortable, then it's good enough for me."
Chow spends his free time on healthy pursuits such as hiking and jogging, and often when he is recognized will happily stop and pose for the cameras.
Chow's wife, Jasmine Tan, previously disclosed his net worth and his plan to donate it to various charities. Establishing their own charity several years ago, Tan supports Chow's decision in giving his money to different causes.
On his reason for giving away his fortune, Chow smiled, "The money's not mine. I'm only keeping it safe for the time being."
Expressing that money is not the source of happiness, he added, "My dream is to be a happy and normal person. The hardest thing in life is not about how much money you earn, but how to keep a peaceful mindset and live the rest of your life in a simple and carefree manner."
This article originally appeared on BrightVibes. You can read it here.
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Reddit tried an experiment to curb hate speech. The results are fascinating.
In 2015, Reddit decided to run some of the haters out of town.
The "homepage of the Internet," known for its wholesale embrace of free debate, banned several of its most notorious forums, including r/coontown, a hub for white supremacist jokes and propaganda, and r/fatpeoplehate, a board on which users heaped abuse on photos of fat people.
Critics accused the site of axing the subreddits for the "wrong" reasons — demonizing unpalatable speech rather than incitement to violence. Others worried the ban would be ineffective. Wouldn't the trolls just spew their hate elsewhere on the site?
Thanks to a group of Georgia Tech researchers, we now have evidence that the ban worked.
Their paper, "You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech," found that not only did banning the forums prompt a large portion of its most dedicated users to leave the site entirely, the redditors who did stay "drastically [decreased] their hate speech usage."
The researchers analyzed over 650 million submissions and comments posted to the site between January and December 2015. After arriving at a definition for "hate speech," which they determined by pulling memes and phrases common to the two shuttered forums, they observed an 80% drop in racist and fat-phobic speech from the users who migrated to other subreddits after the ban. 20-40% of accounts that frequently posted to either r/coontown or r/fatpeoplehate became inactive or were deleted in that same period.
"Through the banning of subreddits which engaged in racism and fat-shaming, Reddit was able to reduce the prevalence of such behavior on the site," the paper's authors concluded.
The researchers have a few theories about why the ban may have worked.
Those who migrated to other subreddits, they speculate, became beholden to existing community norms that restricted their ability to speak hate freely.
They also cite Reddit's effective removal of copycat forums (r/fatpeoplehate2, r/wedislikefatpeople, etc.) before they could reach critical mass.
Creating secure online spaces is a difficult problem. This new research provides at least one possible solution.
Any attempt to moderate an open web forum, the researchers argue, will inevitably have to balance protecting free expression with the right of people to exist on the internet without fear of abuse. A June Pew research poll found that 1 in 4 black Americans reported having been harassed online because of their race, compared with 3% of white Americans.
"The empirical work in this paper suggests that when narrowly applied to small, specific groups, banning deviant hate groups can work to reduce and contain the behavior," the authors wrote.
For vulnerable people who, like most, are living increasingly online lives, it's a small measure of relief.
Correction 9/13/17: This story was updated to identify Alexis Ohanian as Reddit's co-founder and executive chairman, not CEO.