Chinese Actor Zhang Tao, Known for His Villain Roles, Rescues a Struggling Diver Off Indonesia
A Chinese tourist's account of drifting toward the surface off Indonesia with her air running low — and of the fellow guest who hauled her back, who turned out to be the actor Zhang Tao — has become the National Day holiday's warmest story on Weibo.
The post that travelled across Chinese social media on Friday begins, for several paragraphs, like a routine diving incident report. Its author, a Chinese tourist diving off Maratua Island in Indonesian Borneo, described a dive that went wrong in slow motion: with roughly 70 bar of air still in her tank, she suddenly began drifting toward the surface, and the divemaster reached for her without quite holding on. Then a guest she had never spoken to went over the side of the boat, got a grip on her, and he and the divemaster brought her back up between them, one on each side, until she was safely out of the water. The account's final line was the one her readers passed along: the guest in the water was Zhang Tao, an actor.
Relays of her post filled in the feeling she had left out of the procedural version. "Seeing the light catch his mask was like holy light" (像圣光), she wrote, according to one Weibo user who passed the story on — and what moved her as much as the rescue itself was that a stranger, and a compatriot, had stepped in without hesitation in a dangerous moment far from home.
Zhang Tao trained at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and has built a career on disappearing into his parts — Chinese entertainment's term for his kind is 剧抛脸, "a face you throw away with each drama." His specialty is the character audiences love to dislike: a gallery of memorable villains and cheating-boyfriend types, most recently Huo Wenhai in the hit drama Nine Gates (《九门》), the role that had made his face newly famous in the days before he surfaced off Maratua. The irony was not lost on anyone: the man the internet knows for playing people you would cross the street to avoid turned out to be the one who jumps in.
A photograph attached to one of the posts relaying the rescue shows a man in a black cap and a companion indoors; the poster identified the man as Zhang Tao.
The story's reception tracked China's long-running argument about celebrity. "Having grown used to the entertainment world's manufactured personas," one commenter wrote, people were struck by an actor "remembered on screen for his acting, and respected off screen for his character" — the rare famous-person story that confirms virtues the cameras never see. The news outlet Litchi News' write-up of the rescue had been liked more than 4,000 times by midday Friday, and the topic sat at No. 2 on Weibo's hot-search list through the holiday morning.
Strip away the celebrity, though, and what remains is the part of the account that experienced divers would read with a wince: a tank down to 70 bar, an unplanned ascent from depth, a divemaster's grip that did not hold. The posts celebrate who did the grabbing. The account itself describes how narrow the margin was.