Success Quote by Zhang Ziyi

Fame, in Zhang Ziyi's telling, isn’t glitter; it’s a bill that keeps coming due. The line is calibrated to puncture a familiar fantasy about star-making: that the public gets to treat an actor’s success as either effortless luck or suspicious calculation. Her phrasing turns on “also” and “admit.” She’s not merely asking for sympathy, she’s accusing an audience (and a media ecosystem) of bad faith. The fight isn’t over whether she’s successful; it’s over who gets to define the cost of that success.

“Blood and tears” is melodramatic on purpose. It borrows the language of physical labor and sacrifice, insisting that performance work counts as real work even when it happens under spotlights. For a Chinese actress who became globally legible in the early 2000s - a period when “international crossover” often came packaged with reductive headlines, moral policing, and tabloid narratives - the sentence reads like an attempt to reclaim authorship from the rumor mill. It hints at injuries, punishing schedules, pressure from directors and studios, public scrutiny of her personal life, and the extra burden of representing a nation’s cultural export while being picked apart at home.

The last clause, “This makes me feel extremely sad,” lands with almost disarming plainness. It’s not rage; it’s grief. That simplicity functions as strategy: it refuses the glamorous armor people expect celebrities to wear and forces the reader to confront a discomforting idea - that admiration can be dehumanizing when it denies the suffering that helped build the spectacle.