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Sunday Herald Magazine, 29 January 2006As a sexually liberated young American in hit Chinese soap Foreign Babes In Beijing, Rachel DeWoskin's character Jiexi stole a Chinese woman's husband ... and then stole the show. DeWoskin became the most talked about Western woman in a China changing culturally and economically at breakneck speed, as a book of her adventures in Beijing is published, she talks to Fraser Newham about being behind the scenes of a new China
Beijing, 1995. Behind the high walls of the city's Zhongnanhai government complex, chain-smoking nonagenarian Deng Xiaoping still rules over a population of 1.2 billion Chinese; 2000km to the south, the Union Jack still flutters over Hong Kong. But change is in the air. Cut to the Beijing Sheraton Hotel, where in a crowded luxury room, soon-to-be-famous Rachel DeWoskin is about to film her first love scene for Chinese TV. Lighting assistants and boom boys press around her as, perched on the edge of a luxurious king-sized bed, she flicks through her English-Chinese dictionary trying to work out what the director is telling her to do.
Surely she has misunderstood. But when rugged leading man, Wang Ling, confidently steps out of his trousers, it confirms what the dictionary was telling her beyond doubt. Drop your pants, beautiful - and try not to think about the estimated 600 million Chinese TV viewers watching at home.
This is the scene with which DeWoskin opens her memoir Foreign Babes In Beijing - and for her that moment sums up the five years she spent working in China. "My whole experience in China was framed by language," the American writer and one-time soap star recalls. "I was in a constantly confused state, never entirely sure what people were expecting of me - and what could be a better example of that feeling than 'drop your pants'?"
A graduate of Columbia University with a minor in Mandarin, DeWoskin arrived in China in October 1994, following in the footsteps of her father Kenneth, a former teacher of classical Chinese at the University of Michigan. Sustenance was to come from a PR job, the kind of well-paying gig which in the last years of Deng's China could be arranged by any foreigner with the rudiments of Chinese and access to a fax machine. Still in her first months in the city, however, a Chinese friend at a party suggested she audition for a role on a TV show which, translating as she went along, she understood to be something about foreign girls who live in Beijing. In fact, it was the TV drama series Foreign Babes In Beijing, the planned sequel to the massively successful hit of 1993, A Beijinger In New York.
When Foreign Babes aired on Chinese TV in September 1995, half of China's vast population reportedly tuned in to watch across 20 episodes the romantic ups and downs of the Li brothers and the two very different foreign exchange students with whom they fall in love. "The audience thought the show was wildly entertaining," DeWoskin remembers. "It was competing with dreary, state-run affairs - there was very little in the way of sexy programming in China at the time."
And it was DeWoskin's character Jiexi (from the English Jesse), a sexually liberated American with a fur coat and haircut straight out of Southfork Ranch, who stole a Chinese woman's husband and went on to steal the whole show. "People were most interested in Jiexi," the then-actress says of her onscreen character. "She was the most titillating. She created drama and conversation because she was the mistress."
Suddenly, DeWoskin found herself the most talked about Western woman in China. She was recognised in the street wherever she went - cheerful strangers would endlessly imitate the trademark double thumbs-up her character gives in the credits of the show. Her face was plastered across newspaper front pages, and never-ending column inches were expended discussing her likes and dislikes. To her surprise, some newspaper features even claimed to be written by her; in fact the studio was doing a nice business slapping her byline on to articles produced by their own PR department.
Foreign Babes was very much a show of its times, riding the zeitgeist midway through a hairy decade that saw China's social and urban landscapes transform beyond all recognition. It was a time when upwardly mobile young couples would dress up to try their first Big Mac Meal; or when teachers received stock reports by pager as they prepared for class, speculating that out there, somewhere, there were bigger fish to fry.........
http://www.sundayherald.com/53775
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Copyright (C) 2005 FRASER NEWHAM All Rights Reserved.
