Sun, Aug 21, 2005 page18

• A foreign babe catches China fever and recovers

  `Foreign Babes in Beijing' is a wonderful introduction to modern urban China -- intelligent, articulate, informative and entertaining

  • BY BRADLEY WINTERTON / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  It's arguable that this book presents two faces. On the one hand you have the often embarrassing experiences of a nubile young lady in front of Chinese camera crews, lighting technicians, director's assistants and the rest. On the other hand, however, you have the always curious and often knowledgeable observations of a highly-educated woman placed both in a new location and an unexpected job.

  Thus it is that the opening chapter presents you with a scene of the foreign babe being asked to remove various items of underwear on set, while the second fills you in on the background to her eventual arrival in China. You inevitably suspect the publishers insisted on this particular priority, as well as picturing someone meant to be the author in fishnet stockings on the cover. But in fact Rachel DeWoskin shows herself to be both independent and strong-minded, and indeed somewhat of an "intellectual babe" in the final analysis.

  It isn't long before you discover that her father had been a sinologist at the University of Michigan, and both parents had lived in Taiwan, and later Japan, in their early married life. The author herself is a Columbia University graduate and is already on the way to becoming fluent in Mandarin when she arrives in the Chinese capital. She mentions her writing students at Boston University, and she has read Edward Said's Orientalism.

  

  Foreign Babes in Beijing By Rachel Dewoskin 332 pages Granta

  This then, despite the provocative title and lurid cover illustration, is in reality a highly intelligent and interesting slice of life in China in the 1990s. The author blends astute and well-informed observations on the Beijing social scene with accurate background information. The acting stint gives her access to a privileged social milieu, and when her account of this is put side by side with chats with her home help and tart comments on life in China generally, the result is a fascinating book with a distinctive and fresh feel to it.

  You have gossip, love affairs, a strong historical perspective, and a general feeling of China as the fast-expanding, incongruous, opportunistic place it so clearly is. The Beijing life Rachel DeWoskin describes is certainly not oppressive, can be surprising in the extreme, but is not lacking in vigor or initiative, and has as its stars a population eagerly striving to be a trend-setting, or at least closely trend-following, part of a vibrant modern world.

  The author lived in China from 1994 to 1999 and the book ends with the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and the protests that ensued. She has some amusing arguments with students -- US citizens don't have any human rights, they argue. Even former US president Bill Clinton isn't allowed to have a mistress! Days later the same people were complaining that the US Embassy, which they had attacked, was still closed when they went there to file US visa applications. In these weeks the author only manages to get a taxi by claiming she's Swiss or Icelandic.

  Elsewhere she describes herself as a plot-lover and a literalist. The context is that she wants to understand how a friend of hers, a scriptwriter, got killed in a traffic accident. Restraint, which she considered a Chinese virtue, doesn't come naturally to her, she says.

  DeWoskin has some good aphoristic sentences, too -- she prefers to argue in her native language because "fluent arsenals are better equipped with bitter phrases." In an episode where she takes part in a fashion show, she writes "cat-walking in hot-pants, I might have been a deer, slamming towards the headlights." (The Chinese models in the same show, she writes, considered the Westerners "in our shorts, Capri pants, cotton T-shirts, and rice-colored skin, as unfashionable wrecks." Many readers will recognize the feeling).

  Elsewhere she records the opinion that Chinese "ultra-nationalism" is necessary to correct an imbalance in favor of the US, and that 40 percent of Chinese think love is not the "basis for marriage," yet long to see dramas where genuine lovers defy social expectations. This book is full of interesting things.

  As for the TV series itself, she comments that is was different things to different people. To the censors it was light comedy, though officially they reported it as an educational model with strong moral implications. The mass audience saw sex, wealth and success. In this, she says, it was not in essence very different from some of the great Chinese classics of 2,000 years ago.

  She describes lodging in an area officially closed to foreigners, and befriending an American journalist who was "complicated, brave, and bizarre in ways the Foreign Babes scriptwriters could not have portrayed." She also describes her affair with a fashionable Chinese man who hated the films of Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) for "pandering to Westerners" and had an American ex-wife.

  This would have been an excellent book on China even if the writer hadn't had the luck to act in a TV series claiming 600 million viewers. It's funny, lively, well-informed and well-written. References to Tang poetry rub shoulders with observations on China's TV culture. There are comments on the proliferation of suburbs specifically designed for second wives, and much more. All in all, it's one of the best introductions to modern urban China you are likely to find -- intelligent, articulate, painlessly informative and endlessly entertaining.
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