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.
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).
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