China girl

Rachel DeWoskin moved to Beijing to work in a P.R. firm. How did she get a starring role as sex kitten Jiexi in a Chinese soap opera?

By Christine Smallwood

May 17, 2005 | In 1994, Rachel DeWoskin left Columbia University with a degree in English and no idea of what to do with the rest of her life. So, of course, she did the practical thing -- she moved to Beijing.

Living abroad as a recent grad is a trade-off, an exchange of one problem (choosing a career) for another (ordering the vegetarian plate and getting stuck with the rooster head). In DeWoskin's case, things were even more complicated. Shortly after arriving and settling into the grind at an American P.R. firm, she met a man who decided her white skin was all the qualification she needed to act in a soap opera about American girls in Beijing. "I was like, 'Hell, no,'" she remembers. But it didn't take too many more late nights at the office, drafting reports, to change her mind.

The show's title, "Foreign Babes in Beijing," says it all. Two American exchange students (one played by a German) come to China and pursue romances with Chinese men. There's the predictable good girl-bad girl split: the blond Louisa, who loves Chinese culture almost as much as she loves her Chinese boyfriend, and the lusty, slutty, brunet Jiexi, the "dishanze" (mistress, or "third") who steals the honorable Tianming away from his hardworking wife and homeland. As Jiexi, DeWoskin got some lessons in soap opera acting -- for one low-tech slow-motion sequence, she was directed to actually run slowly, arms flailing and all -- and earned the affection of 6 million fans eager to catch a glimpse of the strange new expatriates just beginning to come into Beijing. And that was before syndication.

This month, DeWoskin's account of her years as a foreign babe -- and playing one on TV -- hits the shelves. "Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China" is a double story, a diaristic account of her experiences abroad interwoven with musings on Chinese and American politics and pop culture. "Before the 'Foreign Babes' script, I had never heard the stereotype that Chinese are lazy," a typical observation goes. "But Chinese believe that Americans believe it." She remembers (with a chuckle) the director of photography's wise appraisal of her hysterical attempt at a sex scene -- "Foreign babes are tigers!" "Funny," she drily notes, "I had always thought that was a stereotype of Eastern women."

Being both "Du Ruiqiu" (her name from college Chinese classes, which turned out to have the unfortunate meaning of "bumper harvest") and "Jiexi" -- not to mention "Rachel" -- lends DeWoskin the perspective to collapse the personal and political to great, and occasionally hilarious, effect. She's never afraid to poke fun at, as she says, "the monster in the mirror," and makes herself the first target of all criticisms, as well as primary perpetrator of all gaffes. As a well-to-do Westerner who is paid more handsomely than any of the Chinese employed at her P.R. firm, for instance, she's uncomfortable negotiating her "Foreign Babes" contract, so she settles for a laughable $80 per episode (this for a "Desperate Housewives"-caliber sensation that made its already rich producers even richer). She later learns that "they all found the foreign babes naive, and understood that we were willing to act for free because it was an honor to be on Chinese television, because we wanted to be pretty, and because we were deeply insecure." And, she concedes, "They were likely right."

DeWoskin insists that her book is not political, that she can only speak for herself. Yet even peripherally, the story of Sino-U.S. relations in the 1990s, a decade of previously unimagined opening, unfolds. American readers are treated to all the tiny details that make politics human: the mid-'90s, when the American media was focusing on the human-rights abuses against students in Tiananmen Square and the Chinese media was focusing on the human-rights abuses against Rodney King; the introduction of McDonald's and China's obesity "crisis" (it calls itself a nation of "xiao pangzi," little fatties); the relationships between her Chinese and American friends that were strained by the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The book succeeds not by putting forth any conclusion -- deciding that McDonald's is good or bad for Beijing -- but by throwing the politics that govern our everyday lives into relief, drawing attention to all of the tics and habits and assumptions that we, at home, so often fail to notice.

I met DeWoskin at a cafe near Columbia University, where her husband, Zayd, is finishing his Ph.D. We talked about the difficulties of writing about yourself, why American humor doesn't translate into Chinese, and Beijing, where she still spends half the year.

You wrote "Foreign Babes" almost a decade after your time in China. What made you decide to do it now?

I felt like my Chinese friends had such incredibly interesting lives, and I came back to America and immediately perceived that the idea of China in America was very much like the idea of America in China, which is to say, not accurate by my standards. You know, I would go to the bank teller to cash a Chinese check, and she'd be like, "Do the communists stop you and question you?" I just felt bewildered that Americans didn't have a better sense of how hip and engaging Beijing is, and how international young Chinese are, that in fact they're just like young Americans -- that they're edgy and they're interesting and they're sexy and they're spiking their hair and having premarital sex and doing all these things. It's a very hip environment, and I felt defensive that everyone here thought China was nerdy and caught in 1949.

I think of the book as the story of my friends. It's not a sordid, tawdry kind of kiss-and-tell. Mainly I left those things out, not because I'm coy, but because I don't think they're that interesting. It would be so self-loving -- I mean, you go live in China for 10 years or five years, and write a story of yourself?

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