China girl

In the book, you insist that the Chinese are sophisticated television viewers. They're used to Peking Opera and socialist melodrama. They know the histrionics aren't real, but yet they come up to you and think you're Jiexi.

Well, they think I'm Jiexi in the same way that they think Courtney Cox is Monica, or they think Jennifer Aniston is Rachel, or they think Teri Hatcher is a desperate housewife. People knew that I was an actress, but TV is a fantasy to be lived through, so in spite of the fact that they knew I wasn't Jiexi, really, they wanted me to be in love with Tianming anyway. It was such a lovely story that they wanted it to be true. But I argued, and I still argue, that Chinese audiences are sophisticated consumers of moral drama.

Do you think that they were sophisticated consumers of the political angle of the show, too, in terms of you standing in for all those loose, Western women?

I do. When the Western media accused the show of being a propaganda machine, I think the question that it failed to ask -- first of all, it failed to watch the show -- but the question that it finally failed to ask was, if the show is a propaganda machine, what message does it impart?

Louisa, the good girl, the blonde, of course, becomes an angelic China scholar, and lives out the rest of her days in the courtyard with her Chinese family, being a perfect daughter-in-law and rolling dumplings. And Jiexi breaks the heart of her Chinese family by taking Tianming away with her to America. But she redeems herself by calling the father-in-law "Father." And honestly, when the two of us leave for America in the last episode, it's a beautiful scene of exodus. It was not a xenophobic, panicked scene about me taking Tianming out of China.

So there are two ways to see the show.

Exactly. But both of them involve a long-term commitment to the West. I mean, in Jiexi's case, we got married, and I sacrificed everything for true love. And Louisa sacrificed America so that she could go to China. If you think that the show has a political message at all, it seems to me that the message is that we're going to continue this engagement. And the fact is that, on the street, people followed me around and bought whatever condiments I was buying. So the message to teenage girls was this liberated, free, strong, independent woman -- we want to be like her.

That's such a flexible idea of nationality -- it seems like Louisa actually becomes Chinese. It's hard to imagine a show in America that would so openly celebrate a white person identifying with another race. It would be too tense.

Well, what's tense in China is relationships between Western men and Chinese women. They would never have depicted that on television, although that's the reality of it. Most interracial relationships were not beautiful white babes with virile People's Liberation Army poster boys. Although, increasingly they're becoming that way. And you know, the depictions of Chinese men in America have historically been so hostile and overwrought, it's turning the tables a little bit to have the white girls be exotic and the Chinese men be macho. I was into it. I felt like we could relieve Eastern women momentarily of the burden of being mysterious. And for Chinese men to be kind of the heroes of propaganda films was very attractive to me. And the truth about Chinese men in my experience -- although I never gave this kind of sound bite in China because I was too defensive -- is that they're just like men everywhere. There's just a huge spectrum and they vary tremendously. And many of them are extremely macho and they're not inscrutable Orientals and they're not Charlie Chans and they're not houseboys. When people accused the show of promoting stereotypes, I couldn't help but say, "Have you ever watched American television? Have you seen Long Duk Dong recently?"

There's also an increasing interest in America in Japanese yakuza films and all kinds of Asian gang movies, sort of a hot Asian gangster thing --

No question. Even Jackie Chan. He's not a perfect example, but Bruce Lee -- any of these martial arts guys. I mean, "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" -- all of these movies are promoting a new macho China. And you know, China is becoming more and more of a superpower, so it makes sense that its men would be increasingly depicted as tough.

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