Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads: Author Rachel DeWoskin Discusses Her Experiences In China and Her Memoir "Foreign Babes In Beijing"

Wed, 08/25/2004 - 10:39am

When: March 27, 2008 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

In conjunction with Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads 2008, AADL is delighted to welcome Ann Arbor native and author Rachel DeWoskin in a discussion of her experiences as a foreigner in China, her popular memoir, and the progress in making her novel into a major motion picture from Paramount Pictures -- including updates on casting the film. DeWoskin, an award-winning poet, is the Associate Poetry Editor at Agni Magazine, and an artist-in-residence at Teachers & Writers. She teaches creative writing at New York University. The event will include a booksigning, with books available for purchase."Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China" (W.W. Norton, 2005) has been published in five countries. Her novel, "Aysha's English," is forthcoming in 2008. She has published poems in magazines including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, The New Delta Review, and Nerve Magazine, and non-fiction in the Sunday Times Magazine of London, Conde Nast Traveler, Departures, Teachers & Writers Magazine and Wanderlust, an anthology by Thundersmouth Press.

Transcript

• [00:00:00.00] JACKIE SASAKI: Hello welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. And a wonderful evening with Rachel DeWoskin. Rachel is an Ann Arbor native, and a form student at Community High. She graduated from Columbia University. In 1994, Rachel moved to Beijing and worked as a PR consultant. And later starred in a popular and hugely successful Chinese soap opera watched eagerly by an estimated 600 million people.
• [00:00:53.05] Currently, Rachel is the Associate Poetry Editor of Agni magazine, and an artist and resident at Teachers & Writers. She teaches creative writing at New York University. Her novel, [? Aisha's ?] English, is forthcoming this year, 2008 So let's get started.
• [00:01:13.32] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Thank you for the generous introduction. And thank you guys for showing up and for having me. It's, of course, very nice to be home in Ann Arbor. So I'm going to talk a little bit about Foreign Babes in Beijing, and a little bit about Beijing and Chinese ideas about Western girls. And other things that interests me, Chinese reality TV. An, then I will be happy to take any and all questions.
• [00:01:35.43] So the Chinese soap opera, Foreign Babes in Beijing, from which I've borrowed the title from my book, gave me wo unique opportunities. One was to be an American temptress and home wrecker who seduces a married Chinese man, falls in love with him, and then sacrifices everything for true love when she agrees to marry him. The other, slightly less titillating, but ultimately more fulfilling, was to have a kind of dual perspective on the fraught romance between China and the west.
• [00:02:03.50] On the one hand, during my life in Beijing, I was living the life of a foreign babe. If you can accept that terminology. And on the other hand, I was playing the Chinese idea of that life on national television. So I had an opportunity to chart the parallel courses of those two lives, and those two versions of my life. And to consider not only how some of Beijing's backstage worlds work, but also how China thinks about America. And in particular, American women. And thankfully it also made me think carefully about why China thinks about America an American women the way it does.
• [00:02:36.44] So just a little bit of background, Foreign Babes in Beijing was produced by the Beijing TV Studio in 1995, as a want to be sequel to the hit show Beijing or in New York. I don't know how many of you saw that show. But that was about a Chinese guy who traveled to New York, and experiences the many horrors of life in the West. So in a sense Foreign Babes in Beijing was a sort of optimistic reconfiguring. In the sense that the babes themselves, who are two American girls, moved to Beijing. And China was sort of getting the West's best assets. The show itself was about two sexy Western women falling in love with China and Chinese men, virile and macho Chinese men, unlike the ones we usually see depicted by Hollywood.
• [00:03:17.91] I was starring ludicrously in Foreign Babes as Jiexi, the bad girl of the good girl, bad girl duo. And my involvement in the soap went like this: I was at a party, and some young handsome Chinese guy said to me, you're white, do you want to be in my friend's soap opera. And I said fine. [LAUGHTER] And in that sense, it was like most of the experiences I had in China.
• [00:03:40.84] I moved to Beijing straight out of undergraduate school, partially because I felt connected to China, and partially because in my undergraduate panic about surviving in the real world, I had no idea what to do. My dad, who many of you know is a China scholar, so I had spent my entire childhood summers on overnight train ride across internal China. Sleeping in military guest houses in the beds of revolutionary heroes, and trekking up holy mountains. You know, when I was 11, I have a very happy for me memory of China, which was when I was 11, we climbed down the staircase over the giant Buddha in Leshan, which is 230 feet tall carved into the side a cliff. And I remember looking back up at him from the bottom of the staircase, and each of his limbs was, you know, a thousand times the size of my entire family. And then back up at the parking lot, there was a microcarver, an artist, who was carving Chinese characters into strands of human hair. So I mean put simply, China for me has always held the possibilities for what biggest and smallest in the world. And it gave me an image of myself in the world.
• [00:04:51.67] So in a way, it was no surprise that the first real perspective I got on America, and on my own Americaness came from China. Or that it was in China in my early 20s, that it occurred to me that what I considered to be American actually mattered less than what 1.6 billion other people thought. Even if, by my standards, my version of America was more accurate. And for one thing, there's the obvious possibility, which is that my version wasn't actually more accurate. And for another, if 1.6 billion people share ideas about America, then they're important ideas regardless of whether they conflict with Americas own self perception.
• [00:05:25.43] So at 21 in my desperate search for an adult life, I had taken on a job as a PR executive, one for which I was grossly unqualified. And it required me to write press releases about how American donuts and washing machines were going to improve the quality of life for all Chinese. I struggled with corporate spins. And then suddenly in between CEO spews and ribbon cutting ceremonies, I was filming an exotic fantasy TV drama. Except in this version, as in the new version of my own life, I was the exotic other, which for middle class American white girl from Ann Arbor was kind of a revelation. As was my lesson in the expression drop trou, which is my favorite China story, and is the anecdote with which I begin Foreign Babes in Beijing. Because, it was such a crystallizing language lesson for me. And most of the most symbolically and literally powerful moments in my China life were language lessons.
• [00:06:20.43] I used to think when I first moved to China, somewhat optimistically, that cultures were contained in their languages. And the most you could ever hope to know about someone else's culture was what you would got from speaking his or her language fluently. I still think that that's true, but I have a more realistic spin on it these days. And perhaps because my undergraduate textbook Helen and David Go to China. This was the Columbia University textbook. Didn't cover such vocabulary when director Yao said OK now talk who. I had to look it up.
• [00:06:52.25] I was at that moment perched on the edge of a bed in Beijing's five star Great Wall Sheraton Hotel, thumbing through my red laminated Chinese dictionary, which looks suspiciously like a Mao primer from the cultural revolution. So I found the pinna in the romanization and pieced it together. Tuo, which is peel off, and ku, which is ku are for pants. So I tried to remember how I'd arrived at that moment, and wondered whether peel your pants off could mean something other than peel your pants off. And then I turned to Wang Ling as if he might be able to help, and he grinned and started on his belt buckle. Wang Ling played my love interest in Foreign Babes in Beijing. He was unstoppably macho, 6 foot 2, and chiseled. Designed by producers and personal trainers to turn the tables on Hollywood's stereotypes of wimpy Chinese man. Charlie Chan's inscrutable Orientals and Asian house boys. My role was to play the exotic mysterious femme fatale, relieving Eastern women momentarily of that chore. Jointly, Wang Ling and I, or our characters, were supposed to establish a contemporary counterpoint to intense historical reality, which is that inter-cultural romances in China were primarily between Western men and Chinese women.
• [00:08:05.37] In the 1990s, when I was filing Foreign Babes in Beijing, there were a 106.6 males for every 100 females born. That statistic now is someplace up near 120 or 121. The official figure I think is 117, but the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says its 120. So you can see why nobody in China likes to see beautiful marriage prospects plucked from the pool, and why China's happy to spear some of its most strapping men to foreign women. Needless to say, Chinese producers wouldn't have dared depict a Chinese woman seducing a Western man on TV. And they still won't. It's much safer to depict China penetrating the west.
• [00:08:46.81] In the world of Foreign Babes interestingly, America was responsive to its position in this metaphor. And American women ever the importers of liberation and libido were both aggressive and receptive. Jiexi's first line of dialogue on that bad was, I love you, what are we waiting for? And in this line, she hurled her Westerrness at Tianming. He in the audience would instantly understand her lacerating style of seduction, and disregard for the sanctity of marriage as typically American.
• [00:09:15.38] When Directory Yao told us to Tuoku, Wang Ling watched me look the words up, and then laughed and dropped his pants to the floor. Under normal circumstances, incidentally, I thought he was totally fabulous. But I was panicked under the hot light. My hair had fallen out of the preposterous updo the make up team had managed. And Wang Ling politely push some of it back from my face. I took the hair clip out, and let the rest fall down. You know in ancient Chinese literature, the removal of hair pens or jewelry signifies that a woman was guilty of a sin or crime and awaited punishment. I set my hair pins on the table, and Wang Ling asked me, are you embarrassed? And I said, no, even though I was desperately embarrassed. Because, I wanted to save face. I didn't want Wang Lin to think I was in experienced in love or TV. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:09:55.13] So I prepared myself for our first elicit kiss. Wang Ling craned his neck on to kiss me, but Director Yao shouted roll around on the bed. I paused to consider what that might mean, but before I could ask, Wang Ling opened his mouth as wide as gate, and stretched it over my head. [LAUGHING] No laughing said Director Yao, and then rub his back. So I rubbed his back. And there was a hideously awkward sounds in the room. And I wondered if it was just a really exciting scene for everyone. And now I know that they were just astonished, wondering whether Western girls just do it like that. Because, as it turns out, I was supposed to be arriving in ecstasy, but I had missed a vocabulary clue, and given a chaste back rub.
• [00:10:35.78] So Director Yao said cut, and the make up artist rushed over to repair my lips with a toolkit of lipsticks. You know, I said I'd be more comfortable if Director Yao were also naked. Wang Ling inhaled sharply the lip gloss brush retracted. And at the time I thought it was a request born of desperation. But in fact later when I tried to convince everyone on the set and then all my friends that Jiexi and I were not in fact the same person, and that neither of us represented all Americans, I regretted asking Director Yao to tuo his ku. At the moment though it worked, because everyone's focus shifted to him. And he said we're all professionals here. And in a gesture of tremendous camaraderie and allegiance, he unbuckled his pants and dropped them to floor. [LAUGHTER] So I thanked him, and we started the scene again. And as soon as he said action, I tried to redeem myself by vigorously clawing Wang Ling's back. And I overheard the A.D. whisper to the D.P., see what I mean, foreign babes are tigers. [LAUGHTER] I, of course, had always thought that that was a stereotype of Eastern women.
• [00:11:37.49] So after Foreign Babes in Beijing ran on TV, I saw it for the first time. I'm embarrassed to confess. And It's so naive that it sounds disingenuous. But the reality is I hadn't actually read the script in advanced, because my Chinese reading wasn't that good. And so it wasn't until I watched it on TV with everybody else in China, that I started to sort out some of the moral messages of the show. The Western press was simultaneously sorting them out. And, was totally hysterical about what they called Jiexi's debaucherous lifestyle.
• [00:12:07.34] The Hong Kong's Standard ran a full page picture of me under which they had the caption "Super Bitch." [LAUGHTER] Tired of the predictable fear, Chinese viewers are switching on to the debaucherous lifestyle of Rachel DeWoskin's character. The International Herald Tribune printed a story called "Not a Pretty Picture: Foreign Babes in Beijing", under which they ran a smiley picture of me in front of a bust of Mao. The London Times wrote, Chinese feed their fear of foreigners, using the same bust of Mao picture and juxataposing to one of a Chinese soldier Tiananmen Square. And The Washington Post followed through with my all time favorite headline, "Neo-nationalistic China, Suspect of Western Ways, Embraces Foreign Babes."
• [00:12:46.63] The concern was, of course, was that Foreign Babes was a propaganda machine, that it was anti-Western. But as far as I could tell after reading it quite carefully all night every night when I couldn't sleep, none of the coverage actually had that much to do with the truth. I mean there was the obvious gas, which was that it didn't include the fiber of our days, which were all about kind of no heat on the set. A totally unglamorous lifestyle, you know, fatty meat lunch boxes three times a day, or our conversation which were about matters of daily life and reality. You know, food, movies, books, sex. The the regular. They were not about cross cultural issues or self referential cheesy, crises of identity.
• [00:13:23.39] But the main thing, to my mind, that the press missed was that the foreign babes were redeemed in the show. That while Foreign Babes pretended to be a moral drama, it was actually less a warning than an advertisement. And this is still true if you turn on the TV in China of anything other than the drabbest state run fair. The way I saw it,. There were three versions of Foreign Babes in Beijing. There was the show the censors saw, which was a kind of light drama. Then, there was a show the censor said they saw, which was an educational model, strong moral implications. And then the third one was the show the Chinese audience, which was a hot depiction of interracial sex, Western wealth and success.
• [00:13:59.96] And unlike true propaganda, which provides answers answers, Babes, I think raised questions. So in keeping with the history of Chinese literature and politic, it braves the danger of all kind of tempt and teach literature, which is that audiences will be absorbed by the sexuality and miss the teach part. So for example, the lurid exploration of lascivious acts and Buddhist morality tales, and therefore lose sight of the moral message. So Foreign Babes in Beijing in a sense just spoke an old risky language in a new risky way.
• [00:14:31.15] As evidence, right after the show aired on Chinese TV, teenage girl started following me through marketplaces, and buying whatever I bought. Whether it was like extension cords or fish paste. I was always buying esoteric components and condiments in China. Like that is kind of how I spent my weekends. One time I bought a fake Prada purse, and I could hear the woman behind me saying, you know, American girls love Prada purses, and matching, and statching them off.
• [00:14:58.09] So I mean, one takeaway from this was that even my real life became ultimately a surreal advertisement. But the other takeaway was that decades of propaganda hadn't been without a fact. And this is still true, that the Chinese audience is full of wary consumers of moral drama, who recognize the happening tropes of propaganda, and their appetite for something more flavorful remains intact. And the more flavorful flare now is of course reality TV shows, like Chinese versions of American Idol, and things, which I'll talk about a minute. I spent a lot of time watching those shows.
• [00:15:30.64] As for Foreign Babes, you know, in contrast to the usual cliches, the liminal Jiexi and Louisa were outsiders who existed within Chinese Culture, separate from sort of Japanese style invaders or Western style opium traders of old propaganda. And Jiexi and Louisa were offering up kind of products -- hard currency, the freedom to travel, liberated sex, international business opportunities, and air conditioned condominium. And to me, the question isn't really whether such girls are good or bad, but whether the pleasures they offer can be enjoyed without compromising China's cultural attainment.
• [00:16:04.37] It wasn't only the audience also who forgave the foreign babes for their flirty Western indiscretions. The producers in the plot forgave them too. In the end of Foreign Babes in Beijing when Jiexi disregards her American parents -- who unlike my parents are racist patriots -- and threatened to disown her if she marries a lazy uncultured Chinese guy. But who speaks fluent Chinese on the phone with her. [LAUGHTER] She chooses China over America, and love over money. In a very direct way, she says at some point, to Tianming's mother, I don't love money, I loved Tianming.
• [00:16:35.60] But I found that an interesting and funny kind of sacrifice, because true love didn't really used to be the goal exactly in China. I mean, if you consider cultural revolution ideology, any personal feeling was supposed to be converted into a passion to serve the state. So by making a sacrifice with true love at the end goal, Foreign Babes shrunk tacky political baggage to fit tacky commercial appetite. But in the final scene of Foreign Babes, Jiexi and Tianming leave for their glistening life in America. And it's a scene of inevitable exodus, it's not a scene of sort of xenophobic misery. And it suggests the sort of natural progression. There re birds flying over, and you know, in a way it's an ideal end to the story -- the good girl marries the brother. Jiexi, the bad girl, marries Tianming. And, one couple, one interracial couple, goes West and the other stays in China to yang lau, or cultivate the parents in their dotage.
• [00:17:30.17] But Western women in general are the subject and objects of interest and attention in China. Western men objects, I think of hostility and resentment. Likely the result of centuries of barbarian invasion.
• [00:17:42.53] When, I lived in Beijing, if you were a western woman dancing with a Chinese guy in a nightclub, people cheered for you. Sometimes I'd get into cabs with Chinese guy friends, and the cab driver would congratulate the guy. But if you were a Western man dancing with a Chinese woman, people broke beer bottles over your head. And I think, you know, today, 10 years later, there's a much greater degree of familiarity between ex-patriots and locals in every city in China. At least the ones I frequent. But the dynamics remain basically the same, I would say. Most of what Western women experience there is a kind of celebration. And, as for the stereotypes of foreign women in China, which include things like that we're kaifang, or open minded, which I always took to be a compliment. But actually means we're promiscuous and loosed morale. And that we're kind of importers of spiritual pollution. Those ideas do not originate in the Chinese imagination, they are American imports. My feeling about it is if the only American woman you've ever had contact with is Pamela Anderson on Baywatch, you may think that American women are sluts. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:18:47.71] When I griped to the costumers back in the day about Foreign Babes in Beijing, when they gave me this enormous hair and fur coat, like sewn together so that they dragged behind me in the train, I said, you know, I'm playing a foreign exchange student. There's just no way I would be wearing rhinestone jewelry. And they said, we don't care what you think. This is what the Chinese audience wants to see, and besides you look like Dallas. [LAUGHTER] And I was like you've see Dallas.
• [00:19:10.77] So in 2005, China ran its first mega hit version of Chinese American Idol, which was called, Mongolian Cow, Sour, Sour Yogurt, Supergirl Voice, which is now conveniently called Supergirl. And 400 million people watched it, and millions of them voted. And the girl they chose as the winner, the biggest winner of all time of that show, which has now run several times, was a spicy haired, androgynous tomboy of a 23 year old girl. And I thought that she was a very tough an interesting choice. And she to me suggested that Chinese girl do not aspire to be delicate or understated. They did not have those aspiration in the 1990s when Foreign Babes ran, and they do not have those aspirations now. You know, nobody wanted to be saw as the weeping virtuous, scorned heroine of Foreign Babes in Beijing.
• [00:19:59.41] So of course, there was severe official criticism of Supergirl, accusing the show of promoting vulgarity and discouraging youngsters from living life practically with realistic expectations. Government officials argued that it reflected disintegrating moral and social values, and that allowing citizens to vote, could lead on unwanted political pressures. So the following year, the government agency in charge of radio, film and TV issued a list of ethics about reality TV contests. And including that there be no gossip about the contestants, no scenes of fans screaming and wailing. And no losing contestants in tears. And, finally, that the show be recast. So it's now an all male singing competition, called in Chinese, Happy Boys Voice.
• [00:20:41.23] But I have to say, that having watched it carefully last summer, excluding women has not successfully reduced the level of hysteria on or about the show. And the star of the show is still a woman. A woman named Yang Erche Namu, a controversial lightning rod of a female judge. She's kind of China's Paula Abdul. She's famous for her eight kiss and tell books about growing up in Maasai culture, which is matrilineal society that practices female polygamy. And she's a hugely independent and unapologetic liberated feminist, who writes these scandalous books. And Chinese audiences love her and hate her, and love to hate her. And she's a huge scandal. And, there's no mistake in why the producers cast her for the show. I mean, to me, the reason the Chinese audiences love her is the same reason they love Jiexi, which is that they want to have agency. People in China want to be tough and powerful to have choices, and get what they strive for, including women.
• [00:21:43.46] And I'm going to wrap up with a story of my best Chinese friend, who's my age, Beijinger named Anna, who in the 1990s when I was living in Beijing, fell in love with a Saudi Arabian student named Halid. And needless to say nobody approved. His embassy forbade its scholarship students to date Chinese women. And Anna's parents were furious and bewildered that she had a foreign boyfriend. But Anna and Halid ignored the rules in honor of love, to here her tell the story. And, they were traveling in Kunming when security guards broke into their hotel room in the middle of the night, one night. Foreigners and Chinese were not allowed to travel together, back in the day. And the hotel reported them to their university.
• [00:22:20.73] So Anna did self-criticisms for seven months until she graduated. And because she had a bad attitude, about the self-criticisms, she refused to admit that she and Halid had a romance. She kept demanding that she was his tour guide. The university security department produced a poster detailing her story with a picture of her, and they hung it on campus. Her family saw it because they lived nearby. But all Ann would ever say to me of the scorn and the humiliation associated with this experience was the she was sorry that Halid had to endure it. Because she said that as a Chinese person, she was innately trained to absorb and expect such treatment. But that the authorities shouldn't embarrass or insult foreign students.
• [00:23:00.00] To my mind, the cost to Halid was slight. Whereas, the cost to Anna was quite severe. But she braved odds, and kept living with him until he returned to the Middle East. After which, she wrote him a letter every day for two years. He never wrote back, because he was a diplomat, and wasn't allowed to write to Chinese girls. When I asked Anna why she kept writing him, she said she wanted to marry him.
• [00:23:19.91] And then one day in 1995, he appeared back in Beijing to polish his Chinese, after more than two years at home, during which time he had married a Saudi Arabian woman in an arranged marriage. He called Anna right away to say he wanted to see her. Anna was worried, and she said, I might not like him, because now he was a successful career and a failed personality. She and I had a kind of for free trade language arrangement, and we did not correct each other's sentences.
• [00:23:45.67] But she introduced us anyway at a place called Uncle Sam's Fast Food, for those of you who are familiar with Beijing. It's over by [? Sight ?] tower. I don't recommend it. We were unwrapping hamburgers when he walked in. And he was handsome and quite grown up looking. And Anna fluttered around talking. She said, you know, his Chinese is excellent. She was using Chinese herself. And I said it's nice to meet you in English. Because, I always feel it's patronizing and kind of show offy to use your nonnative language in a conversation which you have a choice. But of course, Halid didn't speak English, so I came off as an ugly American. [LAUGHTER] For the assumption. We on had Chinese in common, and his was better than mine. And there was nothing else I could imagine bring up. So I said your Chinese is impressive, and he said so is yours, and we did that over and over for about five minutes.
• [00:24:28.67] And then we all looked around the restaurant, and I tried to picture them knowing each other, remembered a photo album that Anna had showed me. She kept it at work actually, it was full of cheesecake pictures of her, posing on bridges and under pagodos. Halid had taken them all she told me. And they spanned the seasons. Kind of Anna on ice skates on Hohai, under trees with orange leaves in a bathing suit at the BeiDai Hut seashore.
• [00:24:49.39] So all of a sudden I said to him, what's it like being married? And he said good. And I said, what's married life like for your wife? And he smiled at me and he said, my wife's life is better than the lives of women in other countries. And I said, how do you figure that? And how is that if you're a woman in Saudi Arabia no disrespects you on the streets? If you're in trouble and men stop to help you, you know they will help you. Whereas, in other countries, I asked them. You must know the answer to that, he said. In America, if you stop on the street and you help from a man he's likely to attack you, rape you even. I said, that's ludicrous. No one who stops to help you in the US is likely to attack you. And why does on the street matter so much? What about in your own house or in schools or in professional circles? Halid said in Saudi Arabia, there's no chance of violence against women. Men there respect our women, and would never hurt them. They're untouchable.
• [00:25:41.90] Of course, I didn't know Chinese for untouchable, and Anna had to translate it. But there was no doubt that the last word belonged to Halid. We did not touch the subject of women in China, even though I wanted to. I wanted to fight. [LAUGHTER] But Anna sat up suddenly, and said we had to get back to the office. And Halid and I shooked hands again, and that was it. That 's the only time I ever met him.
• [00:25:58.48] Anna and I had a conversation that night after work. In which, she stated plainly, it was awkward with you and Halid today, you were unsuitable for each other. [LAUGHTER] Maybe, because your cultures are so different. I asked if their cultures weren't different as well. And she said, she guessed they were. And, then as evidence, she said that Halid's new wife had to sit in the back of the house with a cloth over her face whenever men came to play cards, five nights a week. I expressed surprisethat he wasn't busier with matters of the state. And Anna said, this is a terrible question, but do you think his wife is pretty? And I said, I have no idea. And she said, I can't believe he's married to this arranged girl. It's such a waste. And when I asked her what she meant by such a waste, she said, if she has to wear a cloth over her face anyway, then why couldn't she have been Chinese. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:26:48.49] So I will happily take your questions. Yeah?
• [00:26:51.84] AUDIENCE: Does the government regulate in any way with the producing shows of that kind?
• [00:26:57.84] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Does the government interfere with or regulate production of TV shows. The government is in complete control of the production of t TV shows I would say. I mean, there are now, you know, locally produced television shows. But the answer is a resounding yeah. The censorship process is still quite lively. And you know, it's somewhat successful and somewhat unsuccessful. I spent last summer writing an article for the Sunday Times of London about Super Boy, Happy Boy Voice. Actually one of the edicts which was issued by the government after the Super Girl hysteria, was that the title of the show could no longer include the word "super." I think maybe because it suggests the American Superman, maybe because it hints at a kind of desire to reach up above the masses that's unseemly. But, of course, everybody refers to the show in English as Super Boy. So in a way, SARFT the radio film, and TV bureau, I would say they're not in control exactly anymore. They try to be. There's a conversation happening between SARFT and producers, but there's tremendous amount of appetite for very, very commercial productions like American Idol. And, they are happening, and you can see them on TV. And I don't think they have sound socialists, moral messages.
• [00:28:20.19] AUDIENCE: Yeah. Is your show playing in reruns currently?
• [00:28:24.24] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: The question is Foreign Babes in Beijing playing in reruns currently? When I was there last summer, somebody told me that it was playing in Hunan. I've not seen it myself, so I can't vouch. It played in reruns for very long time after it first ran in 1996. It was still playing when I left in 2000. But I'm not sure, actually. I hope not. [LAUGHTER] I really hope not. Yeah?
• [00:28:47.56] AUDIENCE: What's your next book about?
• [00:28:49.28] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: What's my next book about? My next book is a novel, and it's about an ESL teacher in New York who marries her Chinese student after the 1989 Tianamen incident in Beijing. It's about their marriage. Yes?
• [00:29:03.12] AUDIENCE: You mentioned the phrase soap opera. Do they really use that phrase there? [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Do they know why it is ever called a soap opera here?
• [00:29:13.37] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: The question is do they use the term soap opera, and do they know why it was called soap opera here. Actually it's something of a misnomer even to call it a soap opera, because it's not as soaps are in the US. It's not filmed and aired simultaneously. And it's not filmed and aired simultaneously because that prevents them from censoring it as aggressively as they like to. Actually, it's closer to call it a miniseries in the sense that we filmed it for six months, and then it aired, you know, for sixty years. But it was just a continuous loop. There are no new episodes. So it's not actually really a soap opera. It was in the can. And so that way they can censor it at every level. They censor the scripts, and then after each episode is produced, they censor each episode individually. And then they look at the whole thing, and they censor it a third time. And then they put it on the air.
• [00:30:02.16] Yes and then yes, sorry.
• [00:30:03.22] AUDIENCE: On that video clip that you showed. They had your character spoken part dubbed. Was your character dubbed the entire time or just for that opening part?
• [00:30:13.73] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: No. It was dubbed the entire time, I didn't do my own voice over work, because I could not. I frankly couldn't do another six months in the studio, I had to go back to my other job. And, none of the Chinese actors did their own voice work either, because it wasn't considered glamorous. Nobody was interested in doing voice over work. Now, most Chinese shows have simultaneous sound. Simultaneous sound is just more expensive. It's just a low budget production thing to do dubbing later. But nobody on the show did his or her own sound. Or maybe a couple of the older actors did, but none of us did our own voices. And I mean when I watched that for the first time and heard my voice, you can imagine, I was apoplectic. And, the woman who did my voice, speaks beautiful Chinese. It's an American woman named Jean Jones, whom I love and admire. And, she in fact played our mom in the show, even though she was 40.
• [00:31:04.65] How dare they. But she did my voice and she affected this adorable high pitch foreign babe accent. I was stunned. I didn't hear it until the entire thing was on air again, because I just didn't go to the studio to listen in. But yeah the whole thing was dubed. And, I worked really hard to get the dialogue right too, which is another killer. I felt like if they were going to dub it -- I didn't understand how it was working as we filmed, so I didn't know they were dubbing it. And every day I met my tutor for hours proceeding our filming, so I would get the dialogue right, because I didn't wan to humiliate Americans. You can thank me after the talk [LAUGHTER] for saving face. Yeah?
• [00:31:43.17] AUDIENCE: Rachel, your I just recently completed reading book on China. It's called Chinese Lessons by John Pomfret. I don't know whether you're familiar with it. He's a journalist with Washington Post, amongst other things. One of the things that he mentioned was that there is a high rate of corruption in China. And it's case of who you know that will, you know, enable you to get this done. In that respect is that correct.
• [00:32:13.92] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Right. She brings up John Pomfret's book. John Pomfret was a journalist in China with the Washington Post when I was there, and actually a good friend of mine.
• [00:32:20.32] AUDIENCE: I know that too.
• [00:32:21.28] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Right. I know John. I know John well. And I admire his book. He talks about corruption in his book. And the question is to what extent is it true that corruption in China is the law of the land, and you have to know somebody to get something. My feeling about it is no more or less than here. I mean I think, you know, if you ask somebody at Haliburton, for example, whether knowing somebody in high places helps you make money. He'll say yeah. There's a lot of corruption in the Chinese government. There's a lot of corruption here. And in terms of knowing people, nepotism, trying to get a job in China it's friendlier in a way. I would say. Like it's easy to call. If you're a foreigner living in China especially. If you call an office to try to get a job or to try to get an interview, often you'll get the president of office on the phone directly. It's a much smaller communityin a smaller world.
• [00:33:17.16] As, you know, as for government corruption, you know, I think that problem is rampant in a lot of places. And America is the first one I would look at.
• [00:33:26.27] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:33:31.73] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: The question is was Foreign Babes in Beijing censored in anyway. I hounded the producers. I was dying to know the answer to that question. I wanted to know what the script had looked like originally, what they look like now, which lines were being cut, why. I could never find out anything about it. It was not a conversation that they wanted to have with us. And I can see why. We had one fight ourselves, Sophie and I, the girl who played the good girl, which was about AIDS.
• [00:33:55.25] There was a conversation about AIDS in Foreign Babes in Beijing, which implied that you could get AIDS from used clothing. Primarily from used clothing that was imported from the West. And we had a fit about that, and said, you know, we were going to quit the show. We did a whole melodramatic thing. And they said, you know, usually actors don't have a say in this sort of thing. And we said, but it hurts the feelings of our home countries. And they cut the line. They did not cut the scene. There was a scene mysteriously close to the one that they said they would cut when I watched it. But the actual line, actual dialogue about the AIDS infected clothing never made it to the show.
• [00:34:31.57] So we felt that was a small victory. What they cut, I'll never. You know, I'd be interested. You know, know a lot of my friends there now are filmmakers. And it's often not the thing that you would expect. The stuff that gets cut it sort of about sensibility. One of my friends made a movie, which he wanted to call modern woman, and the censors hated the title modern woman, and they made him change it. And he asked why, because it was not a particularly contentious or politically loaded title. And they said, we just don't think it fits the movie at all. Doesn't fit the look of the movie. So it's not always clear. I think sometimes it's literally a question of the personal taste of the person assigned to your project. Yeah?
• [00:35:14.45] aUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:35:17.68] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Who's playing me in the Paramount picture. The short answer is I don't really know. Nobody has signed a contract yet. There's chat about it. There's rumors about it. I know that they're talking to Natalie Portman. And that she's been said to be attached. But that doesn't mean that she's signed a contract. So I'm not 100% sure. These movie things happen slowly and rockily I would say. But they like her, and I like her. She's a smart Jewish girl from Long Island. Seems about right. Yeah?
• [00:35:52.71] AUDIENCE: Are you rich and famou?
• [00:35:54.81] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Am I rich and famous. No. [LAUGHTER] Not really. But thank you for asking. [LAUGHTER]. Yes?
• [00:36:03.96] AUDIENCE: When you were in China, did you get paid [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:36:10.76] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: I got paid in proportion to my talent. [LAUGHTER] So the way that worked was I made $80 an episode. And there were 21 episodes. I made about $2,000 for the entire show. And I actually found that poetic and hilarious, because in my corporate job I was paid obscenely. Incidentally, I was also entirely unqualified for my corporate job, but they wildly overpaid me, and gave me an enormous living stipend ultimately. And I was paid significantly more than my Chinese colleagues, who were way more capable than I was. And it was a constant source of embarrassment for me. And glee for them. I mean my colleague found it funny that I was so overpaid, because they could see that I was just I mean gasping for air right at the level about to go under water all the time.
• [00:36:56.72] And when I found out how underpaid I was on the set of Foreign Babes, I had a rollicking laugh about it with my co-star, Wang Ling, who was not under paid. I think that Chinese actors made, you know, $20, $30,000. They made some reasonable kind of TV rate for having done professional acting work. And let me just say you get what you pay for. [LAUGHTER] Because you may notice that things like when the Foreign Babes stood up, it look like sort of spastic marionettes being yanked from above. And when the Chinese actors stood up, they looked like professional actors, doing a dance move they had learned at Juillard. So it was worth $20,000 for them and $80 dollars episode for us, I would say.
• [00:37:36.83] Other questions? Yeah?
• [00:37:41.68] AUDIENCE: How would you compare the journalistic freedom in Hong Kong versus Beijing or Shanghai?
• [00:37:50.18] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: How would I compare the journalistic freedom in Hong Kong versus Beijing or Shangai. I think probably -- I mean I'm embarrassed to answer these hardcore China questions in front of my dad, who has better answers for all of them. Maybe we'll come back to your corruption question in a minute, and ask Ken to way in. But, I think I there's less of a difference now than there was, you know, pre-1997 when Hong Kong went back to Chinese rule. I mean if you look at a paper like the Hong, Kong, Standard, it looks a lot more now like the China Daily than it did back in the day, or than it now does the I.H.T. But I don't know. Dad? Yeah. What about corruption? Haliburton. [LAUGHTER] There's a lot of China scholars in the audience. Yeah?
• [00:38:41.53] AUDIENCE: How much has the Chinese film industry improved in recent years. And also a whole other question. You talk about speaking Chinese in Chinese culture. I imagine you're just talking about around the greater Beijing area. But that will also have a lot of influx people from other parts of China, which I would imagine would be quite different It will be like saying [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:39:02.77] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: You mean different dialects? Are we talking about --
• [00:39:05.01] AUDIENCE: Yes. Different dialects, just different ways of interacting. People in China aren't as monolithic as America once was. I'm sure they [INAUDIBLE]. RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Oh, that's definitely true. I mean there are many, many languages spoken in China. I speak only Mandarin. And, Mandarin -- almost anywhere you go, you can survive if you have Mandarin. People speak a little bit of it, even in places where it's not widely spoken, or the only language spoken. The Chinese film industry is thriving very interesting. I don't know as much about it as I did back in the day when I lived there. But, you know, most of the films I watch are sort of gritty, low budget, underground films. And then I watch the big budget Chinese films that come to Hollywood now. And I like them. I like Chinese movies tremendously. I like this guy who made Blind. Shaft. You guys see that movie? It's a very interesting movie about minors in China.
• [00:39:59.97] My all time favorite Chinese movie is a very old Chinese movie. And it's an early Johnny [? Mo ?] movie, The Story of [? Choju. ?] Which is about this peasant woman whose husband gets kicked, embarrassingly kicked by the village chief. And she goes through every level of government trying. All she wants is an apology.
• [00:40:24.10] When I had a corporate job in Beijing I used to tell Western executives, if they wanted to understand how the legal system worked in China, they should watch The Story of [? Choju. ?] Because it was a kind of survey course in every level of government, from the smallest local authorities to the central government, and how to get things done there, or how try really valiantly to get things done there. It's a very charming movie.
• [00:40:50.08] JACKIE SASAKI: Rachel, thank you very much.
• [00:40:51.76] RACHEL DeWOSKIN: Thank you guys very much for having me.
• [00:40:53.36] NARRATOR: This concludes our broadcast. For a complete listing of upcoming events at the Ann Arbor District Library, visit our website at www.aadl.org, or call the library at 734-327-4200. Press option 3 for events listings.