Short Takes: Baying For Bai Ling

AN STYLE="font-size: 75%; color:#990000; font-weight:bold">Saturday, Mar. 17, 2001 She blazed a trail when she left China and pitched up in New York with seven movies and two years in a Beijing mental institution behind her ("we were all deluded romantics"). All that and she was only 21 summers young.

Bobbing and weaving, eking out any small opportunities that studying film at NYU afforded her, she quickly learned to speak English and got a bit part on "The Crow," an ill-fated project which saw Brandon Lee (Bruce's son) get killed on the set when a gun misfired. Then a film called "Red Corner," starring Richard Gere, turned her luck and she was plucked from obscurity to play his lead as a Beijing lawyer. Gere gave us Gere, but she gave us bilingual beauty where Chinese enchantress Gong Li had never been able to. (She subsequently appeared in "Wild Wild West" and "Anna and the King.")

"Red Corner" focused Hollywood's eye and incurred Beijing's wrath simultaneously, the latter refusing her entry to visit her family immediately afterward. She became one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful" in 1998, and looked set to break the mold for a Chinese actor by carving out a serious Hollywood career in roles that had been the exclusive reserve of white thespians or black actors who played a little more Merchant-Ivory, like Denzel Washington. Even destiny's dice-box seemed to presage her such a niche, shaken into the universe as she was with the name Bai Ling, "white spirit."

Zap to now. She's just been in Hong Kong promoting her new project, Hallmark Channel's "The Monkey King," opening across Asia this weekend. It's a contemporary version of the classic story, starting in the present and going back 500 years. She plays a ravishing goddess (well, she doesn't have to play it, she just is) who escapes the underworld. Her costars include Russell Wong ("The Joy Luck Club") and Thomas Gibson (who plays Greg in the ABC series "Dharma and Greg"). It's a far cry from "Red Corner," but then Bai Ling's a far cry from anyone and everyone. They broke the mold when they made her.

The first time I ever talked with her by telephone -- she on the set of "Anna and The King" in a Malaysian hotel -- we spoke of stars (the non-acting variety), Nature and New Age shtick. She told me it was strange how it was possible to have great sex with one person and bad sex with another. Evidently her more recent experience had been somewhat epiphanous as she exuberantly proclaimed that for her "sex is like a religion." That man was and still is Chris Isaac, whom she now refers to as her "beautiful white ghost."

She said Van Gogh was her favorite painter, and loved the fact that in his work "everything's burning." By then I was scorching or ready to be scorched. She was 10 shots of slivovitz flaming in a silver ladle, and I was ready to gulp. Two hours later she asked how I would paint the conversation we'd had, what colors I would use, what it would look like. Gushing about restless sensuality as I was, she stopped me and suggested we should each paint a canvas and present it to one another the first time we met. We agreed that the meeting place should be the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris, after the French film "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf" (she didn't know the film). It was only when I put the phone down, I realized I'd forgotten to ask about "Anna and the King." And she hadn't mentioned it either and we had talked for three hours. I was overcome.

When we did meet in Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel some months later, we were canvas-less. She had poise and a nose so cute I wanted to name it. The rest of her wasn't bad either. She told me she liked the idea of male concubines, that "a woman should be able to marry 100 different men." Her logic was indisputable.

That was then, this is now. "You know I met Leo Carax," she tells me over lunch at the Shangri-La Hotel, "but I didn't know then that he had directed "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf." She tells how he spotted her and a friend drinking in New York's Russian Tea Room and gazed at her. He didn't speak, just observed, then followed them to a museum and finally introduced himself. Bai Ling says she was pretty shocked. But two hours later they were drinking and he was teaching her to sing "I love Paris...," which she sings mellifluously at our restaurant table as the sushi sizzles on the griddle.

She says she only saw "Les Amants du Pont-Neuf" for the first time a few months ago. She loved it; she gulped it down and agreed the bridge was the most romantic notion in the universe. And with that, off she went to Hong Kong airport.

Mad, bad and dangerous to know. Bai Ling is one delightful lady. And I...I waited for the van to come round with the men in white coats, just another deluded romantic ready to be taken over by the asylum.