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THE ARTS
APRIL 5, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 13
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At school, there's a boy who is sweet on Xiu Xiu. When she leaves, he stays home because of "family connections"--as the young Joan Chen did. In a way, he is Chen, paying retrospective tribute to a girl who suffered what Chen escaped. The boy is the film's narrator, and we expect that Xiu Xiu's prince charming will ride in to save her in the last reel. But he is never seen again.
Xiu Xiu is sent to train in horsemanship with Lao Jin, a veteran herder who, we are told, "lost his manhood with one slice of a sharp knife." Lao Jin is tough and tender, instantly devoted to the girl's well-being. Xiu Xiu, the sent-down girl, is still stuck up; the movie doesn't glamorize her petulance (though Lu Lu is very much the bedimpled beguiler). Besides, she cannot ignore Lao Jin's kindness. When she complains about not being able to wash, he builds her a small pool; for Xiu Xiu the act of bathing never held such rapture. "Your eyes will rot if you peek!" she tells him. Yet the little flirt wants him to look. She needs to know she fascinates men.
And so Xiu Xiu wades into a tender comradeship with Lao Jin, and the movie bathes in the gentle radiance of its two stars. Now we understand: this is an opposites-attract story. The affection of the city girl and the craggy horseman must ripen into romance. But no again: Chen has rude, sad surprises in store for her heroine and us.
Each day, Xiu Xiu dresses up for the ride back to headquarters that never comes. Then a peddler appears. He tells Xiu Xiu that pretty girls like her are using their wiles with Communist Party officials to get sent back to the city. Why, he will put in a word to them. Dazzled by the glare of his promise in this long night of isolation, Xiu Xiu surrenders to him. And then to other, less attractive strangers, all in the hope of getting a pass home. Without money or connections, she asks, "What's a girl to do?"
The cute girl is a broken woman now, a soldier's trophy. The men who love her (father, boyfriend, Lao Jin) are unable to save her. Lao Jin can only ease her suffering, and finally end it. To prepare for his last act of tenderness, she braids her hair, fastens her scarf and wears a brave little smile. Naively, coquettishly, Xiu Xiu has been courting disaster--a prom date with death. Now that affair will be consummated.
Joan Chen was born under a happier star. "She was one of those people who did everything well," says Yan, a friend from childhood. With grandparents educated at Oxford and parents trained at Harvard, Chen had the pedigree for success, as well as the stern expectations. Joan's father kept asking what she was going to do with her life. "In my family, "Chen says, "going into acting was regarded at strange."
Excelling at marksmanship, she was discovered on the school rifle range by no less a talent scout than Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, and at 15 went into movies. In her debut film, Xie Jin's Youth (1977), she played a deaf mute whose senses are restored by an Army medical team. For her role in Little Flower (1980), as a revolutionary's daughter in pre-Maoist China, she won the Hundred Flowers Award. Instead of staying in China, she moved to New York City as an actress-model. "I was clueless when I arrived. The cultural shock--even the toothpaste tastes different! My desire to go to the States was so vague, yet so strong. It's like going to heaven: you don't plan what happens after you enter."
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