Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel DeWoskin

Author:Rachel DeWoskin [DeWoskin, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393340075
Published: 2005-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

We finished filming Foreign Babes four months after we had begun. Spring had arrived, and dust from the Gobi desert blew in, covering the sunny city in a blanket. I felt happy and free, gaining fluency and friends.

The last day on the set, Jiexi ate a vacuum-packed duck. I have never seen those ducks outside of China. They are widely available in Beijing’s supermarkets; they look like giant rubber toys until the plastic wrappers pop and then the birds reveal themselves as real, naked, saucy ducks, glistening with Jell-O.

“You want me to eat this?” I asked when Director Yao set down the duck. Wang Ling was laughing, standing over an iron stove in our “living room” set, which was still negative five degrees. I had told him I was a vegetarian.

“Tear the wrapping off and begin eating hungrily,” Director Yao instructed me.

“The whole duck?”

“Tear the leg off.”

“I don’t really like to eat meat,” I said, “especially duck. Can I fake it?”

He looked at me for a minute and asked, “Well, does Jiexi?”

“Does Jiexi what?”

“Like duck.”

I had become unpopular for making the point that Jiexi and I were not the same person.

“She loves duck,” I said, licking the aspic off my fingers, and we were even for the trou dropping.

We filmed the first scene last. It was the show opener, shot in Jingshan Park, where we “play among the pigeons,” as Director Yao put it. Pigeons were everywhere, cooing, fluffing, and flapping their ratty wings. We skipped along with our hairdos flying higher than the pigeons.

Sophie, still on her hunger strike, had become a toothpick. I mentioned that I thought she had lost too much weight, thinking even as I said it that it was strange that Americans think it’s okay to tell people when they’re too thin, but not when they’re fat. It’s as random as any Chinese custom. Sophie shrugged when I told her she should make sure to take care of herself. I was just like Assistant Director Xu, commenting on something sensitive and private.

To celebrate the end of filming, we went to China’s Lantern Festival. Tiananmen and the Forbidden City were lit up with elaborate lanterns, some decorated to look like animals. Wang Ling told Sophie and me that the lanterns were intended to scare spirits away, lest those spirits pluck the living from the streets. Young women, dressed in their best dresses, posed for boyfriends in suits with brand-name labels still attached to their sleeves. Old couples ballroom-danced. Children wove through their parents’ legs, carrying candied crabapple sticks and eating moon cakes. Each street off of the main square shone; the usually stern expanse of concrete was suddenly a bright, beautiful disco featuring singers and dancing dragons. In one moonlit corner of the square, a few lucky vendors were selling moon cakes, toys, and plastic neon jewelry. Just off the Avenue of Eternal Peace, Beijing winter life went on; construction workers, all sinew and shout, labored across the skyline. Diners crowded tables in local restaurants. The air was dark with coal heat and cold.

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