The last thing you'd expect, as an American PR woman in China, would be to end up the adored star of a soap opera watched by 600 million people. But Rachel DeWoskin's life has always been unusual, writes Róisín Ingle.
Sipping green tea in a wood- panelled snug in London, Rachel DeWoskin tells an anecdote that goes a long way to explaining how, at 21, the American poetry graduate came to swap Michigan for Beijing and ended up starring in a soap opera watched by 600 million adoring viewers.
"I remember when the realisation struck me that I didn't want a boring life," she says. "I was in my third-grade class. I remember the teacher, I remember the position of my desk. We had just been given calendars, and I was flicking all the way ahead, and I realised I knew exactly where I was going to be on a certain Tuesday six months from then. That thought was unbearable for me."
DeWoskin, who is dressed in black trousers, funky boots and a pink-and-green cardigan that hints at her love of Asian culture, is publicising her first book, the funny and insightful memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. It is named after the soap opera in which, after a chance meeting in a bar with a friend of the producer, she starred as a feisty, sultry American called Jiexi.
DeWoskin helpfully includes a translation of the lyrics of the programme's theme tune in the opening pages of the book, setting the tone for her Asian adventures: "They all come from different countries, they're all in love with Chinese culture and green vegetable snacks. Their lives are carefree and fun. Because they're all old foreigners! Foreign girls, foreign girls in Beijing, Beijing!"
"Surreal is a good word to describe it," DeWoskin says about her time moonlighting on the soap, earning a dismal €65 an episode, while she worked in a job she hated as an executive for a Beijing-based American PR company.
Although she had some basic Mandarin when she moved to the city, in October 1994, and could get by with a hybrid of Chinese and English that she calls Chinglish, she could barely understand Jiexi's lines and she says she didn't believe the show would end up on television. In one scene she has to remove her clothes but has no idea what she is supposed to be doing, because she can't understand the directions. Scenes of her in bed with her lover were intercut with scenes of his hard-working wife in a factory.
In many ways the culture clashes on the show mirrored the clashes that DeWoskin was experiencing in real life even as the billboards, trendy bars, fast-food restaurants and cross-cultural love affairs that blossomed after the Tiananmen Square demonstrations transformed the face of China's capital.
"While I was doing the love scenes I was thinking, This isn't really happening. The funny thing about that feeling is that it informed most of my life in China. And I think it informs the lives of many expatriates. You are struggling to get the nuances in things, and you are struggling to get basic things done. For me I had a constant sense there that my life was totally surreal and that once I left it would be erased from the record."
She says she couldn't have written the book without the "very anal" journal she has kept since she was seven years old. The narrative is self-deprecating and modest; DeWoskin rarely passes up a chance to mention her cultural faux pas. Still, to travel to Beijing alone and then take a role in a soap opera, she must have been supremely confident - "or just a total idiot", she interrupts with a laugh. "People say, 'Wow, you were really brave,' but the honest truth is I didn't know how hard it was going to be or how little I knew. I had been to China before, on family holidays, but by the time I realised how hard my life was going to be I was already there. I had invested so much time and energy in it that I didn't want to lose face."
She discovered what it really meant to be in another world. "You can't anticipate what culture shock feels like; that is the whole point of it. When you travel you know things are going to be different," she says. Her Chinese colleagues were intrigued, for example, by the fact that she was thin and dark-haired, as opposed to fat and yellow-haired, which was their perception of Americans.
"Coming from the US to China you expect not to know what is going on, but I didn't understand the feeling of dislocation that would give. In some ways I forgot who I was. The modesty in the book isn't false, because what I discovered is quite horrifying, which is that it doesn't matter who you think you are, because if 1.6 billion people think you are someone else, then you might as well be."
After the soap opera aired, Jiexi became as big as Carrie from Sex and the City, which meant that teenage girls would follow DeWoskin around shopping centres, buying what she bought. Her voice had been dubbed by an actor with a worse Chinese accent than her own - "really disappointing when I had busted my ass to get the pronunciation right," she says, laughing - and western journalists tut-tutted that it was a morality play about the dangers of US-style waywardness and corruption. "The Chinese are sophisticated consumers of moral drama. They have an ability which exceeds our ability in the West to read between the lines," she says, defending the show. "Chinese people watched the show, and they were like, 'Damn, that's hot.' Everybody wanted to be those western babes. Nobody wanted to be the scorned and virtuous wife."
The fame was overwhelming and inescapable. The television studio gave out her phone number to people who said they wanted to be Jiexi's friend and then called the writer unfriendly when she complained. "It was the only thing about the fame thing that I minded. I didn't want callers in the middle of the night, even if they wanted to be friends."
She did make real friends, though, including Anna, a Beijinger who railed against what was expected of her, embracing Western ideas and ideals, and Zao Jun, a film-maker boyfriend who had recently moved home from Los Angeles. "People have said to me that these people are not typical of Beijing. They said, 'Why didn't you talk about nerdy Chinese guys and docile Chinese women?" she recalls. "I said, You missed the point. In modern, urban Beijing these people exist in large numbers, and they are antistereotype.
"When I came back from China I had so many conversations where it became clear that Western perceptions of the Chinese were so wrong. I felt if I could just introduce them to Anna then they would understand, which was my real motivation for writing the book. Each one of my friends there offered an insight into what it means to have your culture change that fast. Each of them is caught on that edge between cynicism and aspiration, where they are attracted to Western lifestyles and freedoms and language."
DeWoskin, who left Beijing shortly after Nato bombed China's embassy in Belgrade, in 1999, also came to learn more about herself as an American through her time in China. "I think, when you live abroad, you defend your country. You also, on the other hand, see with greater clarity the weaknesses of your own system. A lot of people who have come out with books about China are in the habit of criticising it, which is fine, but I really think you should look at your own system first. Americans are in the habit of talking about human rights, but look at our human-rights record: are we kidding? I think America's position in the world is deplorable, and I think we have squandered the goodwill that was expressed for us after 9/11."
She now works in Manhattan, teaching at New York University, but travels widely and plans to spend next summer back in her beloved Beijing. The book, she says, has freed her from constantly having to explain to people who accidentally discover her past as a pop-culture princess, wondering what on earth she was doing naked on Chinese television.
It turns out that her adventurous spirit is in the blood. The DeWoskin children spent their summers in China because her parents loved all things Asian. "I was desperate to go to summer camp and fall in love with boys and have firecrackers and hamburgers. Instead we had difficult summers. I was 10 when we went to Taiwan. Sometimes we'd have running water; sometimes we wouldn't. We almost never had air conditioning, even though it was 110 degrees. Nobody ever did the things my parents did," she says, sounding grateful.
She was born in Japan, where her mother was teaching and her father was studying. "I literally slept in a suitcase my whole infancy, and my brother slept in a drawer. They had a tiny little tea house in Japan. My parents were adventurers. Their attitude was that you can take your kids anywhere: just stick them in a backpack. And it's true."
Her own 15-month-old daughter, Dalin, has been all over the world with DeWoskin and her husband, Zayd Dohrn, who she describes as "this very cute young guy" whom she met in a gym when she returned from Beijing. Dohrn, she says, is a "radical leftist playwright" who is doing a PhD at Columbia University. She has finished a novel and is hoping to put together a collection of poetry.
You sense life for little Dalin will never be dull, even if her extroverted mother does seem to be settling down. "I did not want a boring life, and except when it comes to my family I fear stability . . . Now that I have a baby I am learning to be more supportive of people who like routines."
Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China, by Rachel DeWoskin, is published by Granta Books, £12.99 in UK