Chen Up

SPOTLIGHT

aum-dazed empress of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, Joan Chen appeared as a finely wrought image of Oriental passivity, a melancholy ornament of imperialism. The part earned her an Oscar nomination, which must have seemed ironic to a woman who began her career playing a girl freedom fighter in a Chinese film celebrating the Long March. Joan Chen had known stardom long before The Last Emperor—in a different world and under very different terms. Plucked at fourteen from an athletic rifle team in her native Shanghai during the final days of Mao to work in film, at eighteen she was named her country's most beloved actress in a national poll. She divided her weeks equally between professional and political training, and was taught to eschew "personal fame or glory."

When Joan Chen relaunched her career in Los Angeles in the early eighties, she had to conform to an unfamiliar standard "of how Asian women are perceived." She wore her hair long, donned high heels, and was soon cast in a series of television guest spots, usually as "a vulnerable, pretty victim or a mistress of some sort." Today, at twenty-eight, she's cut her hair and stopped playing passive. In the upcoming The Blood of Heroes, a futurist adventure tale, she's a hard-bitten, physically assertive village girl, the antithesis of the "pretty little Asian woman," and in David Lynch's broodingly stylized primetime soap, Twin Peaks, she's an autocratic small-town factory owner. Chen's also gradually overcoming her ingrained aversion to the publicity mill, and finally has her own press agent, something she once regarded as anathema. "Right now, I treat it as a business," she says. "It's like I'm opening a restaurant, and I'm just managing it the best way I can."

BEN BRANTLEY