Word: yan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...went back to the remote reaches of her homeland--to the edge of Sichuan, near the Tibetan steppes--to make Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl. The film, based on Tian Yu, a 1995 novel by Chen's childhood friend Yan Geling, is about a naive urban teenager who, like more than 7 million other "educated youth" during the Cultural Revolution, is "sent down" to the countryside to be instructed by the heroic peasantry; instead she learns harsh lessons about the brutality of men in power. The authorities refused to give a permit to the project, so Chen shot without...
Chen was Xiu Xiu's age during the Cultural Revolution but did not get sent down. "She was one of those people who did everything well," says her friend Yan. With grandparents educated at Oxford and parents educated 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 as strange...
Chen wasn't kidding about her unease over her career. Yan recalls that after a bad film experience Chen would "bang her head against the wall. We'd talk about her trying to go to medical school or do a law degree. But I always said, 'Bullshit, you'll forget it all tomorrow.' And of course she always...
...Yan rescued her friend with Tian Yu, a novel that stirred in Chen both a memory of the Cultural Revolution and a long-deferred desire to direct. Chen could have shot her film in the familiar cocoon of a movie studio. But to be faithful to Xiu Xiu's story meant filming it near Tibet. "The location was 13,000 ft. high," Chen says. "It was hard to breathe. We didn't take showers for a month. We were all sniffing each other. Lunch on the set was always late and cold. Or it wouldn't arrive...
...half a jin [pound] of meat every month. Now you can buy as much as you want, if you have the money." Politics doesn't interest him much. "Zhu Rongji? I don't know much about politics, but at least Zhu understands the stock market." At 19 Lin Yan is too young to remember the bad days of meat rationing, but she has a fair idea of what the stock market is. She has already moved from working as a hotel receptionist to a better-paying job selling sports equipment in Wuhan's Galaxy Plaza department store. Three nights...