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The film is also exciting as emotional autobiography--a declaration of independence from an artist who felt trapped straddling East and West. "Working with her," says Bernardo Bertolucci, who cast Chen as the spoiled royal wife in the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor, "I had the feeling she was somehow in exile, not always comfortable. So I love the idea that my own Empress in exile went back to China as a film director."
Xiu Xiu begins her adventure as if it will be the coolest summer camp. Her tailor father sews blouses for his girl; her mother provides sensible advice. The family's easy warmth seems endearingly ordinary here. By the end of the film it will be a miraculous memory, an image that Xiu Xiu can barely touch without getting burned.
She is sent to train in horsemanship with Lao Jin, a veteran herder. Lao Jin is tough and tender, instantly devoted to the girl's well-being. Xiu Xiu, the sent-down girl, is still stuck-up; but she cannot ignore Lao Jin's kindness. When she complains about not being able to wash, he builds her a small pool. "Your eyes will rot if you peek!" she tells him as she bathes. Yet the little flirt wants him to look. She needs to know she fascinates men.
Each day Xiu Xiu dresses up for the ride back to civilization that never comes. Then a peddler appears. He tells Xiu Xiu that pretty girls like her are using their wiles with 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 rougher 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. All along, she has been coquettishly courting disaster--a prom date with death. Now that affair will be consummated.
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."
Excelling at marksmanship, she was discovered on the school rifle range by no less a talent scout than Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, and went into movies, starring in all her roles. For Little Flower (1980), playing 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," she recalls. "The cultural shock--even the toothpaste tasted 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." Chen quickly learned what Westerners expected of an Asian woman. On one of her first auditions, she says, "they told me I didn't look Chinese enough, and I was the only Chinese there. I was trying so hard to look like a white woman."