China: Strange and wonderful things can happen to naive Westerners in China. Take my husband, who gave up a demanding political job in Dublin to become the "trailing spouse" when I was appointed Irish Times Asia Correspondent based in Beijing.
I had images of my loved one keeping house, mothering and fathering our two children, and having cosy coffee mornings with diplomats' wives while I, The Correspondent, travelled to exotic Asian locations. Not to be. One month into the job, I arrived home from a trip to be informed by the better half he had been "picked up" by a Chinese TV soap producer in the Starbucks coffee shop across from where we lived (our Western oasis) and offered a small role in a new Chinese state TV series.
The story was set in 1930s China when concubines were common and Western visitors rare. Its theme was the struggle between the old and the new ways. The series ran for 40 episodes and proved a huge success, drawing 150 million viewers a week. Hubby, who played a Western businessman, appeared in two episodes and was paid the equivalent of €5 per film shoot, a typical Beijing film actor's wage then.
This came to mind reading American Rachel DeWoskin's book, Foreign Babes in Beijing, an account of her five-year stay in China. DeWoskin, a Columbia college graduate, arrived in China in the early 1990s to work in an American PR firm. It was a time of great change in the country, which was starting to embrace Western ideologies not long after the bloody student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
The author wasn't long in the country when she, too, was "discovered" and landed a role as an American "hussy" named Jiexi in a Chinese TV show called Foreign Babes in Beijing, after which she named this book. In the 20-episode drama, a Chinese version of Sex and the City, aired to an estimated 600 million viewers, she played a mistress to a wealthy Chinese businessman. The theme of the book is the clash that follows when foreigner meets Chinese and the cultural issues involved. Through her on- and off-set experiences, De Woskin attempts to weave her on-screen story and her real-life, day-to-day experience as a Westerner in the Chinese capital.
This effort to tell her story on two levels doesn't quite work for me and the book is at its most interesting when she gives a straightforward flavour of daily life in Beijing for a foreigner. Accounts of her daily life in the city are both entertaining and gripping. For example, in 1990 foreigners were allowed to live only in state-approved housing, costing upward of $3,000 a month. Students and young, poorly-paid foreigners couldn't afford those rents and either lived in dormitories or, as in DeWoskin's case, in illegal Chinese apartments. DeWoskin lived on the 20th floor of a building and paid $1,000 a month for the honour. She tells how the elevators stopped running at 11pm, when the operators knocked off for the day. She recounts: "Every one needed a job. At 11pm, the operators and the elevators went to bed. At 5am, they woke. I had the same conversation every morning with one of them. 'Your hair is wet', she said each day. ('Yes.') 'Did you just wash your hair?' ('Yes.') 'You're going to work?' ('Yes.')"
DeWoskin did experience something unique in China, and while she picked up the language and made lots of Chinese friends, she also writes about striving to capture some familiar Western life in Beijing - as we did when we were there. She mentions familiar haunts - Frank's Place English bar near the Workers' Stadium, seedy drinking joints in Sanlitun, and going to house parties in Western compounds such as East Gate and Dragon Villas. She also describes shopping in the dreary state-owned "Friendship Stores", where a Westerner would pay four or five times what they would pay at home for foods such as Kellogg's Cornflakes.
I enjoyed her accounts of the friends she made during her Beijing years - her Chinese colleague Anna, who had a disastrous love affair with a married Middle Easterner; her loyal American friend Kate, who loved China deeply; and her two male Chinese friends. The book also manages to hit on political issues and reflects how, after the 1999 Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Sino-US relations became very strained.
It is a fair effort at depicting the cultural gap between East and West, and the story is told with a sense of humour. But it's worth noting that for people reading the book in 2006, it's already out of date, given the rapid changes - economic, social and physical - that Beijing has undergone in the years since DeWoskin left, and the fact that the culture gap has narrowed.
Miriam Donohoe is News Editor of The Irish Times and was Asia Correspondent from 2001 to 2003, based in Beijing
Foreign Babes in Beijing - Behind the Scenes of a New China By Rachel DeWoskin Granta Books, 324pp. £12