CITY GUIDE >City Special
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CITY GUIDE >City Special
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An unscripted life
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-27 09:06 Writer Yan Geling's list of admirers reads like a Who's Who of Chinese cinema, among them directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.
The former People's Liberation Army dancer is best known for her work on Chen's Forever Enthralled (Mei Lanfang) and for Zhang's upcoming project 13 Girls in Jinling (Jinling Shisan Chai). In fact, her own life is as colorful as her scripts. Born in Shanghai in 1958, Yan became a PLA dancer in an entertainment troupe when she was just 12 and spent her teenage years performing around western China. She started writing at 20, went to the United States to learn creative writing at 30 and now, married to an American diplomat, has been writing ever since, from the US to Africa to Asia, wherever life takes her. "What a person experiences makes them who they are," says Yan, who still cuts the slim and elegant look of a dancer in her light green silk one-piece and white high heels. Every now and then she makes sweet feminine gestures but the army life has left its mark on her and she has a soldier's boldness, often bursting into laughter and uttering powerful sentences. "An American critic said (Russian-American writer Vladimir) Nabokov's English was stiff," she says disbelievingly, "but what's good about American English? It is plain water!" Yan relates to Nabokov. It might be, she says, because both write in their second language, English, or because of their shared identity as outsiders or maybe because they both feel good about their oddities. |
