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Why isn't Maggie Cheung a Hollywood star?
By SUSAN DOMINUS (New York Times)
Updated: 2004-11-16 14:52 "Especially since Cannes, I have a nice feeling out in Hong Kong -- like
Maggie is ours, and we're proud of her," she said. Shown a script for "X2: X-Men
United" a few years back, she declined to pursue it, uninterested in the film
itself. "If I start making films like that, they won't be proud," she said. "I'd
feel like I was cheating. And I don't want half the world -- we have 1.3 billion
people in China -- to know I'm cheating. That matters to me. I have more pride
than that."
Cheung often spends her nights e-mailing friends until 5 in the morning
rather than going out on the town or to awards ceremonies or benefits.
Occasionally, though, she meets up with friends at a restaurant with a private
room. Toward the end of my visit, she picked me up, along with her boyfriend, in
a van with covered windows and a driver who took us across the bay to the
peninsula side of Hong Kong. Cheung, in sunglasses and boots, exited the car and
started making the half-block walk toward the door. Around her, people started
walking as if in slow motion, or stopped in their tracks altogether, so that it
looked as if Cheung were moving at double speed. We took an elevator up 20
flights to Aqua, a sleek restaurant with interior spaces divided by doors that
silently slide open upon approach and dizzying views of the glittering Hong Kong
skyline beyond the bay, like New York's seen through a magnifying glass, perfect
and arrogant and untouched.
"A couple of weeks ago, I was in a room like this, and suddenly it was like
one of those gangster movies, you know?" Cheung said, animated and confiding.
"The door flew open, and then" -- she shaped her hand like a machine gun --
"Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! All these light bulbs started flashing. And then
they were gone. My friends and I were like, What just happened?"
 As Brochard chatted with a friend of Maggie's who'd just arrived,
Cheung replied to a few last questions. Other than now -- she and Brochard seem
particularly content -- when had she been happiest? Cheung thought for a moment,
then described a time when she stopped acting for a long stretch and came to the
States with a boyfriend, crashing at the home of one of his friends. With her
boyfriend, Cheung went camping, stayed in hostels, learned to play a good game
of pool and went bowling. "It was heaven," she said. "We were in Los Angeles.
And we could go anywhere. No one had any idea who I was."
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