From Publishers Weekly
DeWoskin moved to Beijing in 1989, shortly after the military squashed the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, but just as China's younger population began embracing Western ideologies and commodities. This entertaining romp through her five-plus years in Beijing details her life as a PR consultant—and as the star of the wildly popular Chinese nighttime television drama
Foreign Babes in Beijing. After getting the gig on a lark, DeWoskin became known, sometimes even in her real life, as the character Jiexi, an American who falls in love with a married Chinese man, in the 20-episode drama, which aired to an estimated 600 million viewers. Her memoir weaves humorous tales of Sino-U.S. culture clashes both on and off the set with astute observations of the two cultures, as well as a significant amount of Chinese history. Though she admits frequently to being homesick for New York, DeWoskin feels for the loss of more traditional Chinese culture: "Consumerism became a religion; companies arrived like missionaries... seducing the average Zhou Schmoe with products he had never known he needed." The book offers a generous helping of Chinese words (along with their English translations and insights into the young people's "Chinglish"), as well as
Lost in Translation–esque glimmers of the differences between the Chinese and American acting worlds.
Agent, Jill Grinberg. (May)
From Booklist
Don't let the title fool you. Although one might think that DeWoskin's memoir of her life in China is merely a Far Eastern version of
Sex in the City, where Prada gowns are replaced by dowdy Mao jackets, nothing could be further from the truth. An executive for an American PR firm by day, by night DeWoskin is the unlikely star of one of China's first television soap operas, an equally unlikely melodrama involving a sexy American college student who wins the love of a rebellious young Chinese man. The merging of two disparate worlds onscreen is nothing compared to the cultural assimilation DeWoskin observes transpiring within China itself in the years immediately following Tiananmen Square. Hers is the ultimate insider's view, living witness to the philosophical and practical aspects of a traditional and repressed society's tumultuous confrontation with liberated, energetic, and economically dynamic Western influences. Exhibiting sensitivity and uncommon wisdom, DeWoskin delivers a candid and valuable portrait of a China few Westerners get to see.
Carol HaggasCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
