Mining gold for Chinese silver screen

It was 19-year-old Kerry Brogan’s movie debut, and she stood out just a bit on the set in southern rural China – with her light brown hair, blue eyes, and eagerness to prove that a Caucasian woman could make it in the government-controlled Chinese film industry.

The Newton South High School graduate had just landed a role in the 1999 film, as the headstrong and spoiled American teenager who falls in love with an earnest young man from one of China’s ethnic minorities. She had impressed the director with her fluent Mandarin. Everything was going smoothly until news broke that the Chinese Embassy in Serbia had been bombed, in what China branded a deliberate act.

For the movie director, one thing was for sure: American characters had to go. Brogan could remain the girlfriend, but now, perhaps, a Russian one. “It doesn’t matter what country you are from,” the director declared. “As long as it’s not American!”

Brogan has come a long way since then, having appeared in about 40 Chinese films and television shows. Now 28, she is described by a local magazine as “the hottest western face in China”. But five years into her career as a full-time actress in Beijing, she still struggles with roles that play off Asian stereotypes of Western women (pampered, promiscuous, or pious), or that cast her as the “foil” to a heroic or virtuous Chinese lead. She sees herself as working against something like the racial typecasting that affected Sidney Poitier and Bruce Lee decades ago in the United States. And she hopes the Beijing Olympics can do something about that.

More than just an epic athletic event, the games, which open with a gala ceremony Friday, could signal a time of greater cultural openness, Brogan believes. If Chinese officials deem the games a success, they may be emboldened to loosen restrictions on the movie and TV industries, allowing foreign actors and actresses to take on more visible and nuanced roles.

If the games do not go well?

“The country could become more closed off,” said Brogan, sitting on a pink couch in her living room last weekend in one of Beijing’s high-rise buildings. “Actresses like me might be asked to play more stereotyped roles.”

Other Massachusetts natives who have made Beijing their new home say they, too, will be closely watching China’s assessment of the Olympics. Their diverse ventures in the city – including a coffee factory, a comedy club, a financial firm, and a painting studio – are not as publicly visible as Brogan’s acting career, though they insist all foreigners working in China stand to gain, or lose, depending on the government’s mood toward the outside world.

As Brogan has found, however, the Chinese government is particularly prickly when it comes to the role of foreigners in the cultural domain. While officials encourage citizens to immerse themselves in Western scientific, technology, and business practices, they are skeptical about importing what they see as morally questionable Western cultural ideas, said Li Nan, a former journalist who has written extensively on the Chinese film and TV industry.

And they do not hesitate to make an example of wayward Western performers. This past spring when the Icelandic singer, Björk, called out “Tibet, Tibet!” after performing her song, “Declare Independence” in Shanghai, Chinese Ministry of Culture officials condemned her “political show” as breaking Chinese law and “against the professional code of an artist.”

The event kept most Western faces off the air for about two months, Brogan said. Only last month did things loosen up, and she again began appearing regularly on television and movie screens, including a film to promote the Olympics.

Brogan said she looks askance at what Bjork did, feeling sympathetic to the Chinese sense of betrayal just months from their Olympic moment. “When in Rome, do as the Romans,” Brogan said. “You have to respect other people’s culture, customs, and needs. It’s a delicate situation”. She said it is painful for her when Chinese officials fail to distinguish between a global celebrity such as Björk and Western actresses such as herself with a longstanding commitment to mastering Mandarin and immersion in Chinese society.

When the earthquake hit Sichuan Province in May, killing some 70,000 people, she said she experienced it with the anguish of an insider – and yet she knew few in China would have anticipated the depth of her reaction. “I’m not just a white face with brown hair and blue eyes,” she said, describing what she wants her colleagues to understand. “Please accept me for who I am.”

Brian Banowetz, 41, an actor in China, said his recent role as journalist Edgar Snow, alongside Brogan who played his wife, Helen, was unusual. Western actors are often typecast as military officials or policemen. The native of Iowa said he worries that in China, “you’re always a foreigner. You can never break out and become one of them.” He is less optimistic than Brogan about the potential positive influence of the Olympics. The official wariness about foreigners, he said, runs too deep.

In China, producers of movies and television shows must win the approval of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television for their political and moral content, and all movies, once distributed, can be viewed by anyone without regard to age or parental supervision. Brogan said many directors often precensor their scripts, anticipating objections about scenes, preferring to play it safe rather than take risks.

She said she rarely turns down a role because she would rather work from within the system than stand outside in judgment. In the 2004 television show, “Sanda Fighting King” the director kept asking her to make references to Christianity and God. When Brogan fought back, saying Americans came from all backgrounds, the director insisted, “All Americans are Christian.”

Brogan recalled curtly saying, “Right, just like all Chinese are Buddhist.”

At times like that, Brogan said she steps aside briefly to collect herself, realizing she is validating the director’s belief that Western actresses are emotional and stubborn. Still, she said, she inevitably returns to the set, hoping she has made some small difference in the Chinese director’s understandings of Americans. “I want to make the Western character a real person,” she said. “Even if they start as a stereotype, I have the power to try to change it.”

Ever since taking part in a Chinese cultural exchange program at Newton South and majoring in East Asian studies at Bard College in New York, Brogan has been captivated by China. She spent her sophomore year in college studying at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. As the only non-Asian student in the class, she tried out – and got – her role in “Garden of Happiness.”

After her 1999 debut, Brogan returned to Bard, graduated, and returned to Beijing in 2002. When Brogan, the youngest of three girls, told her father, Harold, she may want to go to Beijing to pursue an acting career, he recalled saying, “You got to be kidding”.

Brogan said her plans are unclear. She is on the brink of branching out into other creative endeavors, such as putting out a music CD and launching her website. She feels, more and more, the excitement of synthesizing the two cultures in her life and work. That hybrid identity came through in a 2004 drama, her favorite role to date. She played Jenny, an emotionally volatile young woman from Shanghai who had a British father and Chinese mother. Jenny was a complicated character – Brogan described her as “desperate but tender” – and juggled the Eastern and Western influences within her. Brogan said she struggles with something like that, too.

She wondered, “How do I bring the two worlds together?”

Patricia Wen