In just 64 years, Joan Chen has already lived a multitude of lifetimes. The Shanghai native was a child of the Cultural Revolution, which served as her unlikely gateway into acting when she was selected by the Chinese Communist Party (and personally approved by Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong) to leave high school and train as an actress. She soon became the country’s It Girl and one of its biggest movie stars, only to leave it all behind at age 20 to become an anonymous college student in the U.S. Acting was never the plan — a classmate at California State University, Northridge, suggested she quit her restaurant job and try background work in nearby Hollywood, and the rest, as they say, is history.
This Christmas, she’ll play Michelle Pfeiffer’s neighbor and rival in the Amazon comedy Oh. What. Fun. She spoke to us via Zoom from her home in San Francisco, where she and her husband, cardiologist Peter Hui, have raised their two daughters.
Born and raised in China, she was scouted for her first movie thanks to her rifle skills
They picked me out of my high school rifle team because the character was a girl fighter, and I was relatively sturdier and darker and resembled a country girl who could fight. It came with the perks of riding a bicycle to the studio every day, and I could wear a watch like an adult, and I didn’t have to go to school anymore.
She won best actress in China at age 19 for 1979’s The Little Flower
That film basically catapulted me into being the star of the era. An entire generation, even at my age now, still calls me “Little Flower.” Cinema was then huge; people would put up a sheet so you could sit on either side, and people come up to me today and tell me, “The first time I saw it was on the backside of the screen.”
Coming to America in 1981 was “like landing on the moon”
It was the most exciting thing that anyone could think of, to actually go abroad, because we grew up in a very closed society. With the fame I had, I couldn’t go outside at all in China; I’d be completely mobbed. So I chose to come to the United States — longing for the unknown and the far away and to see what else is out there. It was impossibly strange. When I landed here, I almost felt like an infant. I had to start from zero; not only the language but also culture, everything.
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