"I am still shy in part of me,” the actress Bai Ling says conspiratorially. “I discovered I have eight little spirits living in me. One of the girls is a very shy, traditional country girl, so privately I am extremely shy with my boyfriend. I turn off the lights. I don’t kiss him or make love to him when I do not feel safe.”
Erm, okay. Famed for her incredibly odd, decidedly revealing fashion sense, cover shoots with Playboy and an eclectic movie CV that includes Lords Of Dogtown, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, Wild Wild West and The Crow, I’m having some difficulty with the notion of Bai Ling as a shy country girl.
“But she only comes out when I don’t feel safe,” explains the 36-year old. “And other times I have a young fearless sprit. I also have a wise side connected to nature. My body is like a house for all these spirits. I have to act as the peacemaker.”
I see.
“Yes,” she continues. “I have a shy spirit, a vulnerable one, an assertive one. Then I have a lazy one. When I am not working she lets everything become like slow motion. Another just wanders around. The spirits sometimes change forms. I see them and they guide me. I live through them. Sometimes I feel like wind, air and fire.”
With anyone else I’d be tempted to pronounce them mad as a balloon and run away by now, but Bai Ling is an endlessly fascinating creature. Born in Chengdu, China during the Cultural Revolution, her parents would take opposing sides, and soon after her birth, Bai moved to her grandmother’s residence in rural Sichuan.
“I remember growing up mainly with my grandparents,” she tells me. “Because my parents were against each other in their cultural revolution, my house was not happy. My parents were fighting. There were three of us always crying in the kitchen and no food. So it was a lonely, sad childhood. But luckily my grandparents indulged me. So I would chase naked after geese and chickens and sheep. I would learn instruments like the violin so I had music in my soul. I am naturally a romantic person so it was a wonderful free time.”
She found even more freedom in acting and performance. At the age of 14, she began a three-year stint as a “soldier” working in the musical theatre of the People’s Liberation Army in Tibet.
“It was a interesting time of my life,” she says. “Tibet a is very beautiful place with a beautiful spirit. I didn’t know anything when I arrived there. I still used to think babies came from the belly button. And I had no concept of ugliness. As an adult you think lots of things are ugly, but back then everything seemed beautiful to me.”
Reality, however, soon came crashing in. Acting may have provided an escape from the harsher aspects of life in the People’s Republic of China, but Bai’s rebellious nature soon brought her to the attention of the authorities. She was accused of insubordination for using tobacco and alcohol and was briefly hospitalized for depression at the end of her army service. Riled by these experiences, she took to the streets in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
“I think my nature was enough to challenge the system when I was growing up,” she recalls. “I would spend all my time writing apology letters to my parents, my school teachers, my army leader, my government, everybody. I feel it was a machine life. All my instincts were against it.”
She temporarily escaped to New York in 1991 to attend New York University’s film department as a visiting scholar, but later obtained a special visa that allowed her to remain in the United States. She eventually became a US citizen in 1999.
“If I had any power I would make the whole world one country,” she declares. “That would sort out all the political problems right away. I think nationality divides people and creates violence and provokes the bad side of human nature. If there was only one country the world would be so much more beautiful and in harmony. Even in the US you can feel like a wild animal trapped. I don’t know. Everything I do seems to be against some sort of system. I feel that in my machine life, nature has used me as a tool. That’s why I became the first Chinese person to do something like Playboy. I started from zero. Nobody knew me and I didn’t know the language. It was scary for me. But my nature always wants to fly like a butterfly so I will always do the thing I fear most. It is only a gift when it is tough in the first place.”
Over the coming months you can catch Ms. Ling in Southland Tales, director Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko, and Edmund, one of David Mamet’s more venomous pieces of penmanship. First up though is Dumplings, a terrific and monstrous satire on a woman’s lot by alt-auteur Fruit Chan. Featuring enough body horror to make Eli Roth’s Hostel look like a little girl’s tea party, Dumplings takes us to Kowloon where Bai Ling’s sinister Mei does a steady trade in ‘dumplings’ to ageing, unwanted wives like Qing (Miriam Yeung). The dumplings promise youthful beauty, but just wait until you discover what’s in them.
“Mei was really challenging,” Bai says. “She was testing and flirting and seductive. It was hard to see her on paper. I just had to go my instinct. But the whole shoot was like a sickness, so it worked out for me. I was exhausted and it was really hot in those little kitchens in the movie. The meat was stinking. The crew were sweating. My neck was infected. I was literally on the verge of dying. I was looking out the window at the burning sun and everything was blurred. I felt jumping out the window so I would find peace in the fresh air. I just wanted to emerge from this struggle with this crazed character. The whole time I was trying to finish and find a delight in my heart. But, in the end, my character tested me enough and now I have absolutely 100 percent love for her. When I saw the film I knew she revealed herself for me. When I first saw her I thought, ‘Wow, what a fantastic, mad character!’”
I know exactly what she means.