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A former PLA dancer, Yan Geling started writing at 20 and is married to an American diplomat. [Tashi Metok and Zhou Mi]
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Writer Yan Geling's list of admirers reads like a Who's Who of Chinese cinema, among them directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.
The former People's Liberation Army dancer is best known for her work on Chen's "Forever Enthralled" (Mei Lanfang) and for Zhang's upcoming project "13 Girls in Jinling" (Jinling Shisan Chai).
In fact, her own life is as colorful as her scripts.
Born in Shanghai in 1958, Yan became a PLA dancer in an entertainment troupe when she was just 12 and spent her teenage years performing around western China. She started writing at 20, went to the United States to learn creative writing at 30 and now, married to an American diplomat, has been writing ever since, from the US to Africa to Asia, wherever life takes her.
"What a person experiences makes them who they are," says Yan, who still cuts the slim and elegant look of a dancer in her light green silk one-piece and white high heels. Every now and then she makes sweet feminine gestures but the army life has left its mark on her and she has a soldier's boldness, often bursting into laughter and uttering powerful sentences.
"An American critic said (Russian-American writer Vladimir) Nabokov's English was stiff," she says disbelievingly, "but what's good about American English? It is plain water!"
Yan relates to Nabokov. It might be, she says, because both write in their second language, English, or because of their shared identity as outsiders or maybe because they both feel good about their oddities.
"Until his last days Nabokov lived in hotels. He was an outsider in Russia, Germany, France and America. Even his language has no home - but I think of him as a happy person who traveled around collecting his beloved butterflies every summer."
Yan admits to enjoying life as an outsider, even with its unexpected challenges.
A year after she arrived in the US, she met her husband-to-be Lawrence Arthur Walker, then a 32-year-old diplomat. "He is upright, funny and a genius in language learning," she says. "The most important thing is we share the same values. We both try the best to live up to our own standards, without ever compromising to kiss anybody's ass."
Just as she prepared to settle down in the US with her soul mate, however, a traumatic incident brought her down to earth. One regulation of the Cold War era required American diplomats to report to the US security department liaisons with citizens from Communist countries.
The FBI went to her college and talked to her professor. Then she and her close friends were all interrogated. To cap it off, Yan was ordered to take a lie detection test.
She later described her feelings at the time: "I hung up the phone, sitting in the dark room alone. For the first time, I felt the loneliness of living in a foreign country. It turns out that I had not landed in this country. It did not allow me to land here."
Walker was enraged, quit his job and the two married in 1992. Her husband is now a diplomat once again and Yan is a professional outsider - she lives in a different place every three years, traveling and writing all the time .
Fortunately, after all these years she is able to appreciate the bright side of her nomadic existence.
"You take a place for granted if you live there too long. You become indifferent," she says. "I feel privileged to have a fresh eye to marvel at each place I live."
