The little French girl who read a book about Marco Polo grew up to became a woman who fell in love with China. She was rewarded by finding a Chinese husband in a romantic love-at-first-sight encounter.
Pascale Bon is the mother of three Chinese girls, the wife of a Chinese movie director, the boss of her own golf business in Nanjing and Shanghai and a PhD student for a doctorate in Business Administration (DBA).
For many, it would be no easy job to balance so many roles at the same time. But the energetic 42-year-old Frenchwoman seems to quite enjoy the pace.
"I'm very satisfied with my current life - it's busy but everything is in order," she says with a smile. "China has become my hometown."
With an athletic build and short blond hair, Bon's striking looks make her easy to spot around the city. But locals are even more impressed when she talks. Her Chinese is fluent and near perfect, the result of living in China for about 18 years, 15 of them in Beijing.
Born with French romantic genes from her father, a nuclear physicist, and the ebullience inherited from her Sicilian mother, Bon was considered a child prodigy.
She graduated from university at the age of 17 and got her first doctoral degree in nuclear physics and a master of commerce in her early 20s in Paris. She can also speak seven languages, including Korean, Japanese and Arabic.
Bon could have become a young scientist or a university professor, following in her father's footsteps, if it were not for her reading a book of the travels of Marco Polo when she was a little girl. The book, with colorful, vivid pictures and illustrations, was a present from a grandmother and she learned about China, an ancient, mysterious country.
"I was so fascinated about China and its splendid culture," Bon says. "One night I even dreamed of myself riding on a Chinese dragon, hovering around the country."
Her obsession with the Orient drew the female Marco Polo to China when she was 24. She quickly learned Chinese and ancient Chinese characters, becoming one of the few expats at that time who could speak, read and write Chinese.
In 1989, Bon was transferred to Taiwan as an executive of a French nuclear company and she was later promoted to BNP Paribas, Guangzhou Branch, as general manager in 1994.
It never occurred to Bon that she would find love and a husband after a chance encounter with a Chinese man in Beijing Capital Airport in 1996. She was the chief financial officer of L'Oreal Hong Kong and he had landed in Beijing to attend a conference.
"I was waiting at the hall for a colleague to pick me up when a tall, handsome Chinese guy walked in my direction," Bon recalls.
The "tall, handsome guy" was Yin Dawei, who was also a well-known film, drama and TV series director and a teacher of the movie star Gong Li. He had been going to pick up a friend from Japan that day but the flight was delayed.
Everything can happen in 30 seconds - that was all the time it took for the two to fall in love.
Yin later wrote in "Crazy for You," his autobiography dedicated to Bon, that "the beautiful blonde looked like Princess Diana in the distance, but when I got closer, I found her more like Scarlett O'Hara in 'Gone With the Wind.' I was instantly struck by her beauty and could hardly move for several minutes."
Love at first sight is always hard to explain. It's a matter of chemistry and luck.
Romantic nature
"I believe in love at first sight," Bon says today. At first, the lovebirds lived separately (she in Hong Kong and he in Beijing) so they made numerous phone calls.
A month later, Bon, the Frenchwoman with a dreamy, hopelessly romantic nature, made a bold decision. She quit everything - job, house and car in Hong Kong and boarded the plane for Beijing.
The couple began their happy life together in a tiny rented house in a tiny hutong (lane) behind Tian'anmen Square.
Yin was making a TV series at that time and a lack of money was the biggest problem they had to face.
Bon had gone from being the CFO of a multinational company with an annual income of more than one million HK dollars to being a typical Chinese wife with no income.
She learned how to bargain in noisy food markets; she rode her beloved bicycle everywhere to find a job in Beijing; she disguised herself in a scarf each morning to avoid the suspicious looks and whispers from neighbors.
But true love never fails to conquer. Though without money at their most difficult time, Bon says that even today she still loved those early simple days. "I was nicknamed 'The Princess of the Hutong'," she jokes.
In 2005, after six years of tedious adoption procedures, Bon adopted Jia Jia, a girl abandoned when she was only two months old in Anhui Province. "She is the sunshine in my life," Bon says. Then she adopted another two abandoned girls.
In the same year, Bon set up the Jia Jia Association to help other Chinese girl orphans. "I want to do something for more orphans like Jia Jia. I hope these girls can get the same chance to receive a proper education."
It seems that Bon likes to be busy as she works on her next doctoral degree at Shanghai Tongji University.
Last year she set up a golf training base in Nanjing, and last month her sports business expanded to Shanghai.
"In China, strangely enough, golf is only accessible to a few rich people and there is no professional golf player or licensed golf trainer in China," Bon says. "I want to take 10 years to help train the first Chinese professional player."
Pascale Bon
Nationality: France
Age: 42
Profession: Manager of a golf club
Q&A
Favorite place:
I was living in Beijing for 15 years. My favorite places are the small hutongs. They are the symbol of Beijing and a very important and precious part of Chinese culture.
Worst experience:
My beloved bicycle was stolen when I lived in Beijing 10 years ago, which made me heart-broken and had me crying for a whole day.
Ideal weekend:
Sitting in a quiet park with a good novel at hand or playing golf alone or finding a nice, small town to do some painting.
What can be done to improve Shanghai?
Though I've just arrived in Shanghai, the terrible traffic is just the same as in Beijing. My advice is to improve the messy traffic and require cars, buses and pedestrians to go in their lanes.
Advice to new expats:
Start to learn Chinese. Many Chinese can speak very good English but it's a pity that many expats don't want to learn Chinese. Even a basic knowledge of Mandarin can make a foreigner's life in China easier and more comfortable.
(Shanghai Daily September 11, 2007)
