About face

If there was a point in time when Chinese looked up to exotic looking Chinese (or other Asians) as role models for beauty, it was the 1980s when perming your hair and dressing like a foreigner would elicit a wave of envy. But we are so far beyond it that even Chinese-Americans on Hollywood screens do not excite us any more. Otherwise, Lucy Liu and Ming-Na Wen would be raking in big endorsement deals in China.

I don't want to go into depth on this topic because I'd have to start with Anna May Wong, who was very controversial and misunderstood when her fame reached the land of her ancestry.

Chinese filmmakers are probably not rich enough to cherry-pick Hollywood stars for their projects. If they do, DiCaprio, Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt could be the top trio of male stars. You may counter "They are the biggest anywhere", but I would not include George Clooney or Tom Hanks even if I move back a decade or two. Again, it may have something to do with the physicality - no matter how elusively hard it is to measure.

When an ordinary Chinese watches a foreign movie or a foreign spokesmodel, he or she would expect a certain level of "foreignness". If it's seamlessly Chinese, they would use a different set of benchmarks for judgment. The "foreignness" of the faces that may win the biggest Chinese audience depends on many variables and may not stay the same, but the trick is a balance between exotica and familiarity, or a fusion of the two. Casting directors and corporate advertisers oblivious to such cross-cultural nuances would risk selecting the wrong talent for their China-targeted products.

If all this sounds illogical or politically incorrect, just reverse the equation and see which Asian stars have better chances in Hollywood movies, and you'll realize that the process of accepting foreignness is gradual.