Faced With Few Roles, Actress Builds Herself a ‘Pavilion’

WASHINGTON —  Luo Yan recalls her grandmother’s silence after the Red Guard came to their comfortable Shanghai apartment and beat her grandfather, then dragged him away in the middle of the night.

Luo was only 6 or 7, and China’s Cultural Revolution made no sense to her little-girl mind. She knew that the children at school shunned her, that her grandfather--who’d been the vice president of the Bank of China--now was being called a capitalist “dog.” Once a family to be admired and respected, hers was now in disgrace.

“I always remember what she taught me,” Luo says softly in her hotel suite at the St. Regis. She’s wearing a gorgeous Chinese silk pantsuit with hand-stitched embroidery, in iridescent blue layered over a soft, warm pink.

“A lot of neighbors, they kind of criticized you and gave you a hard time, and I always tried to argue, to say it was not fair, and she always pulled me back. She said, ‘Silence is the most powerful language you can have.’ It always seems as if she was in a different class.”

More than three decades later, Luo still can picture her grandmother in those difficult days: her poise, her self-assurance, the way she expertly navigated the intricacies of class and status in a place where class was supposed to be an issue no longer. It’s an image Luo held in her head as she went about writing, producing--and eventually starring in--the Chinese-American film “Pavilion of Women.”

In the film, loosely adapted from the Pearl S. Buck novel, Luo plays Madame Wu, a married woman from the most affluent, powerful family in an unnamed Chinese town, circa 1938. She scandalizes the community by arranging a concubine for her husband on her 40th birthday, then falls in love with the American priest (played by Willem Dafoe) who runs a local orphanage.

The picture is the first joint Chinese-American production by Universal Pictures, with much of the filming done in China, and is Luo’s English-language acting debut. It also represents the culmination of a dream for Luo, who came to the United States in 1986 as an accomplished film and stage actress and, after finding no roles for Asians in Hollywood, went about creating opportunities for herself. She scrubbed floors, she was a secretary, she studied film packaging in extension classes, she sold real estate. She capitalized on her knowledge of Chinese business customs to start her own import-export business.

With the money from that company, Luo bought the film rights to “Pavilion” in 1996. With a script she co-wrote (and a business plan twice as thick), she persuaded Universal to give her a paltry $5 million to make the movie. She promised the studio an American actor to play the priest, but wrote the lead for herself.

“Madame Wu for me was so easy,” says Luo, who declined to give her age but is approximately her character’s age. “I learned from my grandmother. You see her, almost.”

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Luo was barely 6 months old when she was sent to live with her grandparents, Luo Zong Meng and Liu Suan Wan, in Shanghai. Her parents, theology professors, had been allocated by the Chinese government to a posting near the Russian border and found it impossible to find (or afford) decent child care for their infant daughter.

“To hire a Mandarin-speaking baby-sitter would have cost more than they were making,” Luo says. “They did what was best for me.”

She and her grandparents lived a privileged, Westernized existence. Her grandfather, Luo says, spoke English and ate a continental breakfast. That is, until the Red Guard came to get him, twice, in 1967 and 1968. Both times he was held in the basement of the building where he had worked. Luo was permitted to visit and bring clothes and food; her grandmother was not.

“I traveled across the city to him once a week,” she says. “I remember his hair all turned white, overnight. I was so scared. Usually grandparents are your authority figures. All of a sudden, they relied on you. I could see he was very scared.”

Her grandfather returned home after his second incarceration, which lasted six months, but died before Luo turned 10. She remained with her grandmother. At 16, she was forced to spend five years making fabric in a textile factory.

She completed her service as China’s political climate relaxed, so was permitted to apply to the Shanghai Drama Institute, where she was one of 20 admitted out of a pool of 4,800. From there, she joined the Shanghai People’s Theater and did both stage and screen work throughout her 20s.

“But there was no place for me to grow more,” says Luo, whose grandmother had died at 82 while Luo was at the drama institute. “I had to leave.”

She chose to attend Boston University to study for a master’s degree in fine arts. She had $60 when she arrived, and a promise of housing from a family who needed a housekeeper, she says. After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles, eager to restart her acting career, but the only film she appeared in was a Chinese picture she flew home to make in 1990.

“Opportunities did not exist. Not many people wrote Asian characters,” Luo says. So she decided to develop a character for herself. Buck’s work quickly came to mind.

Buck spent 37 years of her life in China, and Luo is fond of saying that Buck understands the Chinese better, perhaps, than the Chinese understand themselves. She also writes strong female characters, which Luo often finds lacking in American films. And with a Nobel Prize for literature (for “The Good Earth”), Buck’s name sells.

“The package was sent to Universal International, and I think they really responded to the script and that it was based on a Pearl S. Buck novel,” says Paul Hardart, an executive vice president for Universal Focus. “I think they also liked the idea of just working with the Beijing film studios, to get a foothold in China.”

The studio also liked Luo’s business plan and its $5-million budget--an incredibly low sum for any picture, especially one shot in Asia. That figure, Luo says, was possible only because of her strong working knowledge of the Chinese film industry and her business contacts.

“She’s incredibly persistent,” Hardart says of Luo. “A lot of the fact that this movie was made was due to her grit and persistence and zeal.”

Hardart acknowledges that the stunning success of the Chinese film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” has made filmgoers, and film studios, far more open to foreign productions. Luo is happy for that fact but somewhat dismissive of the success of “Crouching Tiger”--which, she points out, did not do well in her homeland, crediting its U.S. popularity to the fact that the genre is new to Americans.

Unlike “Crouching Tiger,” “Pavilion” isn’t a foreign-language film. Ever the businesswoman, Luo chose to make her picture in English. “Over 50% of the world speaks English,” she says, somewhat overstating the numbers.

“Besides,” Luo adds, “I think a movie has no borders. The stories are human stories. When I watch ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ I don’t see a Russian movie. I see myself, people I know, stories I know.”