The Princess of Nebraska

So the world is flat. And hot. And crowded. Even if we don’t have Youtube right now in China,we have Youku. Here Paul van Dyk gets crowds as hip as in Berlin, hopped up on K, speed, coke, and pretty much anything else you’d find in the bloodstream of a New York audience member.

But unless you’re young and leisurely enough to savor that youth culture, the flat world theory doesn’t translate, not all the way. To older expats, the phrase “young Chinese woman” still triggers a narrow set of images: the twenty-something office girl, the cheerful restaurant greeter, the child of Party privilege behind a tinted Mercedes window. For those in the West, the set grows even more discrete: the factory drone, the exotic cinema slut, the hard-working overseas student.

Now what if that overseas student has a life beyond books and her parents’ generational ambitions? What if consumer culture and the internet have left her as jaded and morally ambiguous as any of her western counterparts, and a brief fling has left her pregnant?

She goes to San Francisco to get an abortion. Yang, the man who knocked her up, has a friend there, an old American, Boshen. Boshen is not only a fan of Yang the Peking Opera student, but also an ex-lover. Boshen asks her a lot of nosy questions, but only because he really wants to know about Yang, doesn’t want to believe that Yang just used him for money. At least she can stay at Boshen’s place.

She wanders listlessly around San Francisco, no tourist, through generic megamalls and grimy streets that could just as easily belong to Shanghai or Brussels. The life within her, her intentions for it, and unreconciled feelings for its father zombify her. Finding Boshen’s love letters to Yang, accusing him of prostitution, doesn’t help.

Boshen takes her to a dinner party. The diverse Asian guests prattle about China, baseball’s prospects there, the forgetting of Tiananmen, the trouble Chinese men have getting wives. They don’t know what they’re talking about, and she’s outspoken enough to tell them so. Outspoken, and brazen enough to suggest she might be willing to sell Boshen Yang’s baby.

But the Beijing tough-girl act is only a thin shell, and she finds herself weeping on a drizzly corner. A hooker picks her up, and soon they’re painting the sleazy town, singing KTV with a bunch of horny businessmen. One gets far enough with her to feel her baby bump, before she escapes to vomit up a bellyful of vodka and shame. A Chinese pimp, dead drunk, tells her his hard-luck immigrant story, how lucky she is to be part of the new China.

The hooker introduces her to a man serious about buying her baby, but he wants DNA tests, from Yang too, who doesn’t even know he’s a father. From the hard streets of Chinatown she and the hooker retire to a soft hotel room, where they tickle fight, kiss, and begin to fall in love. Guard down, the hooker shares her own tragedy, the mother, exiled by the Cultural Revolution, who bore her in the grasslands and raised her in poverty.

She leaves the hooker the next morning to meet a friend, a Chinese girl who will take her to the abortion clinic. But a chance encounter on the street with a little girl sends her back to Boshen’s apartment. She sends Yang a break-up text message. Boshen wants to talk, wants to make a family with her, Yang, and the baby. “You have to move on,” she tells him.

She finally opens up to a kind nurse at the abortion clinic. She had wanted to use a condom, but Yang told her that was only for people who didn’t love each other. She wants to keep the baby, but fears she can’t afford it, fears her mother’s reaction. Her plan was to get a degree and a good job, not the hardscrabble life of a single mom.

The nurse suggests an ultrasound before the process of “dilation and evacuation”. She gazes for a brief eternity at the electroscopic image of the four-month life within her.

Her decision, the whole story, really, is an entertainingly dim echo of a Dreiser play. The movie telling of it bears the common indie stamp – innovative shooting and wooden acting. But whoever watches The Princess of Nebraska and comes away understanding that any young Chinese woman – student, worker, mother – can have a life more gloriously screwed up and multilayered than his own, has done himself a service not easily rendered by DVD.

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2. Mazu – the Princess of Tides

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