Rachel DeWoskin was an American arrival in Beijing in 1994, going through a handful of mediocre jobs before joining an international PR firm. Shortly after this however, through mutual friends she is introduced to the film studio responsible for making a hit drama serial involving a variety of foreign girls, their Chinese boyfriends and the families they have to integrate with. DeWoskin was chosen to play the lead, a somewhat scarlet character by the name of Jiexi, who on camera at least, seduces a Chinese man, steals him away from his wife then moves away at the series end to a new life with him in America.

The series, "Foreign Babes in Beijing", was a massive success nationally and still occasionally re-runs today. DeWoskins book is a blow by blow (or shag by shag) account of her time living this experience. Being surrounded by close to an all-Chinese cast, and balancing her filming with her PR career, DeWoskin becomes somewhat estranged from the small expatriate society in Beijing at that time, believing them, somewhat understandably at face value, to be a bunch of self-righteous, money grabbing, culturally insensitive jerks. Instead, as her fame in China grows, she delves more and more into Chinese society, taking a string of Chinese lovers in what only appears to be a general two fingered salute to her American values. Indeed, she starts to live the script.

Consequently, this is a curious book, somewhat limited in scope with the characters – local film actors and artists in the main, as she cuts herself off rather and is absorbed into Beijing life, more as a Chinese immigrant from Hunan would be than a tall American woman. As such it’s a rather one-dimensional account of Beijing life at that time, and doesn’t really pick up much on the important post-Tiananmen period of Beijing that she was living through. That is rather a shame, as expatriate life after the student’s failed revolution was an interesting time to be in the capital – dark, mysterious and somewhat Chekovian in nature. Instead, DeWoskin regales us with tales of her local boyfriends and what they were like in bed (rather good, apparently) and the larks they all got up to when shooting episodes. As a curates egg, DeWoskins book delivers, but as for living in Beijing pre and post 1989 this book ultimately fails to set the tone or to deliver the zeitgeist of living in Beijing during the early nineties.