Rachel DeWoskin Biography

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Rachel DeWoskin (b. 1972) is a screen actress and author.

DeWoskin was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, where she attended the alternative Community High School. The daughter of a Sinology professor at the University of Michigan, she majored in English and studied Chinese at Columbia University in New York City. She went to Beijing in 1994 to work as a public-relations consultant and later starred in a Chinese nighttime soap opera, the hugely successful Foreign Babes in Beijing, which was watched by approximately 600 million viewers. DeWoskin played the character of Jiexi. As the Reuters news agency noted, the show was a "sort of Chinese counterpart to Sex and the City revolving around Chinese-Western culture clashes." At the time, she was one of the few foreign actresses working in mainland China and was considered a sex symbol.

DeWoskin returned to the United States in 1999 where she began graduate work in poetry at Boston University. In 2005, W.W. Norton published her memoir of her time spent in China, Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China. Reviewing the work, The New Yorker commented, "DeWoskin's cleverly layered account thus charts parallel culture clashes, one that she experiences as a Western woman in modern China, and the other, a TV-ready version of the first, tailored to Chinese expectations." DeWoskin appeared as a guest on National Public Radio's syndicated program Fresh Air to discuss the book. The film rights to her book have been purchased by Paramount Pictures, where production is underway as of spring 2006. The director and screen adaptor for the film is Alice Wu.

DeWoskin has also briefly appeared in the movie Saving Face, also directed by Alice Wu, a story about Chinese lesbians in American society.

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