It recently came to my attention that Wei Hui's novel Shanghai Baby has been made into a film, starring Bai Ling as "Coco", the novel's protagonist.  Meanwhile, Rachel Dewoskin has turned her own non-fictional account of her stint as an actress in a 1990s popular Chinese TV series, Foreign Babes in Beijing into a film as well.  Interesting that both stories are being produced as films around the same time and that they both deal with female sexuality in China during the same era.  In one, Chinese women appear seductive, Western men are virile while Chinese men are weak.  In the other, Western women are attracted to virile, artsy Chinese men.  What a telling juxtaposition!  I'll get back to this theme at the end of this blog, but first, for those of you unfamiliar, here's a rundown of both stories.