HANGHAI, Dec. 17 — "It's so much
fun," squealed Yue-Sai Kan as she stripped a tiny jacket off the pale,
thin arms of a plastic doll in her antique-filled Shanghai apartment. The
doll, an idealized version of her younger self, is Ms. Kan's latest effort
to close the gap between the country of her birth and her Sutton Place
home in Manhattan.
Ms. Kan became an instant star here in the mid-1980's when she was host
of a television program called "One World," which introduced knowledge-hungry
Chinese to the outside world with short documentaries about just about
everywhere from Egypt to England. Almost every television set in China
tuned in.
She later started a make-up line under her name, and her signature bob
and bright red lips are still seen in cosmetics advertisements all over
China. Her book of etiquette, which counsels men against spitting and women
against sitting with legs splayed, was also an immediate best seller.
Now Ms. Kan, 51, has taken her one-woman cultural revolution to China's
children with a Barbie-like doll that she wants to represent the Chinese
ideal of beauty. Like her American cousin, the Yue-Sai doll comes freighted
with the politics of consumerism, body image and gender stereotypes.
It is, perhaps, a reflection of the times: padded bras, plastic surgery
and chronic dieting are increasingly common in the generation of urban
Chinese women now coming of age.
Nearly 40 years ago, Mao warned his comrades that enemies of the Cultural
Revolution would arrive to try to change China through "peaceful evolution,"
nudging third-generation cadres back toward the comfortable middle class
values dominant in the West. Ms. Kan, a Chinese-American, maintains homes
in both New York and Shanghai.
Of course, he was right. Like clockwork, agents of the bourgeoisie are
back in droves, and nobody among them is more prominent or more persistent
than Ms. Kan, whose face is almost as well known in China's cities as Mao's
own.
In an auditorium here recently, she held a fashion show of lanky, leggy
models baring their midriffs in life-size versions of her doll's extensive
wardrobe. There Ms. Kan answered well-rehearsed questions from ruddy cheeked,
red kerchiefed Young Pioneers, prepubescent members of the feeder organization
for the Communist Party Youth League.
"Auntie Yue-Sai, before I could only find foreign dolls, so when I saw
a black-haired doll it touched my heart," said a pudgy 11-year-old girl
wearing a red photojournalist vest and lugging an expensive camera. "Why
did you decide to make the Yue-Sai doll?"
The doll idea was born, Ms. Kan told the children and assembled guests,
when an American friend in New York asked her to bring back a Chinese doll
for the friend's 6-year- old daughter. To her dismay, she could not find
any Chinese dolls in China other than a series representing the country's
56 minority groups. The brochure she handed out at the fashion show said:
"Yes, I did find some ugly Chinese `minority' dolls but nothing really
modern and beautiful, nothing representing us!" (There is no strong tradition
of playing with dolls in Chinese culture.)
"All of a sudden," Ms. Kan said, "I realized this is one of the reasons
why so many Asians don't find themselves beautiful!" So she set out to
create her own doll, working with the best doll makers in Hong Kong, who
had previously just made Western dolls. And after 12 head molds and a lot
of tinkering with eyebrows, she finally had "a doll that we can be proud
of as Chinese."
She is unabashed about promoting the doll as an educational toy, quoting
Deng Xiaoping, who used the Chinese word for childhood — which also means
doll — when he said, "everything starts from childhood."
"It is hoped that the doll will inspire young Asian women to examine
who they are and to appreciate their own unique beauty and heritage," her
press release says. So far, that includes dressing as a Disco Girl or a
Birthday Princess and playing with accessories like a make-up table, a
beauty salon and a dining room set. The dolls will sell for $7 to $35 each,
depending on the accessories.
She is sharply critical of the current fad among Asian women who bleach
their hair blond or dye it reddish brown, and she criticizes the Japanese
for starting the trend. She also says she is troubled by Asia's fascination
with Caucasian models, which are used to sell everything from cigarettes
to underwear.
"There's a sociological phenomenon here of feeling that we are inferior,"
she said.
Still, Ms. Kan's doll suggests that equally complex emotions were at
work when she designed her doll, which despite its name has a distinctly
non-Chinese feel. Dolls of this type, whether with Asian features or not,
are known generally as "Western dolls" in Chinese, and their foreignness
is one of the things that attracts Chinese children to them.
Her doll's face is squarer than a Barbie, she explained while sorting
through a plastic bag of doll heads a few days before her fashion show.
And while most Barbies are sold with blond hair and blue eyes, Yue-Sai
dolls are sold with black or brown hair and dark brown eyes, as well as
bright red lipstick that matches her own.
"One of the biggest problems I encountered was that almost everyone
who paints dolls makes them Western, with really round eyes," she said.
"I cannot tell you how hard it is to explain to the technical people that
we have almond eyes."
But her doll's eye shape is barely distinguishable from Barbie's except
for the absence of a painted eyelid fold above the lashes. And while her
doll's waist is half a centimeter broader — about an eighth of an inch
— than America's most popular doll, the other measurements are basically
the same. Both Barbie and Yue-Sai have a four and seven-eighths inch bust,
for example, though Yue-Sai's torso is slightly thicker and so her breasts
have a little less loft.
"We found that if we make them too flat chested or the waistline thicker,
the clothes don't look as good," said Ms. Kan. She said she extended the
legs for the same reason, so the doll is as tall as a Barbie with the same
tapered feet.
The persona that Ms. Kan has created for her doll, meanwhile, belies
a fascination with the West: she's a 16- year-old Chinese-American girl
who stars in a comic strip that will be published in children's newspapers
and magazines in China.
Ms. Kan hired a Japanese artist to draw the strip, whose characters
have the big round eyes characteristic of Japanese comics.
