Joan Chen: ‘America,’ She Recalls, ‘Was Impossibly Strange’

The actress, 64, talks about leaving China, channeling Isabella Rossellini, and easing back on parenting

As told to

Rebecca Sun,

AARP

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Published November 21, 2025

In just 64 years, Joan Chen has already lived a multitude of lifetimes. The Shanghai native was a child of the Cultural Revolution, which served as her unlikely gateway into acting when she was selected by the Chinese Communist Party (and personally approved by Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong) to leave high school and train as an actress. She soon became the country’s It Girl and one of its biggest movie stars, only to leave it all behind at age 20 to become an anonymous college student in the U.S. Acting was never the plan — a classmate at California State University, Northridge, suggested she quit her restaurant job and try background work in nearby Hollywood, and the rest, as they say, is history.

This Christmas, she’ll play Michelle Pfeiffer’s neighbor and rival in the Amazon comedy Oh. What. Fun. She spoke to us via Zoom from her home in San Francisco, where she and her husband, cardiologist Peter Hui, have raised their two daughters.

Born and raised in China, she was scouted for her first movie thanks to her rifle skills

They picked me out of my high school rifle team because the character was a girl fighter, and I was relatively sturdier and darker and resembled a country girl who could fight. It came with the perks of riding a bicycle to the studio every day, and I could wear a watch like an adult, and I didn’t have to go to school anymore.

She won best actress in China at age 19 for 1979’s The Little Flower

That film basically catapulted me into being the star of the era. An entire generation, even at my age now, still calls me “Little Flower.” Cinema was then huge; people would put up a sheet so you could sit on either side, and people come up to me today and tell me, “The first time I saw it was on the backside of the screen.”

Coming to America in 1981 was “like landing on the moon”

It was the most exciting thing that anyone could think of, to actually go abroad, because we grew up in a very closed society. With the fame I had, I couldn’t go outside at all in China; I’d be completely mobbed. So I chose to come to the United States — longing for the unknown and the far away and to see what else is out there. It was impossibly strange. When I landed here, I almost felt like an infant. I had to start from zero; not only the language but also culture, everything.

She had no idea how the Hollywood system worked

I didn’t even know what an agent was, because in China, jobs were assigned to me. A stuntwoman said, “There is an agency who represents people like you.” I took a bus for about an hour and a half and walked in, and the agent sitting inside took my résumé. He didn’t believe anything on it. It was not so long after the Cold War, and I don’t think he had ever met anyone from mainland China. He asked, “What about a headshot?” and I said, “What’s that?”

joan chen as wan jung in the last emperor

In 1987's "The Last Emperor," Chen portrayed Wan Jung, one of the wives of Emperor Pu Yi (John Lone, left). The epic about the final monarch in China's Qing Dynasty won the best-picture Oscar in 1988.

Columbia/Courtesy Everett Collection

The Oscar-winning film The Last Emperor (1987) launched her to stardom in America

I had made many movies before that, but the scale of the set was something I had never experienced. Thousands and thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers had their heads shaved and became extras inside the Forbidden City, and the Forbidden City was closed for our shoot, which had never happened before, nor would it again.

**Her Twin Peaks character was originally written for Isabella Rossellini**

Back then, parts for someone like me were so few. It was my big fortune that David Lynch decided that I could be Josie Packard. Before I met with him, of course I had seen his other films, particularly Blue Velvet: I understood what this exotic element in an incestuous little town meant cinematically. So I knew that the character needed to be an outsider, and she could possibly be Chinese. I was lucky to get the part.

She became a director to share her generation’s experience of the Cultural Revolution

I had something to say—that was the story of my generation: our sacrifice of youth. For 10 years, almost 20 million youth were sent off to reeducation camps. I really felt an urge, like if I didn’t make that film [Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, 1998], I couldn’t tell any other stories.

In 2024's "Dìdi," Chen played a Taiwanese immigrant mother struggling to raise her son (Izaac Wang, right) in America. Chen was named best supporting actress at AARP's Movies for Grownups Awards for her work in the coming-of-age comedy/drama.

Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

**Playing moms, especially in Dìdi (2024), impacted her real-life role as a parent**

Most Asian parents want their kids to do well in school, and they’d be quite exasperated if their kids don’t like schoolwork. But the director’s mother told me, “If you have a child that is considerate and kind and good, what else do you want?” I realized I had been forcing my two daughters to do this and that. Through Dìdi and the whole process of creating my character, my relationship with my daughters did improve.

**Her audition for her new film, Oh. What. Fun., wasn’t necessary**

Michelle Pfeiffer is one of my favorite actresses, so when the director and I had a Zoom, I had prepared something to say, to make the part mine. But he just kind of interrupted me and said, “Oh, Joan, you don’t have to convince me. I’m here to convince you.”

Today she visits China about five times a year

My 94-year-old father lives alone in Shanghai, and I published a book last year and have been doing book tours in China, so I go back and forth. I still work in both countries. Right now the China-U.S. relationship is kind of tense, so it’s good to have cultural activities, to show we are all people who have the same aspirations and dreams for our children and ourselves. Hopefully, I can do something to help that, to show that life is life.

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Los Angeles-based writer Rebecca Sun, a former senior editor at The Hollywood Reporter, was, in 2023, the inaugural recipient of the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment’s Trailblazer Award.