Bai Ling

Bai Ling (, born October 10, 1966) is a Chinese-American actress and musician. She is best known for her work in the films The Crow, Nixon, Red Corner, Crank: High Voltage, Dumplings, Wild Wild West, Anna and the King, Southland Tales, and Maximum Impact, as well as TV shows Entourage and Lost. Notably, she won the Best Supporting Actress awards at the 2004 Hong Kong Film Awards and the 2004 Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan for her role in Dumplings. Early life Bai was born in Chengdu. Her father, Bai Yuxiang, was a musician in the People's Liberation Army, and later a music teacher. Her mother, Chen Binbin, was a dancer, stage actress, and literature teacher at Sichuan University; Bai's maternal grandfather was a military officer of the Kuomintang army, thus was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. In the early 1980s, Bai Ling's parents divorced, and her mother married renowned writer Xu Chi. Bai Ling has one older sister, Bai Jie, who works for the Chinese tax bureau, and a younger brother, Bai Chen, who emigrated to Japan and works for an American company. Bai has described herself as a very shy child who found that she best expressed herself through acting and performing. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), she learned how to perform by participating in eight model plays, at her elementary school shows. After her graduation from middle school, Bai was sent to do labor work at Shuangliu, on the outskirts of Chengdu. In 1978, after graduating from high school, she passed the People's Liberation Army's exams, and became an artist soldier in Nyingchi Prefecture, Tibet. Her main activity there was entertaining in the musical theater. She also served briefly as an Army nurse. Bai later stated that during her time in Tibet, other female performers and she were regularly plied with alcohol and sexually abused by older male officers, including one instance of rape that led to a pregnancy she aborted. She cites this period of sexual abuse for her subsequent struggles with alcohol addiction. Subsequently, Bai spent some time in a mental hospital.