In this ambitious debut, the title character, Xiu Xiu, succumbs to the moral chaos of China's Cultural Revolution. She gets "sent down" from her city to the Tibetan steppes, supposedly to glean wisdom from the masses while mastering the honest trade of horse herding and heading up a girls' cavalry squad. But such units had been disbanded long before she gets there. Xiu Xiu becomes the sexual prey of con men dangling promises of a speedy return home. The one man who truly loves her is Lao Jin, her tentmate and instructor (who, in a horrifying irony, was castrated 20 years before). He watches in despair as, in a matter of months, Xiu Xiu turns from wide-eyed innocent to cynic. She doesn't fully value his devotion until her life is nearly over.

Chen and her co-writer, Geling Yan (who wrote the short story the film is based on), waited two months to have the screenplay approved. When the Film Bureau proposed changes that would have undermined the script, Chen decided to film without an official permit. With a crew of 60 she headed west, to remote parts of the Sichuan province and the Tibetan borderland. There, she told local officials that she'd made proper arrangements -- and as a precaution had each day's footage smuggled out of the area.

"All the way I was nervous like crazy, prepared to be kicked out of China," Chen said during an interview in San Francisco, her adopted hometown. (Chen came to America in 1981 to study filmmaking, and graduated from Cal State University-Northridge.) San Jose Sharks owner George Gund -- a film philanthropist and producer -- opened up his Nevada ranch so she could finish there if she had to. "I'm now two years older," she mused, "and I think I'd be unable to do it today -- it took that two years younger to make it possible."

When the completed picture became a hit both in American and European festivals and in Taiwan, where it swept the Golden Horses (the Taipei equivalent of the Oscars), the Film Bureau banned Chen from acting or making films in China, where she had been groomed as a movie actor from the age of 14.

Yet Chen is reticent about divulging the details of her undercover moviemaking. She doesn't want the Chinese to think she's gloating. She isn't. Chen feels she is "being made an example," and hopes for a rapprochement. She and Yan (who participated in the interview and also lives in the San Francisco Bay Area) see their work as a love story -- indeed, a fairy tale -- rooted not just in China's recent history but in the country's spiritual and artistic heritage.

Even during the Cold War, artists in capitalist countries sometimes voiced a surprising envy of oppressed counterparts in communist regimes, where art was seen to have life-or-death importance. Chen understands that jealousy: "I was brought up in Shanghai feeling I was serving a higher purpose, that's for sure -- something much larger than the pursuit of self-interest, and not just entertainment, something holier than that. We esteemed writing, filmmaking, making an opera, because the power of it is incredible: It is through catharsis and purgation, both intellectual and emotional, that we are better placed to attain virtue. And that should not be forgotten."

Chen's fascination with the figure of Xiu Xiu dates back to her and Yan's youth, during the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Chen escaped the fate of a sent-down girl when she was selected for film work during her first year of high school. Yan also lived in Shanghai until she entered the People's Liberation Army at age 12; she was stationed in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, but as a dancer in a traveling military troupe spent most of her time elsewhere, including 18 months in Tibet. "The army was a desirable place to be," says Chen. "It offered a more disciplined life than the countryside." For Yan's family her enlistment was strategic: It provided her with relative safety while enabling her older brother to stay behind (government policy permitted one child to remain at home).

A sent-down friend provided Yan with the kernel of the tale: She told the writer "how she traded her sexuality for a pass back to the city. What she said stuck in my mind clearly -- 'a woman who has no fear for rape has no fear for anything.' She had changed into somebody else -- damaged, very cynical."

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