Her parents “always wanted me to get the best education. In Joan Chen’s case, the initial reason for her immigration was vaguely educational. Her immigration story illustrates one of many different pathways taken by people from all over the world to come to America for better opportunities in education and other endeavors and, for many of them, to ultimately contribute to the vibrancy and vitality of this country, while maintaining some of their root cultural heritage. This was the beginning of Joan’s American adventure. Coming to Americaįinally, on August 26, 1981, she landed at JFK Airport, New York City, met by her mother and a relative. “That was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. That process, she remembers, was a “difficult journey.” It took a year “begging at every door” in the Beijing bureaucracy to get a passport from the Chinese government. My leaving would be viewed as a form of treason.” But I was considered as a national treasure of some sort, and they weren’t going to let me leave. “So I started the process in China to apply for a passport. “They arranged for a school to give me a tuition waiver and somehow arranged money for my airline ticket,” Joan said. Zhang An Zhong, made plans to bring Joan, a student at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute, to the United States.
This was also the time when Joan’s parents, both medical doctors in Shanghai, had won a Sloan Kettering fellowship to do research in New York. This was in the late 1970s, when China was just coming out of the Cultural Revolution.
As a teenager, she starred in four films, Youth, Little Flower, An Overseas Chinese and Awakening and gained wide acclaim in China. In 1975, when she was 14, the Shanghai Film Studio placed her in the Actors’ Training Program. Joan was discovered on a Shanghai school’s rifle range – she was an excellent shooter - by no less an authority figure than Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong. “Everyone had a picture of me in their home.” “I was considered the darling of the country,” she said, in an exclusive interview for. By the time Joan Chen (then known as Chen Chong) was 17 years old, she was a movie star in China.
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