Destiny plays a part
Acclaimed actress Joan Chen had no hesitation in signing up as the female lead in Serangoon Road, the first television series co-produced by ABC TV and HBO Asia.
Chen's body of work includes Bernardo Bertolucci's Oscar-winning The Last Emperor, David Lynch's cult TV series Twin Peaks and the Australian-made films The Home Song Stories from WA-raised Tony Ayres and the Oscar-nominated Mao's Last Dancer from Bruce Beresford.
"I love working with Australian crews, I think Australia brings me good luck," said Chen by phone.
"I made a small independent US movie (The Salute of the Jugger with Rutger Hauer) in Australia in the outback and in Sydney, and had the greatest time and made the greatest friend, the writer/director David Peoples (Blade Runner), who lived in the Bay Area, and that film brought me to Australia for the first time.
"And then I got to work with Tony Ayres and that brought me a couple of best actress awards. Then I had Bruce Beresford cast me in a small part but a great part in Mao's Last Dancer.
"I just feel that I have always been really happy either working with Australian cast and crew or working in Australia."
In Serangoon Road, Chen plays Patricia Cheng, whose life as a bookkeeper in a bank takes a twist after the murder of her husband, Winston Lee.
Patricia finds herself running Winston's detective agency but with little experience in solving cases such as finding missing persons, she calls on Winston's well-connected friend Sam Callaghan, played by Australia's Don Hany.
"Unfortunately, I never saw his other series because I don't live in Australia but he was the most generous actor; he was a joyful, calm, pure energy on set," Chen said of working with Hany, star of series including East West 101 and Offspring.
"He's just lovely to be with; pleasant is too small a word. He's a really, really, really lovely man. I was very lucky."
Chen was also attracted to Serangoon Road's setting; Singapore during the political and racial tensions of 1964 and 1965.
"Many of the elements in the project appealed to me, this great mix of east and west and the political background of Singapore in 1964 and the detective stories," she said.
"The stories, the concept, all the music and fashion and hair and everything; the whole atmosphere.
"I read up on Singaporean history somewhat and got old picture books of photographs of the era as well as before that just to give me a visual sense and background knowledge of what was possible and what was not possible.
"It is quite rare and it is quite by accident that she owns a detective agency because her late husband was the owner. She keeps it open initially for one reason and that is to somehow find out what happened to her husband, who murdered her husband.
"Throughout the process of trying to find that out and also taking on the cases to help other people she has found a purpose. This is something she could do; obviously she is not going out to the back alleys to detect in her cheongsam; that is why she has a partner, she has Sam."
Chen lives in San Francisco with her husband, Peter Hui, and daughters Angela and Audrey but continues to work in her native Shanghai both in front of and behind the camera.
"I do more work in China than anywhere else and also because there is this whole generation that has seen movies that I made earlier on because back then there was not any other form of entertainment," she said.
"I would say everybody back then saw these films, so there is this foundation there."
Yet it could all have turned out differently for Chen had she not been discovered on a school shooting range by Mao Tse Tung's wife Jiang Qing and sent to the Actors' Training Program at the Shanghai Film Studio.
"Before they picked me I never really thought of acting, never imagined or dreamed or anything but I always loved uniforms, because I just felt uniforms were so good-looking," Chen reflected.
"I always wanted to either join the army or the navy or to be a parachutist. They trained parachutists at a younger age and I wanted to leave high school and somehow get into a uniform.
"That was what I was thinking about but they picked me and I got into a uniform on a movie set, I suppose."
