1. American Teens A Big Talent in China '- Sisters in Adopted Land Win TV Stardom ............................. 125 Forwarded by: C. Mok Source: The Wall Street dourhal, 6/28/1994 Written by: Marcus W. Brauchli Nanjing,Chtna - It's show ttme at Nanjing Cable Television. Fatigue-clad Young Pioneers -- Chtna's version of Scouts -- dtsplay thetr revolutionary fervor by making leg spltnts with red bandarias and bearing away an eight-year-old comrade on a homemade stretcher. Party elders and children dressed as People's Liberation Army troops clap diligently. Then something really revolutionary happens: A recording of "It's s Small, Small World" crescendos as two American girls skip on stage. Mika and Charlotte MacInnis sing and sway through a Chinese rendition of the song. Delighted, Communists and children applaud boisterously. As the Americans leave the stage, a skinny young fan in a tutu rushes over, bursting with a question fop the foreign talent: "Why are Americans so white? Is it because you drink so much milk?" Talented Teens Mike and Charlotte are finding that being a famous foreigner in China means being part celebrity, part curiosity. "A lot of Chinese think we're strange," says 13-year-old fair-haired Charlotte. "But we're just typical Americans." Americans, yes; typical, no. Charlotte and her 15-year-old, brunette sister Mike are cross-cultural pioneers: Chinese-speaking, culturally adroit, _foreign_ TV stars in a society rapidly becoming suffused with Western culture. Daughters of an American Bible-publisher-turned-business-consultant, they grew up mainly in China, attenGed primary school and studied performing arts here. Their careers rocketed after they emceed a bilingual business conference. Now, they appeared on TV singing Beijing Opera and doing rapid-fire comic dialogues, known as _xiangsheng_, in classical Chinese. Such talents are uncommon even among Chinese. Many people can't understand sophisticated _xiangsheng_ puns. But Mike and Charlotte have become celebrities as much because of their nationality as their talent. In one routine, they recite, "As Chairman Mao taught us to say, 'Be modest and you'll progress. Be too proud and you'll regress.'" Chinese audiences love to hear Americans repeat those lines, Charlotte says: "All the cadres sitting in the front row just die." A decade and a half after opening to the world, China still hasn't received the parade of foreign celebrities seen in, for instance, Japan, with its myriad _gaijin_ baseball players, entertainers and talkshow guests. About the only foreigners of Gurable fame in China are Marx and Lenin. A rank below them is Mark Rowswell, a 29-year-old Canadian known to millions of Chinese as "De Shan," or Big Mountain -- "a typical illiterate, country-bumpkin kind of name," he says. His televised skits raze the "stupid foreigner' image In a rattle of Chinese rhymes. After years in the kleig lights, Mr. Rowswell has vaulted into a public-affairs job at Canada's embassy in Beijing, though he still does occasional shows and is recognized everywhere he goes. A celebrity in a land of 1.2 billion people, after all, is never alone. At a Kentucky Fried Chicken on a Nanjing shopping street, Mike and Charlotte want a little privacy to Gown a Pepsi and savor mashed potatoes and gravy. Not e chance. The teenage sisters select a discreet table behind a life-size statue of Col. Sanders, but his fiberglass shoulders aren't broad enough to shield the girls from a gathering of gawkers. "Look," a woman whispers to her son, who abandons his coleslaw to gape, "Ai-Jiang and Ai-Su!" Wondered At and Wooed "This is definitely the worst part," groans Mike, who goes by Ai-jiang -- half of the duo's stage-name Combination that means, literally, "Love Jiangsu." Jiangsu is the province where Mike and Charlotte live and the subject of many of their comic dialogues. At a shop where Bruce Sprtngsteen's "Philadelphia' is blaring from a tape player, the girls look at puppies and kittens for sale while a crowd looks at them. "They speak better Chinese than my children," marvels Zhou Baoxun, a white-haireG 70-year-old. "At least they don't ask for autographs," Mike sighed. No, they want more. A man from nearby Zhejiang province, who saw the Americans on Chinese Central TV's popular Spring Festival show, wrote in to ask for Mtka's hanG. If she wasn't interested, he addeG, he would conslGer marriage to anybody she woul~ care to introGuce. Mtka an~ Charlotte, who also gets suitors by mail, don't reply to amorous would-be penpals. After all, their parents, the Revs. Peter and Elyn Maclnnis, probably wouldn't approve. Peter was born to missionary parents in the coastal Chinese city of Fuzhou in 1948, a year before Mao Tse-tung's Communists swept to power. He met Elyn at Harvard Divinity School, when he worked at a shelter for the homeless and she drove an ambulance. While the Cultural Revolution raged in China, he romanced her with revolutionary ditties. As an engagement present, he introduced her to Mao's Little Red Book. At Home in China When China loosened ldeological controls a notch in 1988, Peter gave up an insurance-company job in Connecticut and moved his family to this htstoric carttel of wide streets and thick, green sycamore trees. He managed modern China's first Bible printing press before quitting last year to start a foreign consulting firm. Elyn became minister of a foretgn congregation here. Their daughters, meantime, soaked up local Culture. One of the first rope-skipping songs they learned began: "Little Red has two hand grenades and has killed 2.5 million Japanese .... " Soon they were enrolled at Nanjtng's Little Red Flowers Song and Dance Troupe, a nationally famous primary school for talented children. They were known as the Big-Foot Americans, but their teacher, Xu Minghua, notes that "the only difference between their singing and Chinese singing is their skin Color." Mike and Charlotte say they don't much miss the U.S., where they spend summers with relatives and meet boyfriend-crazed adolescents who have little interests in far-off China. "They want us to speak some Chinese, and then they're satisfied," Charlotte says. "American kids are pretty mindless." She and her sister do what they can to ensure that Chinese children aren't. They give all their earnings to a program that pays school fees for poor children. And they are planning to host an educational program akin to "Sesame Street" on Nanjing TV. "We have to give something back to China," says Mike, who would like to perform here professionally one day. "It's easier to come back to China than to go to America."