Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Shortly after I published my article about Chinese artists twelve years ago, I was invited to a dinner in New York at which my host told me, “One of my friends is bringing his new girlfriend tonight. She’s Chinese and doesn’t speak much English. I put her next to you since you’ve been there recently.” Han Feng and I began dinner with stiff attempts at conversation in a language we only half shared. I volunteered news of my recent research. “I don’t know much about contemporary art in China,” she said. In a vague attempt to keep the conversation from dying, I related some of my adventures. I wasn’t sure how much was getting through, but at some point I mentioned Geng Jianyi, and she sat up suddenly and said, “Geng Jianyi from Hangzhou? Really, really good-looking, about our age?”

“Yes, that’s the one!”

“I dated him in high school and I never knew what happened to him!”

She came from a country of a billion people; I’d been there. How could we not have someone in common?

Since then, I’ve learned that Han Feng knows most of the world’s interesting people, and I’ve been lucky to be invited to the divine dinners she cooks at home and those she organizes in Chinatown, where one runs into Jessye Norman, Lou Reed, Susan Sarandon, Rupert Murdoch, Anthony Minghella, or, just as likely, her wisecracking upstairs neighbor, or the fur buyer who once paid her a compliment. Her satisfying, throaty laugh makes every evening feel like a celebration. Han Feng is profoundly international. “I love wherever I am and whatever I’m doing,” she once said to me. She arrived in the United States as “a Chinese peasant potato,” as she says. “Some people climb staircase of success,” she told her then husband. “I take express elevator.” Soon she met someone who wanted to back her design activities and promised to make her rich and famous. “I said, ‘Maybe we can forget about famous and concentrate on very rich.’ ” Since then, she has developed a private label that has been sold at Bendel’s, Takashimaya, Bergdorf’s, and Barneys; designed opera costumes for the English National Opera and the Met; and made a line of clothes for the Neue Galerie in New York. She is an international style icon who has been the face of Christian Dior in China and has graced the covers of American magazines.

After her divorce, she had a long-term relationship, which ended when her boyfriend said he wanted to move in. “I can’t believe it! I say, ‘Move in? Move in? I don’t have that kind of closet space!’ ” Most people fall in love with Han Feng if they get half a chance. The king of Morocco has commissioned her to make many of his clothes, and she has been a regular guest at his palace. “I stay there and see all the pomp and circumstance,” she confided, “and I think how glad I am to live a simple life!” It’s the most high-powered simplicity I’ve ever encountered; whatever kind of potato she was when she left China, she’s become an orchid of the first order.

We started in Shanghai, where my favorite place was the YongFoo Élite, brainchild of a local decorator who leased the former residence of the British consul and spent three years and $5 million restoring the space, furnishing it with antiques, and replanting its gardens, giving it the aura of the old Shanghai: decadent, lavish, and sophisticated. While we rhapsodized about the sweet shrimp, the fish fried with pine nuts, and the quail’s eggs roasted with octopus and pork, our Chinese friends were impressed by the romaine salad—an exotic touch in such a setting. Dessert is not always Chinese cuisine’s strong point, but the crisp date pancakes with sesame seeds were both tangy and sweet, as if they were already nostalgic about the rest of the meal. After dinner there, we went to a jazz club that felt like a speakeasy and met up with artist friends. Later, we headed off to the perennially fashionable Face Bar, where we met a Chinese doctor friend of Han Feng’s, who took my pulse and prescribed a health regimen even as we lounged on opium beds drinking hot brandy toddies; the next day, I found myself being whisked off to the acupuncturist.