After marrying a handsome husband, Colorful Clouds finally felt proud, and resumed contact with her old acquaintances.

Brian is a physicist. He did not make Colorful Clouds work, and wanted only that she realize her dreams of leading a happy life and becoming a great performer.

Colorful Clouds became a middle-class housewife and mother of three. She vowed solemnly to break into Hollywood. She believed that her skin color and appearance, while not sought after in China, would be liked by these Westerners.

She and Brian moved the family to southern California to help her make it in Hollywood. But after countless auditions, she never won a part. Even worse, her appearance, which she thought was so special, was common in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. She was even more common in the States than she was in China. At least in China people used to admire her Zhuang ethnic features.

What made Colorful Clouds especially unhappy was that the Chinese theater groups who visited the States had not hired her. After so many years, she appeared in only one feature movie – as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, with a total of two lines.

As time passed, Brian became disappointed that Colorful Clouds had not found work and moved back to the Midwest. He began to feel that perhaps his mysterious wife was really just mediocre after all. Colorful Clouds watched Brian rush about making a living, getting older every day. He had much less hair than before, but much more of a belly. The handsome air he had before they were married was gone. He had become a middle-aged man. The differences between the m grew greater, and they even began sleeping in separate beds. But her penchant for young men remained unchanged.

To kill time, Colorful Clouds began to hang out in the coffee shops at the University of Missouri, and there she met a lot of young men. Many of them became her lovers. Colorful Clouds had several lovers, but she still felt empty and did not know what to do with her time.

Colorful Clouds often telephoned me since I was a student there back then. She needed an audience to listen to her story – to listen to her show off, and vent, and curse everyone for her situation. She sometimes went overboard, blaming everyone and everything but herself: this girlfriend stabbed her in the back, that lover slept with her cousin, and on and on. I was like a garbage dump, taking all of Colorful Clouds' rubbish.

Colorful Clouds was a gifted liar. Her real life bore no resemblance whatsoever to the life she recounted. Sometimes she said Brian had something going with another Chinese woman. This woman, who had abandoned her husband and children in China to establish herself in the United States, was a minor actress, nowhere near as good as Colorful Clouds. Colorful Clouds plotted how to catch the adulterers in the act. Sometimes she said that her husband was the most faithful man on earth, who only had eyes for her. I never pointed out the inconsistencies in Colorful Clouds' stories. I understood that she relied on intuition. If she wanted something, she would get it, whether it was in the real world or in the world of her imagination.

When I returned to China from the United States, the huge changes that the country has gone through were immediately clear. Most people used to take pride in their humbleness and conformity. Not only was attracting attention something that didn't interest them, it was something that people were genuinely afraid of. There is an old Chinese saying: "The bird that flies ahead of the flock is the first to be shot down." Now, with the opening up of the country and the new market economy, it seems as though everyone I meet is a braggart and an attention-seeker. Being different from the crowd is actually encouraged. These ambitious birds have no fear of being shot down.

Fifteen years ago, if you were a performer, you were guaranteed to become a household name by showing your face at the annual Spring Festival gala produced by CCTV. Nowadays you have to be not only creative but also shameless to become famous because everybody realizes that attention can bring money.

In cultural circles, there are four popular ways of seeking fame.

First, create controversy. For example, claim you are gay or bisexual. Publicize your love triangle stories, your affairs with married people, or even make them up. Pay a foreign stud to write a book about your wild sex life entitled My Sexy Chinese Doll. The whole point is to invite criticism and create shock. If people start to bad-mouth you, ding! Your mission is accomplished: you are known and fame sells.

Second, fake your credentials and background. For example, if your mother is a shop clerk, you would tell people that she owns several chain stores. A Danish tourist says hi to you in Chinese on a bus? You tell the media that you dated the cousin of the Danish prince. You took some open university courses at Yale? Claim you got an M.B.A. degree there.

Third, beg the government to ban you. Find connections in the Ministry of Propaganda and talk them into including your movies or your books in their blacklist. It's free advertising and attracts the attention of a worldwide audience.

Fourth, insult the establishment. You're a little potato, but by insulting famous people, you can become famous. For example, sling mud at the hottest movie star, or claim Lu Xun's books and Zhang Yimo's movies are trash.

Colorful Clouds got her first fifteen minutes of fame by being a sex expert in the online beauty forum, then she got her second fifteen minutes of fame by telling the Chinese media that she married her former husband's grandson. Now she is back in Columbia, Missouri, once again just an average housewife. She feels lonely and misses her fleeting fame in China. I'm on a business trip in St. Louis, covering the talk of China 's best-known wandering poet Sing. The University of Missouri literature department has invited Sing to give a reading at the university. It's his first reading since winning a major book award.

"I've got to drive to St. Louis for this event! It's a good chance to get noticed!" Colorful Clouds tells me excitedly on the phone.

As Colorful Clouds expects, the poetry reading attracts a big crowd. She comes, dragging her fair-haired Eurasian kids.

Sing has lived in exile since 1989, and his political poetry has gained him the reputation of being China 's Aleksandr Solzhen-itsyn. After the poetry reading, Colorful Clouds stands up and, cradling her sleeping child, let fly at the wandering poet.

"Sing, before I left China, in 1984, I heard you speak at the Guangxi Art Institute. At the time, I was a university student, just arrived in Nanning from the country. I didn't know much of the world, and I adored you. Now more than ten years have passed, and I've been in the United States for over ten years. Why is everything you say still the same old stuff? Are you that fond of the good old days? If not, why hasn't your style evolved at all? And your English isn't even as good as those of us who are just housewives here in America!"

It's clear that Colorful Clouds is trying to insult Sing at this refined poetry-reading event in order to get attention. Sing is so angry he can't speak. His American translator is also scratching his head and doesn't know how to translate Colorful Clouds' words for the American audience.

Colorful Clouds decides to go whole hog and translates her own words into English. Turning to face the audience, she relates what she has just accused Sing of. As she speaks in her sloppy English to the shocked crowd, her eyes are wide and her face is flushed with emotion. Her arms wave vigorously and violently from side to side, as if accusing the audience of the same shortcomings merely for attending the event.