Pure and pretty girls hard to find in China?

 

Zhang Yimou says he is upset about the demise of "pure" girls. CFP Photo

 

By Huang Daohen

There are more than 1.3 billion people in China, but movie director Zhang Yimou lamented recently that it was difficult to find a pure and simple-hearted girl in China today.

In order to find an actress to play Jing Qiu in his latest film, Romance Under the Hawthorne Tree, Zhang searched far and wide and interviewed more than 10,000 young women.

“If you look at pictures taken in the 1960s or 1970s, you will see an aura of purity around every man or woman in those pictures,” Zhang said at a press conference last week. “But that’s a bygone quality that you hardly see in any young faces today.”

Zhang joked that teens nowadays are uglier because beautiful women choose to marry ugly but rich old men.

Other directors have come across the same problem. Wang Quanan said he was once in a pinch because he couldn’t find an actress to star in his new film, Bailuyuan.

Wang eventually chose Li Meng, a Beijing college student, after looking at as many as 3,000 young women across the country.

Zhang eventually settled on Zhou Dongyu, 17, a high school student from Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province.

Zhang and Wang’s lamentations aroused a heated debate. Many say young people today are too open and their casual attitudes toward sex have made finding a “pure” actress “mission impossible.”