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SCMP Reporter

SLAPPING THE TOP of her ample chest with a plump hand, Cheryl Baisden Zhao, an American from Savannah, Georgia, drawls through shapely, rose-painted lips. 'I have a Southern lady's bosom,'  the Beijing resident says.

Come the autumn, Baisden Zhao's bosom should be smaller, freckle-free - or not 'Southern' any more.

Part-sponsored by Beijing cosmetic-surgery clinic EverCare, the 121-kilogram, 1.72-metre Baisden Zhao will tomorrow embark on eight months of plastic surgery, which will include stomach stapling, multiple liposuction, liposculpture, defreckling and other nips, tucks and slices designed to take her down to about 68kg, the least she will have weighed since her college days, when she says she tipped the scales at 84kg.

EverCare says its 'American Beauty' project will consolidate its claim as leader in China's competitive plastic surgery market.

Baisden Zhao just hopes to be thin, and free of the few freckles that dot her bosom. In mainland society, where people include their height and weight on job applications, cosmetic surgery is increasingly regarded as just another life choice, but the medical hazards and moral issues are largely ignored.

The  mainland authorities don't keep statistics on the size of the market, but clinics such as EverCare have expanded rapidly in recent years.

Set up in 2002, surgeons in its Beijing hospital carry out between eight and 10 operations a day, according to the company's marketing director, Bao Huai. EverCare also has branches in Shanghai, Qingdao and Tianjin; a representative office in London and a new clinic will shortly open in Harbin.

Even by the busy standards of China's burgeoning beauty industry, the story of  Baisden Zhao, an artist, amateur astrologer and self-styled 'queen-sized' China lover, stands out.

Born in America's South as Cheryl Baisden, she is reticent about her age, and will only say that she is 'somewhere in my late 30s'. But she says she was convinced that she had lived in China in previous lives. 'It started when I was about three,' she says in Bao's office, a drab, windowless room in Beijing's Haidian district. 'I began having these really powerful, very strong dreams. I was a little, round-faced Chinese girl with red cheeks and there was this grandmother who said, 'We usually wait until they're five, but she's big,' and she bound my feet. Even in my dream it was agony. I can remember her wrapping and wrapping my feet.

'Here I was, with a perfect Marilyn Monroe-blonde-type mother and my dad, very tall Jewish-German looking, in our average American household. There was nothing very foreign or anything,' she says.

'Then one day, a Chinese family opened a restaurant on the corner of my street. They had a son who was in his 20s, a lot older than me. I just thought he was beautiful,' Baisden Zhao says, her voice swooping in emphasis. 'I'm an artist. I get hypnotised by beauty. Well, he was just so beautiful. That skin.' She pats her cheeks.

Baisden Zhao's passion for China and its men was to be unrequited for years. 'She had always been attracted to Chinese men but ... the Chinese men in Savannah were usually waiters who spoke little English, very old immigrants, or handsome-but-married art professors,' says Bao in a draft of a book he is hoping to publish about the makeover.

Married - unhappily - with two children whom she conceived while she was still a teenager, she seemed impossibly far away from China. Until a few years ago. Divorced, and with her children grown up, Baisden Zhao was in search of a new life and a new man. She began having dreams that all told her to move east.

'We've always been a mystical family,' she says. 'My sister, mother and grandmother talk with the dead. Now I don't do that. I used to read tarot cards but you can't read them for yourself, so I chose astrology instead.'

She sold her design business in Savannah and flew to Beijing during the Sars scare, in the spring of 2003. She was unfazed by the scare. 'I felt I was supposed to be here,' she says. 'I was very calm. I interpret this as God's plan in my life. When I'm in tune with God's plan I feel calm.'

In Beijing, she consulted an online astrologer. 'I thought, this is a big moment in my life and I need a little extra guidance,' Baisden Zhao says. The astrologer told her she would meet the man of her dreams through 'non-physical' means, so she placed an advertisement in one of Beijing's English-language magazines. 'I put in the ad that I was a 'queen-sized lady',' she says. Curiously, among the men who responded was Bao, before he joined EverCare. While the two exchanged letters and e-mails, the spark wasn't there.

But  it was with other applicants, such as Edward. In the summer, she agreed to marry him. Then one day she read an e-mail in which he told a former lover he was using Baisden to get to the US. Exit Edward. Enter Peter Zhao, a slim, 1.69-metre tall Beijinger whom Baisden Zhao describes laughingly as 'a little nerdy, a little naive and sweet'. Intriguingly for her, he signed off on his letters with: 'May God always bless your life.'

Baisden Zhao says: 'I thought, maybe he's religious - but I couldn't believe it, here in Beijing, meeting a religious guy.  My mother had warned me before I left that I would never find a Christian to marry. So I asked him what church he went to.' And he wrote back saying he went to Beijing South Cathedral.

'Not just a Christian, but a Catholic like me, and going to my church,' she says. 'On a Sunday later in June we arranged to meet at the church. When I saw him I thought he was the priest.'  Baisden Zhao laughs with a throaty chuckle.

'The first time [we] went out to dinner, he said, 'You know, I really don't mind that you're fat. It makes you very womanly.' It was destiny.' Baisden Zhao says  they  married five months later.

If Zhao, who runs a small printing business, didn't mind the size of his wife, plenty of other people did. Despite a growing obesity problem in the country, Baisden Zhao  drew a lot of unwanted  attention.

'My God, all my girlfriends back home are within 22kg of what I am,' she says. 'But here, I get stared at and pointed at. I would hear, 'Oh my God she's got big boobs,' and, 'Oh my God she's fat.' It really bothered me because I wanted to make a new start and be comfortable.'

Life in China as an overweight person was harder than in the US. Most people walk more than the average American does, her husband included. At the end of every day, Baisden Zhao's joints would ache and her hips would hurt. Sightseeing was torture.

The problem finally came to a head when her husband wanted to climb the Great Wall. 'I didn't know we'd be walking and I was wearing these red, backless shoes,' Baisden Zhao says. 'We took the cable car up, but you've still got to toil your way up the mountain to get to the top. I just broke down in tears. That's when I realised: I want a new life. I want a new body.'

Baisden Zhao says her dark-haired looks earned her the nickname 'Liz Taylor' at college. Rather uncannily, during a photo shoot in a Beijing hotel, a clearly nervous European woman approaches her and asks: 'Are you Elizabeth? Elizabeth Taylor?'

As she walks away from the brief encounter, Baisden Zhao shrieks: 'Did you hear that? She asked if I was Elizabeth Taylor.' Seconds later, Baisden Zhao stands in a German restaurant. 'Mmmmm. Smell that rye bread. The hops,' she says. 'I can make a meal out of warm rye bread and beer.'

Trailing Baisden Zhao every step of the way is Bao, a smooth-faced, former Chinese opera singer whose eyes dart about when he talks. Baisden Zhao says Bao is her 'best friend' in Beijing; Bao describes her as 'my best non-physical soulmate'.

Reluctantly, he corroborates what Baisden Zhao has already revealed: they met when he answered her ad, about the time he started working at the cosmetic surgery company.

Does he often answer lonely hearts ads? 'No, but her ad was very poetic,' says Bao, his eyes sliding away. 'We both love Emily Dickinson.'

Bao is planning to write two books based on his soulmate's experiences. The first will detail Baisden Zhao's makeover. Bao tells her he thinks their original title Her New Life in China - is 'very boring'. 'How about calling it Marrying China. That's so patriotic,' he says, drowning out Baisden Zhao's protests of: 'No I don't like that, Bao, I want there to be something of me in this.' On the title of the second book - about inter-racial dating - they are agreed: Crouching Tiger Seeks Hidden Dragon.

To help pay for the operations, EverCare has offered a 50,000-yuan reduction on total costs of about 200,000 yuan. In exchange, she will promote the company whenever she appears in public.

That kind of deal is common in the mainland's cosmetic surgery business. In July, EverCare sponsored 24-year-old Beijinger Hao Lulu in a total makeover - if she would act as PR for their company.

Dr Henry Chan,  associate professor and chief of dermatology at the University of Hong Kong's Department of Medicine, says the practice is giving the profession a bad name. 'Personally, I don't feel it's appropriate to use patients to get publicity,' he says. 'It decreases respect for the profession and makes it seem just like a commercial thing.'

Baisden Zhao says her life has been tough. 'You could write a book about it,' she says of times with a father who rejected her and a violent husband.  And despite her large body, carrying voice and salty sense of humour, there are signs of the vulnerability of someone who is willing to trust anyone who promises them a fat-free life.

'I know beauty is an illusion. But when I was young and beautiful I didn't appreciate it,' says Baisden Zhao. 'I had perfect skin and very few freckles. So now I figure it's the time to become beautiful again and really appreciate it. I've finally found someone who really loves me - who didn't marry me because I had big boobs. All my life I've worked on the inside of me, and now I'm gonna work on the outside.'

With about a dozen procedures looming, is Baisden Zhao scared? 'Oh God yes,' she says. 'I'm scared to death in a way. But  I just feel more comfortable here in China than with American doctors. Well, like, they're going to do acupuncture to help me heal from the operation.'



Knives, camera, action