Inside the baffling murder that inspired 'Twin Peaks'
Her death inspired the cult 1990s TV show 'Twin Peaks.' Her ghost is said to haunt the woods where her body was found more than 100 years ago. And yet Hazel I. Drew remains a mystery.
Drew was a pretty, vivacious 19-year-old blonde living in Troy, NY, when she disappeared near her uncle's farm on July 7, 1908. Locals spotted her body floating in a mill pond days later.
7 A scene from 'Twin Peaks,' with actor Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, whose death anchored the show — and was inspired by the real life Hazel I. Drew, murdered in upstate New York in 1908.
Everett Collection / Everett Collection
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Her death gripped the nation — reporters from the Big Apple to the Old West breathlessly covered the case. Was it a suicide? A murder? An accident?
Rumors swirled. A few days before she vanished, Drew had abruptly quit her job as a governess for a prominent local family. In fact, her acquaintances whispered, Hazel had been acting sort of strange lately. She consorted with lots of men. She had fallen ill and gone away for a month. She had arrived at the door of her dressmaker one evening begging her to make her a new shirtwaist that night for a weekend sojourn to Lake George.
The papers printed every sensational claim: Hazel had been pregnant! Hazel was a sex worker! Hazel was living a double life! As if the only way a girl could have gotten herself killed was if she had asked for it.
7 Another shot of Lee in 'Twin Peaks.' Although Drake inspired the show's development, she was seldom discussed during its production or years-long television run.
©New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection
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'It was a common trope in crime writing,' said Jerry C. Drake — a civil servant, former history professor and author of the new book 'Hazel Was a Good Girl' (CLASH, out June 10), which claims to solve Hazel's murder.
'This sort of archetype of the fallen woman, but in Hazel's case, it was absolutely untrue,' he told The Post. 'I wanted to give her justice.'
'Hazel Was a Good Girl,' however, also aims to restore Hazel's good name, to show the young woman behind the myth, to portray her as distinct from Laura Palmer, her dead-blonde 'Twin Peaks' doppelganger.
'Going into this, I thought even if I can't solve her case, I can at least fix her reputation,' Drake said. 'I can decouple her from Laura Palmer and rechristen her as who she really was.'
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Hazel I. Drew was born in 1888, to a large working-class Irish-Methodist family in Rensselaer County, NY. When she was 14, she moved to Troy, where her aunt — a domestic servant for the city's well-heeled — helped Hazel get jobs in the homes of prominent members of the local Republican party.
7 'Going into this, I thought even if I can't solve her case, I can at least fix her reputation,' said author Drake. 'I can decouple her from Laura Palmer and rechristen her as who she really was.'
Albany Times Union
Hazel did not come from wealth, but she was educated — she was described as always having her nose in a book — and she soon advanced to being a governess. She enjoyed the privileges that came with working for the upper classes: fine food, nice clothes, opulent surroundings, access to the best doctors and dentists, as well as a library of books. She was vivacious and curious and eager to experience life.
'She liked nice things,' Drake said. 'She would have had disposable income, and she spent it on good clothes. She had expensive eyeglasses. She liked to go out with her girlfriends and spent the weekends skating and going to the amusement park. She traveled to New York City and Boston with friends. But she also went to church religiously — she would bring her dates to church.'
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Her family members said she had various suitors, and one of her friends mentioned that she was seeing a man who worked at a dentist's office. Yet, Hazel didn't seem serious about any of these potential paramours. Her letters weren't flirtatious but friendly. She mainly seemed concerned with having a good time with her girlfriends.
Yet something strange did seem to happen to Hazel in the months leading up to her death. She had been traveling across the Eastern Seaboard. She fell ill and had to convalesce at her uncle's farm. Her friends, family members and employers had conflicting accounts of where she was at any given moment.
7 Author Drake says he was 'obsessed' with David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks,' which was based on Hazel's murder.
Getty Images for ABA
Her mother — who later hired a psychic to help solve Hazel's death — said that she believed someone 'who was well to do' had 'Hazel in his control.'
The district attorney investigating the case tried to rule it as a suicide, but the autopsy proved otherwise. Hazel had not drowned, the doctors revealed, but had died from a blow to the back of the head. Someone had hit her, or caused her to fall and hit her head, and then dumped her in the river. Locals wrote letters claiming to have solved the killing in their dreams. Someone claimed hypnosis was involved.
'It was very 'Twin Peaks,'' Drake said. 'But unfortunately, Hazel didn't have an Agent Dale Cooper helping her.'
A month into the rollercoaster investigation, however, the DA closed the case. The press — formerly in a frenzy over who killed Hazel Drew — moved on to the next dead blonde. Even after her story compelled Mark Frost, whose grandmother grew up in Troy, to write 'Twin Peaks' with David Lynch, Hazel was rarely brought up again.
7 A snow-covered gravestone is a modest testament to Hazel's brief life.
Courtesy of Jerry C. Drake, PhD
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Drake loved 'Twin Peaks' and became obsessed with unsolved mysteries when it was on the air. And yet, he had never heard the name Hazel Drew until it appeared to him in a dream in 2019. In the dream, his friend — who had just moved to Troy — handed him a book, and inside there was a bookplate that read 'Ex Libris Hazel I. Drew.'
When he woke up, he wrote the name down and later Googled it. He found a podcast about the legend of Hazel Drew and a short post from the site Find a Grave that said that Hazel's story had inspired 'Twin Peaks.'
'I just was like, 'Well, I'm obsessed with this,'' he recalled. 'I love David Lynch, I love this show, I love ghosts and mysteries, and my friend is now living in this town, so I was like, I'm going to take the week off, my wife and I will go to Troy.'
Then things got really weird. Hazel appeared to him in dreams — introducing him to a family member as a guy 'working on my case' or leading him to a cafe. He experienced several spooky presences by her grave, including a rock thrown at him from out of nowhere. He woke up in mi an AirbNb in Troy after one of his dreams about her to find a black crow in his room.
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Yet Drake said that none of these instances deterred him from pursuing his investigation, but only spurred him on.
'My feeling was this is a person who had unfinished business,' he said. 'They say that ghosts want their wrongs righted, and they maybe cry out from the other side for people who they think they can do that.'
7 Author Jerry. C. Drake
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He said that he is confident that he has named her murderer — read the book to find out who — even if he doesn't have the definitive smoking gun. 'I hope it will stimulate people to ask rational questions about her killer,' he said, and maybe even give Hazel's ghost some peace and justice.
'That's why I ended up calling the book 'Hazel Was a Good Girl,' because everybody kept saying that,' he said. 'Her mom says that the doctors say it, it's, it's, there's even a clip of it on the cover. … So, I thought, 'I'm just gonna give her, her, her good name back.''
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6 hours ago
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Inside the baffling murder that inspired 'Twin Peaks'
Her death inspired the cult 1990s TV show 'Twin Peaks.' Her ghost is said to haunt the woods where her body was found more than 100 years ago. And yet Hazel I. Drew remains a mystery. Drew was a pretty, vivacious 19-year-old blonde living in Troy, NY, when she disappeared near her uncle's farm on July 7, 1908. Locals spotted her body floating in a mill pond days later. 7 A scene from 'Twin Peaks,' with actor Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, whose death anchored the show — and was inspired by the real life Hazel I. Drew, murdered in upstate New York in 1908. Everett Collection / Everett Collection Advertisement Her death gripped the nation — reporters from the Big Apple to the Old West breathlessly covered the case. Was it a suicide? A murder? An accident? Rumors swirled. A few days before she vanished, Drew had abruptly quit her job as a governess for a prominent local family. In fact, her acquaintances whispered, Hazel had been acting sort of strange lately. She consorted with lots of men. She had fallen ill and gone away for a month. She had arrived at the door of her dressmaker one evening begging her to make her a new shirtwaist that night for a weekend sojourn to Lake George. The papers printed every sensational claim: Hazel had been pregnant! Hazel was a sex worker! Hazel was living a double life! As if the only way a girl could have gotten herself killed was if she had asked for it. 7 Another shot of Lee in 'Twin Peaks.' Although Drake inspired the show's development, she was seldom discussed during its production or years-long television run. ©New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection Advertisement 'It was a common trope in crime writing,' said Jerry C. Drake — a civil servant, former history professor and author of the new book 'Hazel Was a Good Girl' (CLASH, out June 10), which claims to solve Hazel's murder. 'This sort of archetype of the fallen woman, but in Hazel's case, it was absolutely untrue,' he told The Post. 'I wanted to give her justice.' 'Hazel Was a Good Girl,' however, also aims to restore Hazel's good name, to show the young woman behind the myth, to portray her as distinct from Laura Palmer, her dead-blonde 'Twin Peaks' doppelganger. 'Going into this, I thought even if I can't solve her case, I can at least fix her reputation,' Drake said. 'I can decouple her from Laura Palmer and rechristen her as who she really was.' Advertisement Hazel I. Drew was born in 1888, to a large working-class Irish-Methodist family in Rensselaer County, NY. When she was 14, she moved to Troy, where her aunt — a domestic servant for the city's well-heeled — helped Hazel get jobs in the homes of prominent members of the local Republican party. 7 'Going into this, I thought even if I can't solve her case, I can at least fix her reputation,' said author Drake. 'I can decouple her from Laura Palmer and rechristen her as who she really was.' Albany Times Union Hazel did not come from wealth, but she was educated — she was described as always having her nose in a book — and she soon advanced to being a governess. She enjoyed the privileges that came with working for the upper classes: fine food, nice clothes, opulent surroundings, access to the best doctors and dentists, as well as a library of books. She was vivacious and curious and eager to experience life. 'She liked nice things,' Drake said. 'She would have had disposable income, and she spent it on good clothes. She had expensive eyeglasses. She liked to go out with her girlfriends and spent the weekends skating and going to the amusement park. She traveled to New York City and Boston with friends. But she also went to church religiously — she would bring her dates to church.' Advertisement Her family members said she had various suitors, and one of her friends mentioned that she was seeing a man who worked at a dentist's office. Yet, Hazel didn't seem serious about any of these potential paramours. Her letters weren't flirtatious but friendly. She mainly seemed concerned with having a good time with her girlfriends. Yet something strange did seem to happen to Hazel in the months leading up to her death. She had been traveling across the Eastern Seaboard. She fell ill and had to convalesce at her uncle's farm. Her friends, family members and employers had conflicting accounts of where she was at any given moment. 7 Author Drake says he was 'obsessed' with David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks,' which was based on Hazel's murder. Getty Images for ABA Her mother — who later hired a psychic to help solve Hazel's death — said that she believed someone 'who was well to do' had 'Hazel in his control.' The district attorney investigating the case tried to rule it as a suicide, but the autopsy proved otherwise. Hazel had not drowned, the doctors revealed, but had died from a blow to the back of the head. Someone had hit her, or caused her to fall and hit her head, and then dumped her in the river. Locals wrote letters claiming to have solved the killing in their dreams. Someone claimed hypnosis was involved. 'It was very 'Twin Peaks,'' Drake said. 'But unfortunately, Hazel didn't have an Agent Dale Cooper helping her.' A month into the rollercoaster investigation, however, the DA closed the case. The press — formerly in a frenzy over who killed Hazel Drew — moved on to the next dead blonde. Even after her story compelled Mark Frost, whose grandmother grew up in Troy, to write 'Twin Peaks' with David Lynch, Hazel was rarely brought up again. 7 A snow-covered gravestone is a modest testament to Hazel's brief life. Courtesy of Jerry C. Drake, PhD Advertisement Drake loved 'Twin Peaks' and became obsessed with unsolved mysteries when it was on the air. And yet, he had never heard the name Hazel Drew until it appeared to him in a dream in 2019. In the dream, his friend — who had just moved to Troy — handed him a book, and inside there was a bookplate that read 'Ex Libris Hazel I. Drew.' When he woke up, he wrote the name down and later Googled it. He found a podcast about the legend of Hazel Drew and a short post from the site Find a Grave that said that Hazel's story had inspired 'Twin Peaks.' 'I just was like, 'Well, I'm obsessed with this,'' he recalled. 'I love David Lynch, I love this show, I love ghosts and mysteries, and my friend is now living in this town, so I was like, I'm going to take the week off, my wife and I will go to Troy.' Then things got really weird. Hazel appeared to him in dreams — introducing him to a family member as a guy 'working on my case' or leading him to a cafe. He experienced several spooky presences by her grave, including a rock thrown at him from out of nowhere. He woke up in mi an AirbNb in Troy after one of his dreams about her to find a black crow in his room. Advertisement Yet Drake said that none of these instances deterred him from pursuing his investigation, but only spurred him on. 'My feeling was this is a person who had unfinished business,' he said. 'They say that ghosts want their wrongs righted, and they maybe cry out from the other side for people who they think they can do that.' 7 Author Jerry. C. Drake Advertisement He said that he is confident that he has named her murderer — read the book to find out who — even if he doesn't have the definitive smoking gun. 'I hope it will stimulate people to ask rational questions about her killer,' he said, and maybe even give Hazel's ghost some peace and justice. 'That's why I ended up calling the book 'Hazel Was a Good Girl,' because everybody kept saying that,' he said. 'Her mom says that the doctors say it, it's, it's, there's even a clip of it on the cover. … So, I thought, 'I'm just gonna give her, her, her good name back.''
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I moved to Beijing, with funding from a Luce scholarship, and started looking for stories. They weren't hard to find. The years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics turned out to be a remarkable era of relative openness. Many international observers saw Xi Jinping's rise in 2012 as the beginning of a period of liberalization, the inevitable political outcome of the country's growing prosperity. For journalists, China was a playground and a gold mine at once. We could travel (mostly) freely and talk to (almost) anyone. Along with the wealth of narrative material came a sense of purpose: We felt as though we were writing the story of the New China—a country opening up to the rest of the world, trying on identities, experimenting with new ways of thinking and living. The story that captivated me most was that of the Chongqing Dockers. It was one of those article ideas that miraculously fall in your lap, and in retrospect feel like fate. I'd heard that McLaurin, another Luce Scholar, had started coaching a football team in Chongqing, so I flew down to visit him. The first practice I attended was barely controlled chaos: The team didn't have proper equipment, no one wanted to hit one another, and they kept taking cigarette breaks. 'It was like 'Little Giants,' except with adult Chinese men,' I wrote to my editor at The New Republic. He green-lighted the story, and I spent the next year following the team, as well as McLaurin's efforts to create a nationwide league. The movie analogy was fortuitous. Just before the article was published, Sony bought the IP rights, as well as the rights to McLaurin's life story. The project would be developed by Escape Artists, the production company co-founded by Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants. Maybe the NFL, struggling to break into the Chinese market, would even get involved. The deal changed McLaurin's life. Sony flew him and his mom out to Los Angeles, where a limo picked them up at the airport. He met with Tisch and the other producers. They floated Chris Pratt for the role of the coach. One executive asked McLaurin if he'd considered acting. McLaurin also met with high-level executives at the NFL interested in helping establish American football in China. He'd been planning to apply to law school, but now he decided to stay in Chongqing and keep developing the league. In retrospect, the China-Hollywood love affair was at that point in its wildest throes. As the reporter Erich Schwartzel recounts in his 2022 book, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China spent the late 2000s and 2010s learning the craft of blockbusting by partnering with Hollywood filmmakers and executives. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, got access to the growing market of Chinese moviegoers. (In 2012, then–Vice President Joe Biden negotiated an agreement to raise the quota of U.S. films allowed to screen in China.) It was, in effect, a classic technology transfer, much like General Motors setting up factories in China in exchange for teaching Chinese workers how to build cars. Erich Schwartzel: How China captured Hollywood With a potential audience of 1.4 billion, every U.S. studio was trying to make movies that would appeal to the Chinese market. This led to some ham-fisted creative choices. The filmmakers behind Iron Man 3 added a scene in which a Chinese doctor saves Tony Stark's life, though it wasn't included in the U.S. cut. The Chinese release of Rian Johnson's time-travel thriller, Looper, contained a gratuitous sequence in which Bruce Willis and Xu Qing gallivant around Shanghai. In the same film, Jeff Daniels's character tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt's, 'I'm from the future—you should go to China.' The threat of being denied a Chinese release also resulted in countless acts of self-censorship by Hollywood studios. Sony changed the villains of its Red Dawn remake from Chinese to North Korean in postproduction, and removed a scene showing the destruction of the Great Wall of China from the Adam Sandler film Pixels. In this environment, Hollywood put a premium on stories that could appeal equally to American and Chinese audiences. That usually meant going as broad as possible and leaning away from cultural specifics, as in the Transformers and Marvel movies. But in theory, another, more difficult path existed, the Hollywood equivalent of the Northwest Passage: a movie that incorporated Chinese and American cultures equally. This could be a breakthrough not only in the box office but also in storytelling. It could even map a future for the two countries, offering proof that we have more in common than we might think. The producers at Sony apparently hoped that a 'Year of the Pigskin' adaptation could pull off that trick. 'The movie we want to develop is JERRY MAGUIRE meets THE BAD NEWS BEARS set in China,' Tisch wrote in an email to Sony's then-chairman and CEO, Michael Lynton. 'This is the perfect movie to film in China.' But there was a puzzle built into the project. 'The struggle for me was trying to figure out who the movie was for,' Ian Helfer, who was hired to write the screenplay, told me recently. His task was to create a comedy that would be a vehicle for a big American star while appealing to Chinese audiences. But nobody in Hollywood really knew what Chinese audiences wanted, aside from tentpole action movies. They seemed happy to watch Tom Cruise save the world, but would they pay to see Chris Pratt teach them how to play an obscure foreign sport? Helfer's vision mostly tracked the original article: An American former college-football star goes to China and teaches the locals to play football. Everyone learns some important lessons about teamwork, brotherhood, and cultural differences along the way. He turned in a draft and hoped for the best. Most Hollywood projects die in development, and the autopsy is rarely conclusive. Exactly why the Sony project fizzled is not clear. Helfer said he'd heard that Sony's China office had objected to the project because it didn't feature a Chinese protagonist. Whatever the reason, when the 'Pigskin' option came up for renewal in 2017, Sony passed. By then, the China-Hollywood wave was cresting. The Zhang Yimou–directed co-production The Great Wall, released in 2017 and starring Matt Damon, flopped in the United States. That same year, the agreement that had raised the quota of U.S. films in China expired. Xi Jinping, who was turning out not to be the liberal reformer many Westerners had hoped for, railed against foreign cultural influence and encouraged homegrown art. His plan worked: Although China had depended on the U.S. for both entertainment and training earlier in the decade, it was now producing its own big-budget triumphs. In 2017, the jingoistic action flick Wolf Warrior 2 broke Chinese box-office records and ushered in a new era of nationalist blockbusters. At the same time, however, U.S. box-office revenues had plateaued, making the Chinese market even more important for Hollywood profits. After Sony declined to renew, Paramount optioned the rights to 'Year of the Pigskin,' and the development gears ground back into motion. This time, there was apparent interest from John Cena, who was in the midst of a full-on pivot to China, which included studying Mandarin. (He hadn't yet torpedoed his career there by referring to Taiwan as a 'country' in an interview, after which he apologized profusely in a much-mocked video.) The Paramount version of 'Pigskin' died when the studio discovered belatedly that football wasn't big in China, according to Toby Jaffe, the producer who'd arranged the deal. 'They realized that it wasn't well-suited for the Chinese market,' he told me recently. 'So the reason they bought it for maybe wasn't the most logical analysis.' The option expired once again in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic snuffed out whatever flame still burned in the China-Hollywood romance. McLaurin's China dreams were fading too. His hopes for a broad expansion of American football in China—he had started working for the NFL in Shanghai—seemed out of reach. He left China and went to law school. I figured we'd never hear about a 'Pigskin' adaptation again. When I met the Clash producer and screenwriter Wu Tao outside a hotel in Rotterdam in February, he greeted me with a hug. He told me he couldn't believe we were finally meeting after all these years, given how our lives were both intertwined with the Dockers. 'It's fate,' he said. Wu has spiky hair, a goatee, and an energy that belies his 51 years. He was wearing a bright-green sweater covered with black hearts with the words THANKYOUIDON'TCARE spelled backwards. We sat down at a coffee table in the hotel lobby alongside the director of Clash, Jiang Jiachen. Jiang was wearing computer-teacher glasses and a ribbed gray sweater. Wu, who'd produced and written the script for Clash, right away called out the elephant in the room with a joke. He had stolen one line from my article, he said with a chuckle—a character saying, 'Welcome to Chongqing'—but hadn't paid me for the IP. (This line does not actually appear in the article.) 'Next time,' I said. Wu said he'd been working as a producer at the Chinese media giant Wanda in Beijing when, in 2018, he came across an old article in the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek about the Dockers. He'd already produced a couple of modest hits, including the superhero satire Jian Bing Man, but he wanted to write his own feature. He was immediately taken with the Dockers' story, and a few days later, he flew to Chongqing to meet the players. They mentioned that Paramount was already working on a movie about the team, but Wu told them that an American filmmaker wouldn't do their story justice. 'In the end, Hollywood cares about the Chinese market,' Wu told me. 'They don't understand China's culture and its people.' He paid a handful of the players about $2,750 each for their life rights, and bought the rights to the team's name for about $16,500. Wu also met up with McLaurin in Shanghai, but they didn't ultimately sign an agreement. 'I understood that, in his head, this was his movie,' Wu said. But Wu had his own vision. Shirley Li: How Hollywood sold out to China Wu got to work writing a script. By 2022, he'd persuaded iQIYI to make the movie and gotten his script past the government censorship bureau with minimal changes. In summer 2023, they began shooting in Chongqing. Wu told me that he'd set out to tell the Dockers' story from a Chinese perspective. 'It's easy to imagine the Hollywood version, like Lawrence of Arabia,' he said. 'A white Westerner saves a group of uncivilized Chinese people.' Even if he'd wanted to tell that kind of story, Wu knew it wouldn't fly in the domestic market. 'We're not even talking about politics; that's just reality,' Wu said. Jiang added, 'It's a postcolonial context.' This argument made sense to me in theory, but I was curious to see what it meant in practice. That evening, I sat in a packed theater and took in the film. Clash opens with a flashback of Yonggan, the hero, running away from a bully as a kid—behavior that gets him mocked as a coward. (His name translates to 'brave.') It then cuts to adult Yonggan, who works as a deliveryman for his family's tofu shop, sprinting and careening his scooter through Chongqing's windy roads, bridges, and back alleys. When Yonggan gets an urgent delivery order from an athletic field where a football team happens to be practicing, the team captain watches in awe as Yonggan sprints down the sideline, takeout bag in hand, faster than the football players. He gets recruited on the spot. Although Clash has the same basic framing as the American film treatments—an underdog team struggling against the odds—the details are original, and telling. Instead of focusing on the coach, the story centers on Yonggan and his teammates, each of whom is dealing with his own middle-class problems: Yonggan's father wants him to give up his football dreams and work at the tofu shop; the war veteran Rock struggles to connect with his daughter; the model office-worker Wang Peixun can't satisfy his wife. The coach, meanwhile, is not an American former college-football star, but rather a Mexican former water boy named Sanchez. He wanted to play in the NFL, he tells the players, but in the U.S., they let Mexicans have only subordinate jobs. The sole American character is, naturally, the captain of the evil Shanghai team. Notably, there's no mention of 'American football' at all; they simply call the sport 'football,' which in Mandarin is the same as the word for 'rugby.' As for the tone, it's hyperlocal in a way that feels authentic to the material. Characters trade quips in rat-a-tat Chongqing dialect. Jokes and references are not overexplained. The film has a catchy hip-hop soundtrack featuring local artists. It also embraces tropes of Chinese comedy that might feel cringey to American audiences: abrupt tonal shifts, fourth-wall breaks, and flashes of the surreal, including an impromptu musical number and a surprisingly moving moment of fantasy at the end. (There are also the predictable gay-panic jokes.) I had been dreading a lazy rip-off, but this felt like its own thing. To my surprise, the audience—which was primarily European, not Chinese—loved it. At both screenings I attended, it got big cheers. When festival attendees voted on their favorite films, Clash ranked 37th out of 188 titles. (The Brutalist came in 50th.) After watching the film, my griping about the IP rights felt petty. Sure, Wu had blatantly lifted the premise of my article. (I looked up the Chinese article that Wu claimed first inspired him and saw that it explicitly mentioned my New Republic article, and the Sony movie deal, in the first paragraph.) But he'd done something original with it. It occurred to me that even if Wu had taken the story and reframed it to please a domestic audience, I was arguably guilty of the same crime. Just like Wu, I had been writing for a market, namely the American magazine reader of 2014. American narratives about China tend to be simplistic and self-serving. During the Cold War, China was foreign and scary. In the 1980s, as it began to reform its economy, American reporters focused on the green shoots of capitalism and the budding pro-democracy movement. In the post-Olympics glow of the 2010s, American readers were interested in stories about how the Chinese aren't all that different from us: See, they play football too! Or go on cruises, or follow motivational speakers, or do stand-up comedy. I was writing at a cultural and political moment when American audiences—and I myself—felt a self-satisfied comfort in the idea that China might follow in our footsteps. What Hollywood didn't realize is that Chinese viewers weren't interested in that kind of story—not then, and certainly not now. Part of me still wishes that a filmmaker had managed to tell the Dockers story in a way that emphasized international cooperation, especially now that our countries feel further apart than ever. But the liberal-fantasy version was probably never going to work. I'm glad someone made a version that does.
