Liu Yang: Back then we were roommates in the foreign students' dormitory of Capital Normal University. I was preparing for my entrance exam to the Central Academy of Drama. One day, he told me that he was going to "wash myself." I was puzzled and he repeated himself. It turned out that he was going for a bath. He used a word-for-word translation of "je me lave" into Chinese, which didn't make any sense. (He should sayWo Qu Xi Zaoin Pinyin.) Therefore, sometimes we needed to use body language or even draw pictures to communicate.

You now speak perfect Chinese. Do you have any tip or shortcut to learning Chinese?

Xavier Froment:My Chinese is enough for chatting with friends. I think my Chinese is mediocre and my pronunciation is horrible

Liu Yang:He sounds like our ethnic Uygur people. Sometimes, we introduced him to others as someone from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region jokingly and some have belived this!

Can you write Chinese?

Xavier Froment:Yes, a little. I send cellphone short messages in Pinyin.I regard language as a tool of communication. It is just like driving. Basically everyone can master it, but some people are better at it than others. Many people are more linguistically talented than me. But I live in the language environment and I have to speak Chinese. All my plays are performed in Chinese and it is important to have the capacity to read and write Chinese.

Liu Yang: Sometimes he can understand Chinese even deeper than the Chinese people, as is evident from the playscript of Wang Xiaobo. He managed to understand deeper meanings that even I failed to get. I was amazed until I learned that he had majored in literature back in France.

An unexpected box blockbuster

What do you like and dislike about your stay in China?

Xavier Froment:Unpleasant experiences? Receiving and using the discount coupons in shopping malls is really annoying.

Liu Yang: There was one unhappy episode connected with the staging ofEast Palace West Palace. Some theatres had already agreed to stage it, but the director of the movieEast Palace West Palaceannounced publicly that Three Oranges had no copyright. The pressure scared away all prospective theatres from hosting the performance. Xavier finally found a venue from a former partner. The play was so successful that we had to add two extra performances and all tickets were sold out. Many people failed to get a ticket even after making reservations. Xavier also invited those people who had promised to cooperate at first but refused later. After watching the play, they offered to invest in our play's future.

It is known as a story about gay people.

Liu Yang:It is a story about love. I had no contact with homosexuals before acting in the play. Therefore, when I acted in that play I understood it totally as a love story. Xavier showed me the movieHappy Together(a love story about a gay couple) by Wong Kar-wai. After watching it, I thought it is perfectly okay for the story to happen to a straight couple. The movie is also essentially a love story.

InEast Palace West Palace, I played the role of the abusive Xiao Shi. The father of the actor who was beaten by Xiao Shi in the play came backstage to find me after the performance. With tears in his eyes, he scolded me, "I will kill you if anything happens to my son." I felt so embarrassed at that moment. In real life, I am a very close friend of that actor.