When Jonathan Kos-Read moved to Beijing in 1997 he became an English teacher or, as he describes it, “one of the burger flippers of globalisation”.
1997年，当乔纳森•考斯-瑞德(Jonathan Kos-Read)移居北京时，他成了一名英语教师，或者用他的话来说，“全球化时代的打工仔”。

Today Kos-Read is a movie and television personality in China better known by his stage name Cao Cao. For the past 15 years, the US actor has performed in some of the country’s biggest blockbusters alongside China’s most loved actors.
如今，考斯-瑞德是中国的一名电影和电视人物，他的艺名“曹操”更为人所熟知。在过去15年间，这名美国演员在中国一些最有名的大片里扮演角色，合作的都是中国最受欢迎的演员。
“I would see white guys on TV occasionally and they were awful,” says the 41-year-old. “They couldn’t act, they had bad Chinese, and they looked funny. I thought, you know, I could do better than them. My Chinese was pretty good, I’d studied acting and I was cognitive of the fact that I had a look that Chinese people associate with the regular American guy.”
“我在电视上偶尔能看到白人男性，而且他们都不怎么样，”41岁的考斯-瑞德称，“他们不会演戏，中文很差，而且看起来很滑稽。我当时想，你知道的，我可以比他们做得更好。我的中文很棒，我学过表演，我也知道我长着一张中国人会联想到典型美国人的脸。”
His big break came in 1999 when he spotted an ad for a western actor in an English-language magazine. He won a part in the movie, Looking for Trouble, and was promised Rmb3,000 ($482). Yet, the actor never received his cash: the producers claimed they had “run out of money”. Despite this, the film give him guanxi (Mandarin for “connections”) in the Chinese film industry, whose box office is second only to that of the US. In 2013, box office returns in China reached Rmb21.7bn, up 48 per cent from the previous year.
1999年，他迎来了自己的大转机，当时他在一本英文杂志上看到了一则招聘西方演员的广告。他赢得了电影《没事找事》(Looking for Trouble)中的一个角色，被许以3000元人民币（合482美元）的报酬。不过，他从未拿到过那笔钱：制片方声称他们“没钱了”。尽管如此，这部电影让他在中国电影业拥有了一些关系，这里的票房仅次于美国，排在全球第二位。2013年，中国电影票房收入达到217亿元人民币，同比增长48%。
Kos-Read’s latest film — an action-packed, zombie movie called Ghouls — involved him shooting for a month in the wilds of Inner Mongolia. However, he is best known for hosting Here Comes Cao Cao on Beijing TV, where he asks people to do stupid things on camera, and for his role as a romantic interest in the popular TV series Beijing Love Story.
考斯-瑞德最新的电影是一部名为《鬼吹灯》(Ghouls)的僵尸动作片，涉及他的镜头将在内蒙古的荒野拍摄1个月。不过，他最出名的还是主持北京卫视的《曹操来了》（他让人们在镜头前做傻事），以及在观众喜爱的电视连续剧《北京爱情故事》中扮演的一个浪漫对象。
Kos-Read has always acted: he attended a high school in Los Angeles that specialised in the arts before switching to study molecular biology at New York University. When he first arrived in Beijing he made a pact to speak nothing but Chinese for the first four months. It was “lonely because you talk like a five-year-old,” he recalls.
考斯-瑞德从小开始表演：他在洛杉矶就读的高中以艺术为特长，进入纽约大学(New York University)后转向学习分子生物学。刚来到北京时，他跟自己约定在前4个月内只说中文。他回忆称，那感觉“是孤独的，因为你说起话来就像5岁的孩子。”
He is now fluent in Mandarin, and has a Chinese wife, Li Zhiyin, with whom he has two daughters; Roxanne, seven, and Persephone, two. Both girls are bilingual (Roxanne does simultaneous translation for her extended American family).
现在，他的普通话很流利，而且有个中国妻子——李之茵，夫妇俩有两个女儿：7岁的罗克珊(Roxanne)和2岁的珀耳塞福涅(Persephone)。两个女孩都说双语（罗克珊为她的美国亲戚担当同声传译）。
Kos-Read loves the fact that his daughters are growing up in “this complex soup of international people”. It is a world away from his own childhood in a tree-lined suburb of LA. “We played football in the streets and I thought the whole world was like that when I was seven,” he says.
考斯-瑞德很喜欢他的女儿成长于“国际人士杂汤”的现实。这个世界与他在绿树成荫的洛杉矶郊区的童年很不一样。“那时我们在街上踢球，在我7岁时，我以为全世界都是那样的，”他称。
The family home, a two-storey penthouse overlooking a lake in Beijing, is Kos-Read’s second property. He bought his first in 2001 when he received a cheque for Rmb150,000 — then the single largest sum of money he had ever earned. His wife, “a conservative Beijing girl”, convinced him to invest: they bought an apartment that year for just Rmb300,000 in cash. Since then the property market has boomed.
这家人在北京的家是位于顶层的两层复式楼，俯瞰着一汪湖水，这是考斯-瑞德的第二套房。2001年，他收到了一笔15万元人民币的支票，买了第一套房。这是他当时赚过的最大一笔钱。他的妻子——“一个传统的北京姑娘”，说服他去投资：当年他们仅用了30万元人民币就买了一套公寓。自那以来，北京的楼市已大幅上涨。
It is a long way from where Kos-Read started in the late 1990s. Back then, across the street from his apartment, “it was just potato fields all the way until the next city”. For fun he used to go to a nightclub called The Freezer, while another popular disco was nicknamed “Nightmare”. Today the “buildings are taller, the streets are wider, the cars are nicer, but the people are still the same,” he says. “Its like this enormous city has grown up around people and it’s always a continual surprise to them.”
现在的北京与考斯-瑞德在上世纪90年代末刚开始到这里的样子相距甚远。那时，他住的公寓马路对面“只有土豆田，一直延伸至邻近的城市”。作为娱乐活动，他曾去一家名为“The Freezer”的夜店，还有另外一家绰号为“Nightmare”的高人气的迪斯科舞厅。如今，“建筑更高，街道更宽，汽车更炫，但人还是一样，”他称，“感觉就像是这座巨大的城市在人们周围逐渐成长，总是不断地给人们带来意外。”
The movie industry, likewise, has been transformed. In the early years it was “hard to get a good cinematographer, a good director, a good art director, a good prop guy”. Yet an ever-growing audience has attracted Hollywood, which is eager to ride the great Chinese movie wave (and attract the millions of movie-goers). “Talented people go where the money is. And so Chinese films and movies look better and more polished and more professional.”
电影业也发生了转变。早些年，“很难找到优秀的电影摄像师、好导演、出色的艺术总监、出色的道具师”。不过，不断壮大的观众群体吸引了好莱坞的注意，后者迫不及待地加入中国宏大的电影浪潮（试图吸引数以百万计的观影者）。“财富在哪，人才就在哪。所以，中国影片和电影也越来越好看，制作日益精良，也更加专业。”
Censorship prevails, however. For this reason, Kos-Read prefers doing web serials which enjoy more free rein and attract a younger, hipper crowd than TV. In a Sex and the City-style web-based show, The Intimate Diary of Little Miss Lightning, which came out earlier this year, he plays a bisexual fashion designer. Sex scenes are included — something unheard of on tightly controlled state-run TV.
然而，电影审查仍很普遍。正因如此，考斯-瑞德更喜欢演网络剧，尺度更自由，而且观众群体比电视剧更年轻、时尚。在去年初面世的风格类似于《欲望都市》的网络剧《蕾女心经》(The Intimate Diary of Little Miss Lightning)中，他出演一个双性恋时尚设计师。剧中包含性爱场景，这在受到严格管控的官方电视台是闻所未闻的。
Harder still is breaking out of the token “white guy” role. In 2005 Kos-Read had a part in Operation No Borders, a TV series about Chinese police officers who travel to the US. One scene, shot on location in America, featured a black drug dealer played by a well-spoken British actor. Kos-Read remembers the director yelling in Chinese “cut, cut, cut” and saying to Kos-Read: “Tell the actor he needs to be more black!” The director wanted a cartoonish, “ghetto” portrayal of African-American culture.
不过，更难的是打破“白人男子”角色的框框。2005年，考斯-瑞德在一部讲述中国警察前往美国的电视剧《无国界行动》中出演一个角色。在美国实地拍摄的一个场景中，一名谈吐得体的英国演员饰演一个黑人毒贩。考斯-瑞德记得当时导演用中文吼道“停、停、停”，并告诉考斯-瑞德：“跟那个演员说，他得更像黑人！”这位导演想要刻画的是漫画式的、“贫民窟”样的非裔美国人文化。
This reduction to stereotypes is because scriptwriters rarely come into contact with real foreigners “so they invent a lot of stuff that foreigners do,” says Kos-Read. “The plot . . . hinges on [the character] doing something stupid and ridiculous.”
这种刻板印象是因为编剧很少接触真正的外国人，“所以他们臆想了很多外国人会做的事，”考斯-瑞德称，“剧情让角色做一些愚蠢和荒谬的事情。”
That is changing, slowly. Kos-Read remains often a token character but in recent years he has had parts that are more complex. And he insists that he has no plans to leave China.
这一点正在慢慢改变。考斯-瑞德仍然经常出演公式化的角色，但近年他饰演了一些比较复杂的角色。他坚称，自己没有离开中国的计划。
“The best thing about working in China as an actor is working,” he says matter-of-factly. “I mean, let’s be realistic. In LA there are 10,000 guys who are just like me. I wanted to be an actor since I was a little kid and I’ve made a good living doing it. And so whenever I’m cold, I’m sad, I’m unhappy with the script or thinking how difficult it is to get paid, I can always say well, you are working doing something you love.”
“在中国当演员最好的事就是有工作，”他就事论事地说道，“我的意思是，我们应该现实些。洛杉矶有成千上万像我一样的人。我从小就想当演员，我也因此得到了很好的生活。所以，每当我受到冷落，感到伤心，对剧本感到不满，或者想到拿到报酬会有多难时，我总是可以说，嗯，你毕竟在做自己热爱的工作。”
Still, he confesses: “I betray my art every day for a paycheck. There is some of that in any industry. But it gets hard on the soul.”
不过，他坦言：“我每天都为了收入而出卖自己的演技。每个行业都会有这种问题。但这会让灵魂受伤。”