He finally found work as a
taxi dancer (a paid dance partner) at Maxim's Restaurant-Cabaret.
Writing a letter a day to his parents for 18 months, he described in novelistic detail such actions as chauffeuring around Life reporter Teddy White, who later became a chronicler of presidents; driving blithely across a booby-trapped air field in Kweiyang; and living in liberated Shanghai, where he fell in love with a Jewish refugee
taxi dancer. (This last story isn't in the letters, but you can read it in an excerpt from the autobiography in Conjunctions, issue 56.)
Butterfly) mentored him on this romantic drama between a Filipino immigrant and an American
taxi dancer in Depression-era California.
Instead, the irrepressibly hopeful heroine is a "
taxi dancer" at a New York dance hall whose track record with men is frankly abysmal.
Phuong (Do Thi Hal Yen) is patient: The exquisite former
taxi dancer has dealt with drunkards and other things far worse than a would-be gallant with two left feet.
As the film opens we see him called to identify the body of Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), the quiet American of the title, his friend and romantic rival for the love of Phuong (Hai Yen Do) - the girl he'd taken from life as a
taxi dancer to become his mistress.
With his pen, Pai portrays the big and small characters of his time, from
taxi dancer to opera singer, from professor to air-force pilot, from street peddler to noodle-shop owner, and so on.
According to Pontecorvo, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and Alexander Rockwell's
Taxi Dancer are among the Hollywood films in competition.
Sweet Charity tells the story of New York '
taxi dancer' Charity Hope Valentine and her search for true love.