Still luminous at 46, Joan Chen floats on gold high-heeled mules into the Royal Hawaiian hotel in a thin, pink silk shift. Loose curls adorn her shoulders. In town for the Louis Vuitton Hawaii International Film Festival, she will be at tonight's screening of her latest film, "Home Song Stories," to pick up the HIFF Achievement in Acting Award.

For a generation of Asian-American women she was one of the few faces they could relate to in film and on TV. Chen broke out on the big screen in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 sweeping, sensual "The Last Emperor" and played the character Josie Pickard in David Lynch's seminal TV series "Twin Peaks."

But by that time the Shanghai native was already a seasoned actress. When she was just 14, the Shanghai Film Studio hand-picked her for the Actors' Training Program.

"It was fun because you didn't have to go to high school — that was the best part about acting," recalls Chen. "But it wasn't my dream to become famous or a star in any way, and we were getting paid just like any factory girls."

In fact, although she found she loved acting, "at the same time I didn't treasure whatever success that films brought me. I didn't care at all."

At 18, she won the best actress prize at the Hundred Flowers Awards, China's equivalent of the Academy Awards, for her role in "Little Flower." Yet at the time "I still had to ride the bus ... and the buses were crowded." She held her arms above her head, her elbows forming a wall in front of her face, and said, laughing, "I had to design a way to hold my arms up this way so that nobody around me could see me, and it was already a hard situation."

All she wanted, said Chen, was to "be normal. All I really wanted was just to go to America to be a normal college girl." And she did. Chen earned a filmmaking degree from California State University, Northridge.

Straddling the film businesses of China, Hong Kong and the U.S., Chen was a precursor to global stars Gong Li ("Farewell My Concubine," "Miami Vice") and Zhang Ziyi ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "Memoirs of a Geisha").

Does Chen feel that she paved the way for a next generation of Chinese actresses?

"It's really not for me to say," Chen said with the rippling laugh that she used so effectively in "The Last Emperor." "I did it because I wanted to do it and that's all. For me, my desire to get good acting jobs during my early years in Hollywood was sort of my salvation really. It was the only positive force that got me up every day. Life was turmoil because I was going through a big cultural shock and really having a hard time adjusting. So having this goal, going to auditions — it seemed this burning passion was the only good thing, really."

For Chen, the jump to Hollywood "was an important journey." And she acknowledges that later, people did look up to her.

"There were young people who came to me and told me that I was their role model, and I realized that I had that responsibility also," said Chen. "But it's usually just deeply personal. I'm not the kind of person that has a lucid career plan and attacks it. It was really just my restless soul that was driving me."

But she isn't a hothouse flower who just goes with the flow. Her directorial debut, "Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl" (which she also co-wrote), won the best picture award at Taipei's Golden Horse Film Festival in 1998. About the devastating effect the cultural revolution has on a young girl, "Xiu Xiu" was banned in China.

She next directed a mainstream Hollywood film, the melodramatic weeper "Autumn in New York" with Richard Gere and Winona Ryder.

Since then she has focused on raising her two daughters — Angela, 9, and Audrey, 5 — with her physician husband, Peter Hui, in San Francisco.

"I started a couple of scripts, and one I almost started production on when my second daughter was born," said Chen. "But they're just not good enough, I feel."

Yet the artist in her is still hungry. "If there was this story that drove me the same way that 'Xiu Xiu' drove me, I would certainly ask for the forgiveness from my family and go out there and make it because I do miss directing, and I do love telling stories."

Her acting career is heating up again. While Chen has appeared intermittently in American and Hong Kong productions in the past decade, she has a whopping six films coming out. She plays Tony Leung's red-fingernailed wife in "Lust, Caution," the latest from Ang Lee; stars in "The Sun Also Rises" by Wen Jiang ("Red Sorgum"); and will appear in "All God's Children Can Dance," to name just three. That last was adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story by O'ahu-bred Scott Coffey. "I loved doing 'All God's Children,' " said Chen. "It's a really unique little film."

Chen worked with another filmmaker originally from Hawai'i — Eric Byler. She starred in his "Americanese," which screened at HIFF last year.

"Eric Byler is a very thoughtful, politically aware film director who wanted to discuss the issue of Asians in America and I'm impressed with that," said Chen. "He did a great job."

The actress's cell phone rang: Her family was waiting for her at the beach, and it was clear she wanted to join them.

All she had time to say about her current HIFF entry, "Home Song Stories," was: "I'm very proud of this film. I worked hard ... and I love the way Tony Ayres wrote and directed it."

For the record, Chen plays a fading nightclub singer — and mother of two — who marries an Australian sailor. Set in the 1960s, she does what she can to make a home for them. Told from the point of view of the son, the tragic "Home Song Stories" is based on Ayres' real life.

Reach Lesa Griffith at lgriffith@honoluluadvertiser.com.