Siqin Gaowa made her debut in the 1981 film Anxious to Return, in which she plays Yuzhen, a woman that during the Sino-Japanese War saves a wounded soldier, and falls in love with him.
She achieved fame and garnered wide acclaim for her performance in the 1982 film Rickshaw Boy, an adaptation of Lao She's novel of the same title, in which she portrayed "Tigress", the love interest of Zhang Fengyi's character "Xiangzi".
Siqin Gaowa was born Duan Anlin in Guangzhou,[4] Guangdong Province, China, on 20 January 1950.
Her mother was a Mongolian woman, while her father was a Han Chinese army officer originally from the Shǎnxī Province, who was stationed in Guangzhou at the time of her birth.
Her father died of an illness when Siqin Gaowa was four years old, and her mother subsequently moved back to Inner Mongolia with her.
In the movie, she portrays the widow Yu Zhen, an honest peasant woman, who during the Sino-Japanese War saves and falls in love with a wounded soldier who is "trying to grapple with his conflicting emotions.
[4] In 1984 she was acclaimed for her portrayal of Azhen in the award-winning Homecoming (1984), literally translated, Time and Tide (Chinese: Sishui liunian).
[12] The three immigrant women find themselves in New York without a physical home nor a homeland, they "each live and enact personal dramas of loss and displacement," but are finally depicted as happily together in the last scene.
[13] In 1993, Siqin Gaowa played the lead role in Woman Sesame Oil Maker (1993), which tells the story of a woman in a small village in Hebei[14] who runs a small sesame oil business that becomes unexpectedly successful, but who then uses her money to buy a peasant bride for her mentally disabled son.
It was said that the woman, Xiang, "unforgettably played by Siqin Gaowa,"[15] brilliantly incarnates "the dilemma of women today, in China and elsewhere, torn between restrictive old traditions and deceptive new freedoms.
[16][17] In 2006, Siqin Gaowa starred alongside Chow Yun-fat in The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, presented at the Toronto International Film Festival.