The photo was what broke me. For years, I had been free of the affliction, and suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, I was back in its velvety clutches.

The photo of which I speak is of the 26-year-old Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi from her new movie, 2046. In it, she is dressed like a courtesan from a night-club in 1960s Hong Kong, wearing a body hugging black silk dress covered in sparkling jewels with a high collar rising all the way to her tiny chin. One arm is placed defiantly on the sumptuous curve of her hip, the other rests timidly on her flat stomach. Her hips are cocked provocatively, her back arched and tense as a drawn bow. The perfect china-doll face staring out of the photo, with its heavy lidded eyes and rose petal lips, radiates a variety of emotions — scorn, fury, vulnerability — in equal proportion. She is as impenetrable as a block of ice, yet as delicate as porcelain.

It had been some time since I'd been obsessed with an Asian girl. In today's parlance, the phenomenon is known as "A-love" or "Asian fetish." Most of my Caucasian friends have either gone through a phase or are currently in the thralls of it. My first — and I thought — last stint was during my freshman and sophomore years in college. I dated two Asian girls in a row, one of whom was of Vietnamese and European decent. We had a little game we played with one another where I'd ask, "Who's Asian are you?," to which she'd playfully reply, "Why, I'm Eurasian." Get it? Your Asian . . . so cute.

Anyway, for the past several years I've been blissfully free of "A-love." Girls of other ethnicities — who before seemed so clumsy and hairy when compared to the girls with alabaster skin and shimmering clouds of jet black hair that populated my fantasies — finally started to look attractive to me again. I was a reformed man. If I encountered an Asian girl in the street, my first instinct was to ask her name instead of fantasizing about the silky feel of her bare thigh against my hand. I was free to develop obsessions about non-Asian actresses, such as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Monica Bellucci.

And then there was this picture of Zhang Ziyi. For those of you not familiar with the name, you may remember her from the famous wu xia movie by director Ang Lee, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (Wu xia is a term referring to the popular Chinese martial fantasy/swords and sorcery genre). Zhang plays a petulant and love-sick young woman blessed with extraordinary skills. Shortly afterwards, she was cast in Rush Hour 2 as one of the bad guys who takes on Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. More recently, she starred in two more wu xia movies that borrowed heavily from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero (in which she co-starred with Jet-Li), and House of Flying Daggers. Her latest movie is 2046 from Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, and her next movie will be a movie produced by Steven Spielberg, the film adaptation of Memoirs of Geisha.

With all of these movies under her belt, Zhang Ziyi has achieved an extraordinary level of fame not only in China, but in the rest of the world. In 2001 she was one of People's 50 most beautiful people. She is the featured actress in a recent Newsweek article on Asian cinema in which Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, refers to her as "the actress of the future." Not too long ago, she was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the elite group responsible for picking Oscar winners. She was the only Chinese movie star among 112 artists and executives invited, a group that included Jamie Foxx and Gael Garcia Bernal.

In addition to her film experience, she has made a splash in the world of advertising. Zhang is the new face for Coca-Cola Asia, and she is also a spokesperson for Maybelline, Pantene, and (formerly) Tag Heuer.

Anybody who has seen one of her movies would be hard-pressed to admit her fame and recognition is not justly deserved. To put it simply, she steals the show in almost every movie in which she acts. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was only her second film. There, she found herself in the intimidating position of working alongside Asian superstars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Crouching Tiger was supposed to be the movie that put those two actors on the American movie scene — instead, it was Zhang who impressed audiences. Every one of the scenes that made the movie remarkable included her. It was a remarkable coup. To put it in perspective, imagine a relatively unknown Western actress upstaging Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Legend of Zorro. It's hard to imagine . . . but Zhang pulled it off, or at least its equivalent.

In my opinion, she managed the same feat in her other wu xia films, House of Flying Daggers and Hero. Those movies are also full of popular Asian actors (and in the case of Jet-Li, actors popular in both the West and the East), but the only parts of the movie really crackling with energy are the ones including Zhang. She is such a paradox, both fragile and indestructible, tender and heartless. Her face can blaze with fury in one second and crumble in despair the next. The one underlying characteristic consistent in all her phases is passion. Her passion is the element which makes her so powerful on the screen, whether she is flying through the air swinging a sword or, in the case of 2046, crying broken-heartedly as she listens to her lover have sex with another women in the adjoining room.

Her performance in 2046 blows all her other performances away. I had seen her other movies, and while I found her impressive and attractive, I was not overcome to the point of obsession. 2046 changed that. Indeed, I didn't even need to see the movie; the picture in the New York Times review (described above) was all that it took. The same day the review came out, I raced to Lincoln Plaza to see the movie. The first showing was sold out, the second was not for two more hours. Who cared? Not me. It was Friday night and I had a party to attend, but I wasn't going anywhere. I just stood in the lobby and stared dumbly at the movie poster.

She was everything I had hoped she would be. Her role occupies only part of the story, but once again, her performance stood out from all the others. The review in the New York Times describes her performance much more eloquently than I could, so I'll defer to it here: "Ms. Zhang's shockingly intense performance burns a hole in the film that gives everything, including all the other relationships, a sense of terrific urgency."

Urgency . . . yes, that's a good word to describe the feeling I've had since I saw that picture, a feeling enhanced by my viewing of the movie itself. In the past few days I've been thinking about Zhang non-stop. Writing this article hasn't helped much, either.

I think it is only fair to note there are some people in the world who do not adore her as much as I do. Zhang, like every celebrity, has her fair share of critics. Some Chinese people believe her rapid rise to stardom was all about luck, not talent. The Hong Kong tabloids have crucified her a number of times, most notably by implying she had an affair with the director of Hero and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou. She has also been accused of selling herself out to America. When 2046 premiered in Hong Kong, she wasn't present because she was in America filming Memoirs of Geisha, a choice which the audience did not appreciate. I was reading some Chinese chat room forums where people claimed Zhang was not very attractive at all, at least according to Chinese standards. It's only the American males with their Asian fetishes who pine for her.

To most of those points, especially the last one, I have no adequate defense. Perhaps she's not very pretty after all and I'm viewing her through lenses distorted by a Western male fetish. But as to the criticism that her success is due to luck and not talent, I have to vehemently disagree. I have not seen all of Zhang's movies, but I have seen the majority of them. In every one she shares the screen with other talented stars, and in every one she is the star that shines the brightest. Even better, she seems to be just coming into her own. She truly is the actress of the future . . . which doesn't bode well for my chances of purging myself of my "A-love" affliction.