SAN DIEGO (TNA) – Evelyn Lin’s father only recently found out about his daughter’s porn career, while perusing a popular Chinese news site over Christmas.

“My Dad was just browsing through entertainment,” Lin, 20, explains, “and – Bam! – this big article hits him.”

Her father decided not to confront her until after the holidays. When he did, he called her and simply said that he knew.

“I freaked out,” she recalls. “I just hung up. I didn’t know what to say.”

A short time afterwards, he reached out to her via e-mail, reluctantly acknowledging her career. As a favor he asked that she try to conceal her work from the rest of the family, particularly her grandparents in China and mother in Southern California.

“It would really break your mother’s heart if she found out,” he lamented.

Lin speaks breezily and without self-recrimination over her father’s discovery. “He’s not OK with it,” she explains. “He’s not like ‘Yay, go do porn!’ But I think he’s got this feeling of helplessness.”

Since entering porn as a fresh-faced, 18-year-old college student, Lin has gone on to become one of the world’s biggest Asian porn stars, easily identified by – aside from her good looks – a mole on her upper lip and scar on her abdomen. (The scar, she explains, is from an appendectomy.)

Lin is something of an anomaly in the porn industry. She’s one of the few Chinese-Americans performing in the U.S. these days. Add on-screen shyness and a strikingly wholesome appearance – silky complexion, brilliant white teeth, and delicate smile – and Lin appears to live in a world far removed from the porn industry.

Yet, she’s in the middle of it, living in Southern California, signed to Goldstar (one of the largest porn modeling agencies), doing scenes around the San Fernando Valley.

The paradox is what leads Lin to the offices of The Naughty American for a face-to-face interview. In person, an actress – especially a pornographic one – often can’t conceal that they’re not nearly as decent or demure as they appear on film.

***

To meet Evelyn Lin is to take a leap of faith, to accept that the soft-spoken, well-mannered college coed has sex on camera; that she’s appeared in more than 100 scenes, with names such as “Asian 1 on 1,” “Big Dicks, Little Asians.”

The Naughty America receptionist greets her and can’t believe she’s in porn. Says she’s too shy. I walk into the conference room and hold out my hand. Lin takes it and offers a soft handshake.

She appears slightly disoriented this afternoon, understandably so. The porn industry doesn’t usually work this way. When a writer wants to interview talent, they usually do a phone interview, something that works well for both parties. The writer gets the story quickly and cheaply and the actress doesn’t have to reveal too much of herself.

But she hasn’t been brought in for the typical porn interview, the glib lines about how she loves her work, the male talent, and the sex. Those interviews tend to conceal, rather than reveal, the women behind the porn persona.

It takes something close to bravery for Lin to meet a reporter alone, in a closed room, and discuss her personal life, upbringing, and career. To put her at ease, I explain The Naughty American, the news site for Naughty America, and show her around our office.

As we leave the reception area, I hold the door for her. She waits for me to go first. I continue to hold the door. She doesn’t move.

The moment reveals something about Lin: Although she’s spent most of her life in Los Angeles since emigrating from Hunan, China, at age five, and appears assimilated to American culture, she’s nonetheless retained bits of her old culture. It’s doubtful that an American woman would be so reluctant to pass by a door being held by a man.

Lin has a light, almost ethereal presence. As we stroll to The Naughty American, Evelyn doesn’t so much walk as drift. I try to keep the conversation flowing, but she doesn’t say much. She’s remaining cautious, still not sure why she’s here.

She may be wondering whether she’s in for more than just an interview, which is fair enough. She’s a sex worker, being escorted by a stranger around a corporate office. If she only knew: Writers don’t do that sort of stuff. We don’t have the cachet.

We return to the conference room. The noises of a corporate life – ringing phones, calls for coffee – filter into the room, so I shut the door.

As she fidgets with her mini skirt I set the voice recorder on the table.

“Here’s what I’m hoping for” I begin. “I want the real Evelyn Lin, the Evelyn that nobody knows about, the Evelyn that exists off-screen.”

She nods in obeisance, as though she’s about to be interrogated.

“If there’s anything you don’t want to talk about, let me know,” I state. “Otherwise, I’m going to ask about all aspects of your life. Some of the questions might get pretty personal.”

“I’m fine with everything,” she answers. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

***

We talk about just how she got into the industry. She’s maintained that she was tricked by an unscrupulous fashion photographer when she was 18 years old. The photographer, she claims, told her that doing porn was the way most women got into mainstream modeling.

I don’t buy it.

“That makes for a nice story,” I tell her. “It plays nicely into guys’ fantasies of seduction, but what really happened?”

“I know,” she concedes. “Every time I tell this story to someone, it just sounds stupider and stupider. But that’s really what happened.”

Her high school boyfriend, the guy she lost her virginity to, had broken up with her. As a way to get back at him – and to show what he was missing – Lin decided to do some modeling, as she says, “some more heated, sultry photos.”

A female friend, who did some fashion modeling, referred Lin to her photographer. When Lin met the man, he claimed that Lin’s friend had done porn in order to build her fashion portfolio.

“At the time, in the back of my mind, it wasn’t completely legit,” Lin explains. “But I was still a little vengeful and the money sounded really good. So, I just kind of told myself, ‘Hey, maybe that’s how you really get into modeling.’”

After that first scene, Lin found out that her friend had quit working with the guy when he tried to get her to do porn as well.

“I think he understood that I was more naive,” she says.

***

After 20 minutes, Lin loosens up. She becomes expressive and laughs more; the interrogation becomes a conversation.

Evelyn explains that the first scene left her numb, rather than bitter or regretful. It would take weeks before she realized she had entered the porn industry. In reminiscing about her debut, she repeatedly mentions how impressed she was by the money.

Such a preponderance on money stems from her childhood, when, she claims, her family had financial problems.

“Kids had whatever their parents bought them,” she states. “They had Mercedes, BMWs, and I didn’t.”

She loses me. I point out that not having German luxury cars hardly qualifies as financial hardship.

“Probably compared to a lot of people, it wasn’t that bad,” she allows. “But I had a lot of friends who lived in gated communities. I saw their houses, compared them to mine and thought, ‘Wow, what a difference.’”

The comment proves revelatory, explaining her reason for getting into porn: Evelyn Lin, it seems, is materialistic.

I feel compelled to call her out for her it. However, I’m enjoying our conversation and couch the observation in journalistic rhetoric.

“Some people might see you talking about the cars and houses,” I suggest, “and say that you place an inordinate amount of importance on material wealth.”

She reflects for a moment.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. I always wanted to have the kind of money my friends had.”

She then speaks of a “barrier” – a curious word – between herself and affluence when she was a child, suggesting she felt somehow disenfranchised growing up.

“I felt like I couldn’t go into some stores,” she remembers. “The money barrier made me feel like I didn’t belong.”

The discussion of values leads to questions about how they were instilled in her. Lin says that when she was young her parents dabbled in religion, but nothing stuck.

“We tried,” she recalls. “We went to Buddhist temple. We went to church. … To me, you don’t need organized religion. The Ten Commandments are supposed to be part of this religion, but I just see them as good morals.”

Evelyn adds that she grew up in a normal Chinese-American household – no abuse or neglect. I press for cracks in the veneer, but find nothing.

***

Until recently, Lin attended college in Southern California. She would go to class during the week and shoot scenes in Los Angeles on the weekend.

Though she requested that The Naughty American not publish the school name, the information is out there. During an “interview” in one of her earlier scenes she mentions the school by name – something she regrets.

“Evelyn Lin,” of course, isn’t a real name. But fellow students quickly figured out her identity and posted dozens of polarizing messages on an unofficial school forum. Many students supported her career, but an equal number – mostly men – attacked her for it. A few guys referred to her by her real name and chimed in with gossip about her relationship at the time.

“I want to get rid of the site so bad,” Lin says with exasperation.

However, she had little recourse. She soon began to receive harassing phone calls, which only stopped after she called campus police. (Lin told the police only that she had “done some modeling.”)

Lin, who’s never been contacted by the school administration about her porn career, intends to return to school next semester.

While Lin values her privacy, she says she’s only shy with people she meets for the first time. Spend a little time with her, she claims, and people will see that she’s chatty and zany, just a well-adjusted college coed.

***

“She knows how to have fun,” confirms “Chad,” a close friend from college. “You get the occasional corny joke. For example, she makes fun of all the girls who dress kind of skanky, which is funny because she doesn’t wear any clothes at work.”

Chad says Lin’s Type-A personality can also be amusing. “She’s crazy organized,” he explains. “She’s never applied for a job where she had to fill out a resume. But when I applied for a job, she made sure the resume was perfect.”

And that same need for order, Chad believes, would doom her as a sales woman, where she would have little tolerance for fickle customers.

“She should never work in sales, because she’d end up killing someone.”

He thinks that Lin’s personality makes her a natural to direct adult videos when she’s done performing.

But Lin has taken her lumps in porn and indicates that she may get out of the business after she graduates. She’s flirting with the idea of going into public relations, but she’s realistic. “I’m not sure how people would feel about having an ex-porn star as their publicist,” she sighs.

She mentions becoming a porn publicist – which would seem to suit her well. She’s managed her own image tactfully. Over the course of the interview, Lin in fact asks that two comments remain off the record. Neither is particularly juicy – both addressing the business side of her porn career.

As for the porn industry, Lin is turned off by what she says is a lack of honesty and professionalism. She gives two examples, the first her agent, who she says skimmed large sums of money off bookings by explaining that directors weren’t willing to pay Lin’s going rate.

The second example says more about Lin than the industry. It’s a bewildering moment in the interview. She tells of several directors and production assistants who had the audacity to hit on her on set. She’s miffed as she speaks, as though she never expected such a thing to happen in porn.

“It seems a little naïve that you would be appalled by guys hitting on you,” I tell her.

“It was a little awkward,” she says defensively. “It was immediately after a scene, and I was still naked, and this guy is staring me down.”

And yet, later in our conversation, Lin describes a robust sex drive in which she’s had sex in campus laundry rooms and elevators and worn out ex-boyfriends.

“Honestly,” she marvels, “I’ve worn out ex-boyfriends to the point where they’ve been like, ‘Honey, can we not have so much sex?’”

The tales of sexual adventure so shortly after ones of sexual prudishness bring the interview full circle, and the original question pops up: How could Evelyn Lin be such a porn star, yet such an ingénue?

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