Gong Li' s English?

Not too bad. Lacks a bit of timing or feeling for the words, but for someone who's mostly done movies in Mandarin, she's pretty good, especially for 1997. At that time she needed a translator to explain stuff between the scenes, especially because this movie was semi-impro (director Wang wanted to do it that way and Irons loved it), so she had a difficult time improvising on the spot because her English skills were not good enough to be doing that, so most of her scenes were pre-set, while most of the movie is actually impro - work of the actors and the director!

Should listen to Wayne Wang's commetary on the film's special edition dvd.
Li's English, at the time, was limited to learning each word phonetically. According to Wang, she did seem to know who Dietrich on the TV screen was in the bar scene. She did a frame-by-frame imitation of Dietrich's gesture as it was on TV. It was a brilliant moment in the film.

When Irons improvised in some of the takes and performed the scene differently, she did not seem to know how to react. This was said by Wang in the audio track.

All in all, a brave film by the director crossing reality and fiction.