Our conversation about a potential entrepreneurship course and program soon spilled over into a more earnest conversation about issues we saw in higher education both in China and abroad, such as the lack of female role models, training in critical thinking, and how to encourage students to make their own informed unconventional choices in their careers post graduation.
Read MoreAbout a month ago in Shenzhen, I met a “lady from the West" who told me that she had “dreamwalked” into the reality of "copy painters" in Dafen village in Shenzhen. She was wide-eyed, both curious and critical about everything happening around her, and ready to work, with just about everything around her.
Read MoreA month ago in Shenzhen, I met a “lady from the West" who dreamwalked into the reality of the creative struggle of "copy painters" in the Dafen village.
Read MoreOne day I am going to leave everything behind, I thought. I will leave behind everyone who is dear to me, and move to a place where people won’t know my name. They won’t even know how to pronounce my name when I tell them. This way they cannot prescribe me a future—a university, a job, a marriage, a husband, and a child, nor lay down any laws for my everyday life. I will be free to wake up when I want to, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, just as how Karl Marx describes it in The German Ideology, without ever again being a woman who is given a family name. I will step fully into a name that’s mine.
Read MoreWhen I moved to Shenzhen to reunite with my migrant parents in the early 90s, we lived in a temporary hut with a tin roof. Every time when there was pouring rain, I would have to make myself earplugs out of cotton balls. The children TV shows I watched before the storm would instantly turn as mute as the battle of rain and thunder on the other side of the tin roof. It came as a surprise to me how quiet rain had become, since we moved to an apartment with concrete walls.
Read MoreBut somehow I felt shielded from the angst of “the prosperous 90s,” partly due to my parents’ quiet rebellion against the rigid education system—“Go play!” my mom would always tell me. Her constant affirmation of my right to play had set me free from the worldly worries that had infiltrated our world from the adult’s one. But on a deeper level, I wanted to believe that all children are secretly protected by fairies. Us back then, children today, and in the future. I wanted to believe that the little paradises of play children create for themselves could be so much more powerful than any agony, angst, Weltschmerz, or ideological crisis that happened to be prevailing at the time.
Read MoreAt one point, even the last faint beams of sunset had vanished, so we needed to take out our torches. The person behind would shed light for the person before. I remembered the moment I stopped and turned around, I saw a mountain covered in streams of light that flowed down the slopes like gleaming water of gold. Above us, there was the Milky Way flowing across the entire sky like a river, as if the universe was reflecting back to us the grandeur of human endeavor. Since that day, I’ve stored that image in the depths of my memories, as if I knew that someday I would have to retrieve from it the missing hints I’d need to carry on.
Read MoreMaking a documentary consists of a series of waiting. We often have shooting days where nothing works as we expect. In documentary, you lose your sense of order of events, as if nothing happens at all through your lens, and all of a sudden, everything happen all at once. And you are never sure whether the nothing that happens or the everything would actually end up being an integral part to your story. So you push the record button, wait around, light a cigarette, take a sip of water, look into the tired eyes of your teammate, and smile with a nod, tacitly informing your teammate that you have not fallen asleep. But to the outsiders, you will look as if you’ve fallen so much in love with that which is in the shot.
Read MoreThinking of it, some of the most intimate moments of my life were actually shared with strangers from all around the world, people who understood nothing about me or my worries. They’ve seen me cry after waving goodbye to parents, they’ve seen me shed big bright tears after saying farewell to a lover; they've shared my sorrows, anonymously.
Read MoreRecently, I’ve come to the conclusion that my dual existence is no different from the existence of a street artist—somewhat aimless, full of weltschmerz (literally, “world pain”), confusion, and desires, but never lacking the impulse to jump onto another train.
Read MoreI decided to document my creative endeavors between the two cities for a year—what I see, what I hear, what my friends do, and how we imagine and create together.
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