From changing internships and finding a faithful community to writing film ideas and hanging out with my sister and brother in law. Some stories are told in the present tense.

June 17, Friday: Arrival. After a warm welcome from my sister and brother in law, ate at some Australian hot dog stand. Tried the “poutine” fries and “italian sausage”.  Disappointed after eating homestyle italian food just 2 days ago =[. China’s taste just isn’t the same; realized there may be some minor taste bud adjusting I’d have to do…

June 19, Sunday: First day at church, BICF (Beijing International Christian Fellowship). Pretty awesome group, people from all continents: Africa, Europe, Australia, US, couple other Asian countries. Really liked the vibe in it, thought I’d come back. Had to show ID to get in (to show I’m a foreigner). I’m grateful for the freedom we have in the States…

June 21, Tuesday: One of the worst days in my life. I plan on writing a full post just for it. Basically, I find out the internship I was set up for was far from what I expected. I felt like I screwed up. Big time. I quit that internship in a week and am at another one now. Long story, but after that, things were getting better.

Weeks 1 & 2: Got a lot done. Quit my internship the Monday after. Got to know and hung out with sister and brother in law’s circle of friends. Signed up for morning Chinese classes. Landed a couple emergency internship interviews. Things were looking up.

July 4, Monday: 4th of July! Awesome day. Watched new Donnie Yen movie, Wu Xia, very twisted, beautiful and good. Then afterward ate at a grand-opening burger joint, Let’s Burger Plus. Pretty classy and authentic to American food. Lots of good fries and dipping sauces too.

July 11, Monday: Got my new internship! Helping with marketing/blog/video at Great Wall Club (GWC). Work started today. It was a lot of fun, met a lot of fun, interesting people. Got to know the company and did a little work too. Now I can be at ease. China was a place I was finally starting to adjust to.
http://www.greatwallclub.com/

July 16, Saturday: A monumental day for me. For the first time ever, met and got to help out a pretty big time director. I was very honored to help out LIxin Fan with his first Beijing screening of Last Train Home, a heartbreaking documentary about the life of migrant workers in China. He’s a great guy, I hope to see him again sometime in the future.

Li Bin (other assistant), Lixin Fan, me

And ever since, just been working at the internship. Well, that’s pretty much my first month in a nutshell. More detailed posts about past and current weeks coming soon!

-Mai

So I was supposed to start writing in this about a month ago.  I guess I procrastinated a bit.  I could choose to catch everyone up on what I’ve been up to for the whole trip, but I’ll just say what I’ve been up to lately and go from there.

China’s not always the most convenient place to be.  When you leave something behind, you’re pretty much guaranteed to never get it back.  Cause at home, when you leave something in a friend’s car, you’ll get it back but when you leave it in a cab in China, someone’s gonna take it.  No one, even someone who is totally well off, will try and get it back for you because in Chinese culture lost items are seen as gifts.  Kinda messed up but I can’t really complain.  Anyways, that’s why I didn’t want to post cause that phone acted as my camera and I didn’t have any pictures to post up.  Guess I’ll have to make do without for now.

These past few days have been rough.  Despite the great weekend I had and finding a new internship, I’ve been having a hard time figuring out what it is I want to do with my life.  To be honest I do miss engineering a lot sometimes.  But I know that if I go back, I will undoubtedly have the trapped feeling of never having the opportunity of doing something creative.  Film and music are two things I have a heard time holding off on for long term.  And there’s no way I’d be able to make films if I’m burnt from 40 hours a week of mechanical engineering.

I realize that in filmmaking, it really takes an extroverted personality.  For those of you who know me, there is no way I am like that.  But there’s something about the discipline and art that I love so much.  Maybe it’s the feeling you get at the final image of a grand movie.  Or being able to make people feel very emotional and motivated to change the way they think or act.  It’s one of those two.  But there’s just something about it that I couldn’t quite grasp for a while…that is until I had dinner with my brother in law and talked with him.

I felt indifferent/unemotional to filmmaking for a while because I never worked on it as hard as I did for engineering. I feel from experience that hard work is an important aspect to valuing and enjoying a certain discipline.  All those hours I invested into studying for Statics/Dynamics/Fluids surpasses the hours I put into planning/writing for filmmaking by far.  Of course there’d be times I’d like engineering more.  I realized what I enjoy and miss so much about engineering was working those long hours to get to the solution to that challenging problem.  And all I have to do now is work those long hours to plan out just the right story or idea for the short film.  It’s just that simple.

Part of the reason why I never worked so hard was because I was scared.  But why didn’t that stop me when I made “Hungree No More”?  The reason why that is by far my most favorite work was that I put the most work into it by far.  I think I put as many hours into that one film as I did studying the whole quarter for Statics.  Sadly, I haven’t worked so hard on a film ever since. And that’s why everything afterward ranged from mediocre to unnecessary and bad.

So it’s time I work hard again…for what I really love.  Maybe if I spend 2-3 hours a day planning/scripting for short films I might just spark my passion again.  Each idea needs to be worked out as intricately as an advanced engineering problem.  All the little kinks, errors need to be fixed to get to just the right solution.  To get just the right story.  To get just the right ending that’ll spark the emotion I perfectly intended. Being slightly off or illogical is unaffordable, it can ruin the final product.  And when it comes to actually filming and editing, those are just exams to see how well I planned things.  I need to work that hard, that carefully and I have to make sure I come up with the perfect plan/story to make the best film possible.

Aside from that, for future job positions, I think I want a more introverted job.  Directing is a bit daunting for me.  So my 3 choices are: screenwriting, cinematography, and rough cut editing.  But I think cinematography is my best choice.  I’ll have to work really hard for it though!

-Mai