The 6 Best Chinese Film Director to Know if You are a Chinese Culture Nut

1. Hou Hsiao-hsien

 

Famous Films: 

A City of Sadness (1989), Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), Flowers of Shanghai (1998)

Spotlight
Exquisite compositions, long takes and languid moods are characteristics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s work, even when dealing with tragic ruptures. Many of Hou’s films take place at times of turbulent social-political transition: The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) follows a boy’s coming of age after his family leaves the mainland for Taiwan in 1947; A City of Sadness chronicles the post-Second World War impact of the Chinese Nationalist government on a Taiwanese family; and The Puppetmaster (1993) finds a master puppeteer being forced to use his craft as a propaganda tool under the Japanese occupation.

Hou’s recreation of the past reached a feverish peak with Flowers of Shanghai, which takes place in the brothels of the English concession in 1884. His meditations on contemporary Taiwanese society include the deceptively lackadaisical small-time crime study Goodbye, South Goodbye and the hypnotic nightlife odyssey Millennium Mambo (2001).

2. Edward Yang

Famous Films: 

The Terrorisers (1986), A Brighter Summer Day (1991), Yi Yi (2000)

Spotlight

The films of Edward Yang were sadly little seen in the west during his lifetime because the director was not concerned with selling his work for profit. Often utilising the multi-stranded narrative format, Yang took the urbanisation of Taiwan as his subject: The Terrorisers is a mystery concerning the connections between an assortment of amoral strangers; A Brighter Summer Day follows the activities of 1960s street gangs; A Confucian Confusion (1994) critiques materialistic young professionals; Mahjong (1996) takes place in the modern underworld; and Yi Yi examines the life of a middle-class family over the course of a year.

3. Wong Kar-wai

Famous Films:

Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000); 2046(2004); My Blueberry Nights (2007); The Grandmaster(2013)

Spotlight

Wong Kar-wai became an arthouse favorite in the 1990s with such aesthetically invigorating cinematic love letters to Hong Kong as Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels (1995). Famed for his protracted production process – both In the Mood for Love and 2046 (2004) would take more than a year to shoot as footage was scrapped, plot strands were dropped, and locations were changed – Wong has kept his company Jet Tone afloat by taking on various advertising assignments alongside his dream projects.

Wong’s vivid style was pioneered in partnership with the Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle with their collaboration on the melancholic romance Happy Together(1997) transforming Buenos Aires into a hyper-saturated space for unfulfilled longing. Such charismatic local stars as Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung and pop diva Faye Wong have thrived under Wong’s idiosyncratic direction to create the memorably lovesick protagonists who populate his intoxicating universe.

4. Ann Hui

Famous Films

Boat People (1982), The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2006), A Simple Life (2011)

Spotlight 

Ann Hui has amassed a considerable body of work despite often going against the popular tide of her local film industry. A prominent member of the Hong Kong New Wave, with an interest in familial strife, national identity and social issues, Hui explored cultural displacement with her Vietnam trilogy, consisting of the television episode Boy from Vietnam (1978) and the features The Story of Woo Viet (1981) and Boat People.

This concern also permeates more commercial works such as the crime thriller Zodiac Killers (1991), in which a Chinese student living in Tokyo is sucked into the dangerous world of the yakuza. Hui’s humanistic melodramas often address the ageing process: The Postmodern Life of My Aunt features a retiree who is swindled out of her savings, while A Simple Life beautifully details the relationship between a film producer and his elderly servant when the latter falls ill.

5. Jia Zhangke 

Famous Films

Platform (2000), Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006);    The World(2004); A Touch of Sin (2013);

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Hou Hsiao-hsienA fierce critic of China’s transformative society,Jia Zhangke’s studies of problems at grassroots levels have blurred the line between fact and fiction due to his integration of documentary elements. Jia was an early convert to digital video who extended the postmodern aesthetics of Xiao Wu (1997) and Platform when he switched formats to chronicle disenfranchised youth in Unknown Pleasures.

6. Lou Ye

  

Famous films 

Suzhou River (2000), Summer Palace (2006), Spring Fever (2009)

Spotlight

Although his frequent clashes with China’s restrictive censorship board have cast the Sixth Generation filmmaker Lou Ye as a figure of controversy, his work is more defined by its sensuous quality. From his mesmerising noir Suzhou River to recent Bi Feiyu adaptation Blind Massage (2014), Lou has conflated sex and politics to emotionally devastating effect as alienated characters navigate eroticised urban landscapes.

Summer Palace follows the experiences of a hedonistic female student at a Beijing university in the late-1980s and the traumatic impact of the post-Tiananmen fallout on her social circle; Spring Fever concerns a gay Nanjing travel agent who casually flits between lovers to maintain his sexual freedom; and Mystery (2012) follows an upwardly mobile businessman who is leading a dangerous double life. Such films never fail to linger in the memory due to the manner in which Lou filters bold social provocation through uniquely seductive atmospherics.

Shanghai Dreams: An Elegy for Youth in 1980s

When people now buzzing about the recently released Chinese movie Fleet of Time ,  I would rather watching another film Shanghai Dreams(2005) depicting a realistic state of a group of people living a suffering life in Guizhou province of China.  Encouraged by the political policy , these people who grow from big cities like Shanghai were involved in the movement of going down to urban areas in support of the poor as a part of a political ideology.

Born in earlier 1990s, I have not gone through the era of post culture revolution through which people was oppressed by sex and advertised by government’s propaganda. The generation who are like my parents walked through the time as “pioneers”, steps by steps; however in the film, from the eyes of children of this generation, I can feel the pain and the sorrow etched by the history. The humanity under that era was chained, everyone was highly moralized in the call of Chairman Mao. When this group of people started realizing that their work is useless and there was no hope for their own future, they changed. They long for the return of cities. Some succeeded and some stayed in countryside forever. But, their youth with their fantasy was swallowed in the swirl of the history.

At a certain moment, individual’s fate is extricably intertwined with national transformation. In 1980s, China started to boom in economy, and the time was recorded when this eastern dragon started to show himself on the global stage. Those people born in that period of time has grown up at their thirties, they cherishes their boyhood and youth by films, by all the films in a same style like Fleet of Time. While beautiful it is, days never come back.

1980s, like the Chinese name of the film and the heroin, 青红, which represents “cyan” and “red”. The combination of these two opposite colors through the film pictured the innocence but rather the grief of the generation.

Note:

Shanghai Dreams (青红: Qīng hóng) is a 2005 Chinese film directed by Wang Xiaoshuai and was the winner of the Jury Prize at the 2005 Cannes Films Festival.

Posting a song from movie Time of Fleet (2014), by Faye Wang

In Remembrance of a Legend, John Lennon

” You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

John Lennon with no doubt is a legendary musician and an audacious activist of his time. Two years ago on the eighth day of December, Google doodled him in tribute of his 70th birthday. Every year people holding candles and flowers gathers to love, to revere and to remember him. Even it has been 34 years after Lennon was assassinated in New York City,  people still get inspired and affected by his songs and his beyond of time charisma.

Signatured by 1970s, Beatles became a mania leading the young and waving the spirit of the time.  From generation to generation, this spirit never ends, because we are in love with peace and because we are against war.

“In his short lived life of 40 years, he has given his wife Yoko Ono, so much to the world.” said by his wife Yoko Ono. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hendrik Hertzberg, who constantly report Lennon’s stories in The New Yorker,  recalled that Lennon had shown his love for his country by insisting on living in the U.S. This moment was captured 40 years ago:

“I would like to stay in America, yes,” John said. “Yoko was brought up and educated here, and she’s made a convert of me. New York is like Parisin the old days. I always used to dream about van Gogh and everybody being there together. Now everyone’s in New York. I love a lot of places, like France, but New York is more like Liverpool. Even the Brooklyn accent is like Liverpudlian—‘cawfee.’ New York and Liverpool are both full of tough people. They’re both near the water. I’ll go back home when I’m eighty, to Cornwall, maybe, or Wales. We all go home to die, like elephants. But I’d like to spend a few decades around the world first.”

In John Lennon’s seventieth birthday,  Herzberg added, “He never would get to be eighty; he barely even got to be forty. But it’s not quite true that he never got to go home to die. He was already home.”

It is true. A man of his great talents beholding the stigma of all the time deserves the honor from everywhere of the world.

Imagine.

There is no Heavens, no Countries, no Boundaries;

One world will be lived with no possessions;

One world will be shared with a brotherhood of man;

Only Peace can make all the possibilities.

Henri Matisse: The Color Scissor

For my curiosity and interest, I saw a show “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” at MoMA last week. He is the master of color with his infinite passions. Like he said, “ From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”

   

Matisse and his Cuts-Outs

In the late years of Henri Matisse, he turned almost exclusively to cut paper into forms of varying shapes and sizes, and then arranged them to decorative compositions. Critics regarded the cut-outs as an reflection on both a renewed commitment to form and color and an inventiveness directed to the status of the work of art, whether as a unique object, environment, ornament, or a hybrid of all of these.

The show exhibited the ornamental function of fine art. With different pieces and shapes rearranged, the vivid colorful forms kind of like dancing in the paper when I stared them in the eyes of the 21^st century. From the art framed on the wall, I felt the pleasure of his life and the intimacy he brought to audience. Paper cut outs, a game every teenager used to play, presented a remembrance of youth and created a resonance with viewers.

A Memo of Fauvism

For a better understanding of an artist’s style and expression, I took a note of Fauvism, a movement he represents for, from his biography.

Matisse’s career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover “the essential character of things” and to produce an art “of balance, purity, and serenity,” as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work.

Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910. The movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Matisse and André Derain. Matisse’s first solo exhibition was at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1904, without much success. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-Impressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross.^[15] In that year he painted the most important of his works in the neo-Impressionist style, Luxe, Calme et Volupté. In 1905 he travelled southwards again to work with André Derain at Collioure. His paintings of this period are characterised by flat shapes and controlled lines, using pointillism in a less rigorous way than before.

 The Swimming Pool

When Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs opened at the Tate Modern in London, it became a blockbuster since it has charted the final chapter of Matisse’s more than five decade career. However, the New York iteration has some marked differences from the Tate show. In addition to about 100 cut-outs, according to NYT, created between 1937 and 1954, MoMA featured Matisse’s largest and most ambitious cut-out, “The Swimming Pool,” a room-size work in nine panels made in 1952. It depicts swimmers splashing in the water and leaping through the air in blue and white. MoMA acquired “The Swimming Pool” from the Matisse family in 1975 and it has been out of public view for about 20 years. A five-year conservation effort MoMA has made to restore its original color balance, height, and spatial configuration provide a magical environment. The ease and the comfort was flowing over the work while I stood in the center of the exhibition room, picturing a state of solace of an old artist’s life.

Woody Allen: An Absurd Peter Pan II

A Reflection

Stylistic transformation and endless scandals contribute to Woody Allen’s controversies. Unlike most filmmakers, who followed the commercial model of Hollywood filmmaking, Allen’s signature style of comedy in his initial works gained considerable popularity among a certain group of intellectuals. However, changing from his original comic style to a more tragic but romantic style after the 1990s, mainly lost the concept of dark humor by adding more romantic elements in his works, Allen together with his works was unwelcomed by his previous fans and critics. Additionally, Allen was honored with the 2014 Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement at the 71^st Annual Golden Globe Awards ceremony, but the fairness of this award was discredited by critics because of his child molestation. New details was uncovered by a journalist about old accusations from Allen’s ex-wife Mia Farrow, declaring that Woody Allen sexually abused his adopted child, Dylan Farrow, 20 years ago (Kristof, 2014). However, Allen has denied these allegations. Thus the issue, along with his new style of filmmaking, have turned him into a controversial figure.

Although Woody Allen’s stylistic transformation and scandal about child molestation are increasingly debatable, his controversies in fact are the result of his inability to actualize his dreaming fantasy in real life. Therefore, he transferred this feeling into philosophical reflections in his later works.

Woody Allen’s stylistic change, a discussion of the relationships between ethical bounds and abnormal sexual relationships, express his helplessness to establish a moral sexual relation in real life. Suffering from scandals about child custody and child molestation in his personal life, Allen implemented this frustration to his films, expressing his longing for the nature of good and beauty instead of evil and depressing sides of reality. The sexual involvement with his adopted child forced him to keep a certain distance from reality, which may represent in his film themes and character building, indicating his moral reflections. The theme of his films in the 1990s was transferred to a discussion of a possible stable relation among three persons. For example, in the film “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, Allen created an ideal but whimsical relationship among Cristina, a beautiful American young girl full of passion, Juan Antonio, a romantic Spanish artist and his wife Maria Elena, an emotionally and mentally unstable women. Allen tried to add a third person, that is Christina, as a chemical agent, to balance a normal relationship with unsteady relationships of two persons, mirroring his thought on his involvement with Mia Farrow in real life. In his another film “Midnight in Paris”, he also express this feeling, hoping to escape from the time he lived in to an old era where great writers and artists he admired existing. In the film, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald are the friend of the hero, inspiring the hero continuously worked on his sketchy novel he refused to publish. This experience is similar to Allen himself because he in a certain time was bored of screenwriting but expecting to write novels. Therefore, Woody Allen’s transformation in style is likely a reminiscence of an old era to depict a dreamy picture where he can never live in the present.

The debate on Woody Allen’s child molestation remained contentious, but it does not necessarily affect his sensitivity in filmmaking. The objectivity of either Kristof/Farrow or Allen is insufficient. However, publically speaking for himself after extensive reports is abnormal due to its own personality and is inconsistent with his previous attitude towards celebrity, as he frequently refused to attend any kinds of film ceremonies. This strange behavior may merely in the purpose of showing his love for children. In his final statement, he claimed, “being taught to hate your father and made to believe he molested you has already taken a psychological toll on this lovely young woman.” He also suggested that Dylan Farrow would ultimately understand who has really made her a victim. Clearly, Allen to some degree was infuriated by the accusations. If the truth stands on Allen’s side, it is inescapable that the emotions of frustration and powerlessness would be pictured in his films, portraying more dark and tragic side of reality. On the contrary, if the truth stands on Farrow’s side, that is, Woody Allen did molest the child, then the weak and dark side of his own persona may have depicted in his films as a sense of incapability facing the inherently dishonest nature of humans. Accordingly, even though Allen’s works are inextricably intertwined with his own personality, his instinctual sense of humor remained in his work in his unique style. Allen intentionally kept a certain distance from his own image in private life and his character in his works, allowing him to create the works reflecting this philosophy on the relationship between fantasy and reality at a moral level. Thus, the perspectives from either side of the controversy would not diminish Allen’s artistic sensibility.

Woody Allen is, in his own way, a true intellectual gladiator of arts. His reconsideration of comic filming style derives from his own philosophy of life. Even though critics and fans of his previous works criticize his revolutionized style in his later works, Allen still insisted on his own philosophy in representing the inconsistency of reality and imagination. Additionally, plagued by scandals about child abuse, he transferred this experience and emotion into his films by adding increasingly sophisticated romantic and tragic elements. Therefore, the accusation of his child molestation, whether true or not, does not necessarily cripples his body of work.

Woody Allen: An Absurd Peter Pan

 

Woody Allen is certainly among my top 10 directors for his unique filming style and sarcastic tone in scriptwriting. Earlier this year, Allen was again involved in child molestation scandals, and his image was publicly added a negative mark at the time he was awarded with lifetime achievement in the Golden Globe. For my curiosity, I did some research about this issue and decided to give a snapshot of this legendary figure.

 

Spotlight the Achievements

Woody Allen is known as one of the most celebrated film directors and screenwriters and one of the greatest comedians. The elements of parody, irony, and slapstick infuse his comedy films with a sense of absurd humor. Deeply influenced by Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, Allen obsessed with satiric dark characters. He also developed the theme in romantic feminism, which was influenced by his long involvement with muses of many his works, Mia Farrow. Even though he was tarnished by scandals related to his personal life, he is still a prolific director and a reputed actor occasionally appeared in his own films. With five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay for Annie Hall, Allen has become one of the most accomplished and significant filmmakers in history.

 

Discover the transformation

Allen’s stylistic transformation from satire to tragic fantasy during the late 90s and early 2000s has been increasingly debatable. As both reviewers from The New York Times and The Independent commented after Celebrity was released, numerous salient similarities between Woody Allen’s Celebrity and Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita made the work a simple imitation with less value (Adair, 1999). The resemblances between the two films shattered many peoples’ expectations of Allen as a comedy director. Instead of considering his failures in the 1990s as a distinctive limitation, proponents seemed to regard this stylistic change as a change in self-representation. The reason for this idea is that Allen in fact despises celebrities even though he is a reputed person. This paradox was detailed in the film Celebrity when Allen pictured himself as an innocent victim of the culture of celebrity as a consequence of celebrity’s hypocritical and untrustworthy nature. Furthermore, inherent problems occurred in his works of the 1990s may have impeded his earlier comedic style of realism, for example, the recurrence of settings in New York City and repetitive theme of despair and loss, those depictions indicate Allen’s contradiction in self-representation because of his unwillingness to be visible in front of the public and reluctance to be identified as an admired public image (McIntyre, 2001).

 

Focus on the controversy                                             

Another controversy, Woody Allen’s child molestation in recent news, has gained the public attention. Allen was charged by Mia Farrow, his ex-girlfriend, of molesting his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, but Allen defended himself by claiming Mia Farrow’s malevolence over their breakup as he married with her adopted child, Soon-Yi Previn, his legal stepdaughter in 1992. In the article “Dylan Farrow’s Story”, Nicholas Kristof stated that Allen’s misbehavior as an artistic giant set a wrong moral standard, thus awarding him with the lifetime achievement in Golden Globe is questionable.                                                                           

As Dylan claimed in the report, she has been traumatized for nearly 20 years since she was seven, and was also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder largely affected by Allen’s popularity and fame. Praised by actors, critics and audiences, Woody Allen as a frequently appeared public image on every type of media nevertheless is a nightmare for Dylan because of his “inappropriate touching”. On the contrary, Woody Allen recently defended himself against the accusation by quoting a special investigational unit’s statement to support two hypotheses. First, Dylan’s claim about her trauma is the result of either her mental illness relating to her unstable growth environment or misleading by her mother before the trial. Allen then doubts Mia’s integrity and honesty by taking quotes from Moses Farrow, another adopted child of Allen. From his words, the imaginary misconduct was misled by Mia and was merely a revenge to Allen because his marriage with Soon-Yi. Second, Allen denied Mia’s story by proving that the attic of her country house is a venue he would barely be present, providing the alibi to commit the crime.

Related reports:

Dylan Farrow’s Story http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/kristof-dylan-farrows-story.html

Woody Allen Speaks Out http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/woody-allen-speaks-out.html?_r=0

A Note from a documentary film: The Art of the Steal (2009)

 

Storytelling is no doubt one of the key skills for public relations professionals. A compelling story appeals to emotional and functional side from audience. The targeted audience not only can be informed by well-packaged stories, but also more importantly can be persuaded by powerful sensation related to a particular product, certain awareness or a brand culture.

I recently watched a documentary film The Art of the Steal, describing the successful effort by Philadelphia’s leading aristocrats to break Barnes’s will and move the collection away from the setting and arrangement that Barnes had painstakingly established for it in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. The will-breakers had the collection moved, in 2012, to downtown Philadelphia. The protest of the relocation from opponents still continues in the end of the film.

Now, let’s talk a little about the character Albert C. Barnes, the founder of the Barnes Foundation, a controversial figure both in art and business fields as well. A man of unique instinct in art, Barnes formed a progressive insight in art after his rise, establishing the Barnes Foundation completely for educational purposes. In such way, fine art and Barnes Foundation in particular were not created and designed to entertain public but to educate students. This eccentric function of art at that time was debatable by the public. On the contrast, Barnes’ tough intention on radical display and strict possession of art collection infuriated celebrities and government in his time. Unlike the Modern Art Museum, critics believed that the way Barnes exhibited his art was inaccessible to the audience and of little value. This private-owned tension of rightful display makes Barnes even more controversial than purely for educational uses.

In the first half part of the film, it mainly stresses Barnes’ eccentric taste of art and the dogmatic purpose of the foundation. An explanation of the reason behind this combined his history of rise as an ordinary person then followed by the structure. However, the turning point of the film is the falls of the foundation after Barnes’ death. The film presents a blow-by-blow account of the breaking of Barnes’ will, a decades-long process that was initiated by Philadelphia aristocrats who were enemies of Dr. Barnes while he was alive, and that was continued by the heirs of those aristocrats.

Although a documentary film should be unbiased and possibly close to the truth, an inevitable sympathetic tone in this film stands for Barnes. “The film obviously had a message that didn’t reflect the complexities of the issues,” said Linda Eaton, director of collections at Winterthur. “Even if you agree with their conclusions, that the Barnes should stay where it is, this work is a polemic that’s structured to get people riled up, to get them excited and angry.” “There are valid arguments to be made for moving the collection to a place where more people can see it,” Ms. Eaton added. “And as for the question of whether Barnes’s will should be broken, is a will necessarily the most sacred document in the world? As we could also seen from the film, the speaks and opinions from those aristocrats also doesn’t appear in the film by stating their declination of interviews.

Let alone the truth stands for either sides, the director Don Argott clearly made an argument towards this issue. In defense of a “heavy-handed” style regarded by Constance Rosenblum of The New York Times, saying, Mr. Argott said, “We were trying to tell a compelling story, using all the tools at our disposal. We didn’t want to make a boring talking-heads documentary. We wanted to make a work that would resonate with audiences, and these are the kinds of works that do.” He added, “Whether or not you agree with the will, it represents Barnes’s point of view, and it’s our script for how he thought.” From a perspective of storyteller, an emphasis placed on the breaking of Barnes’ will and a graphical illustration of how its clauses were challenged and overcome surely compelled the audience. People who saw the “The Art of the Steal” in Toronto were hostile to the move and very angry about it, as another article reported. To this point, the film has achieved the goal to inform the audience and to persuade them to buy the story, and they probably would take an action to it.

So what elements make a story successful? Like Aristotle pointed out already, Ethos, Logos, Pathos – those are three essential ways of persuasion. Ethos, the storytellers’ trustworthiness and credibility; Logos refers to logical arguments of the story; and lastly pathos means the emotions of the audience the story appeals to. For example, the film includes journalists, art historians and public figures on both sides of the long debate, many of the figures discussed in it, such as Rebecca Rimel (CEO of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the group which purportedly benefited financially from the Barnes’s move), Raymond G. Perelman (a powerful local billionaire alleged to have orchestrated the move); and Bernard C. Watson (the president of the Barnes Foundation, who was accused of giving over its control to the Philadelphia authorities), declined to be interviewed for the documentary, they are all contributed to the credibility of the film and in certain way to lead the argument in complexities. Also, the way the director organized those sources and sophisticatedly tuned in all different perspectives in sequence is a strategy of making an argument and a rhetorical type of reasoning, ultimately pulling out sympathetic emotions from the audience.

Mr. Argott’s taste is nothing if not eclectic, as critics Constance Rosenblum stated in the article of Requiem for a Jumble of Artworks in the NYT, a story is nothing if not weigh in a valuable volume elements of Ethos, Logos and Pathos.

Note: here is the link of the documentary, if you are interested:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dxj9q2snl4

What does independence mean to me ?

 

“Every human beings is an isolated island.”                        

Independence, by its definition, as can be analyzed from a lexical level, consists of the prefix “un” and the root “dependent”, meaning not being controlled by something else or reading external support. When referring to the “independence” in a broader circumstances, for most of time we talking about a country or a territory. For example, a statement declaring that Scotland is an independent country. However, in this context, I only speak for a person — myself. For me, the word “independence” can be ignited and be enlightened only if it convey the meaning “loneliness” self-contradictionary though.

Being lonely is not a punishment, but an enjoyment. When the most powerful thing in the universe -my brain- is talking to myself, I can feel the clash of wills, the explosion of thoughts, and the outburst of emotions. This was not only pictured at the time of Big Bang or in the first chapter of Bible, but existed in everyone’s life everyday. ME, as an example, a foreigner come alone from another country out of United States, knowing nobody, separated by Pacific Ocean, from my homeland, with an I-20 and an identification stamp, I learned how to locate North in a new land, how to settle in an apartment with an reasonable deal, and  how to feed myself by my own hands within 20 minutes in a cheapest but nutritious way. Those are the lessons and skills for survival without experiencing “Being a foreigner”. Confidently enough now, I can find the right way to go home when a vague and weird voice come to my ears saying that X train will take Y line at the midnight.

Being independence also means that I can still stick on what I am in the crowds. To be a member of minority is not easy; following what others do is the shortcuts to fix problems. When my previous friends are all started to work with payments or got married or study for a one-year program in England, I chose for further study in the field where I flipped on, even though this is the field lived by toughest fighters which I need to use my disadvantage competing with their advantages. There is like a temperature fascinates me, a magic warm hand pushing me forward to take the way only me can traveled by.

Stepping the road on which is unique for me requires more sufferings and efforts than others. In this way, risky though you may receive the most precious gift from God and taste the drops of triumph. By this way, you are individualized with courage and sword to cut off all the thistles and thorns. And at the end of this way, you will be sharpened to become a true gladiator at the glimpse of Athena.

Starting from this point, pick up the pen and I can write the story in this blog.