On Jan 26, 2022, we hosted our starry night conversation project on the topics of multiculturalism, with Tao, a life experimenter; Dawn, a child born in Vietnam; Fay, an Abu Dhabi-based filmmaker; and Qi Qinwen, a translator of documentary literature, revealing their perspectives on war, foreigners, and lifestyles.
1. Tao, a life experimenter
There is a platform that brings together individuals from multicultural backgrounds for a short getaway from the city, to a forest, an island, a valley, or the countryside, to conduct community-based experiments. Tao, the founder of the platform, often refers to this community he envisions as a "Utopia". Here, everyone is free to learn, communicate, think, feel, create, and explore the way of life of the local community without any burdens or labels.
Tao's idea for the platform was inspired by his journey.
After graduating from high school, Tao traveled through Europe, India, Russia, and Southeast Asia... These journeys allowed him to observe abundant exotic lifestyles. In rural Finland, he observed an old couple picking raspberries, milking cows, and living a quiet life; in a temple in Wudang Mountain, he saw the Taoist master and abbot chanting scriptures and cultivating their spirituality; in Guangzhou, he witnessed how Africans workers were racially discriminated against or in tears because they couldn't buy a ticket home.
These experiences inspired Tao to then launch an integrated platform called "Yunyang XSociety". Through this inclusive platform, Tao hopes to build strong connections between people, nature, and cultures, to give more wandering lives a special sense of belonging, and to encourage each experience to deepen people’s understanding of themselves through the experiences of others.
2. Dawn, a child born during the Vietnam War
“I grew up in the US, but I call Vietnam home.”
This is the story of Dawn Le and her family. Dawn's mother was pregnant with Dawn when she and Dawn's father became unexpectedly whisked away on a boat from Vietnam by American officials nine days before the end of the Vietnam War. Dawn's six siblings were all left behind at home in Vietnam. People on the boat told her parents that they must be dead after the raid from Vietcong... It wasn't until more than 10 years later that Dawn finally got to know her siblings in Vietnam and reunited with them. Her family story is the epitome of the broader history that impacted more than three generations of Vietnamese people.
3. Fay, an Abu Dhabi-based filmmaker
Fay is the founder of the 48-Hour Film Marathon in Shanghai, a screenwriter with a multicultural background, and a lover of literature. As a high school student in the United States, Fay was introduced to screenwriting as a new way of creating literature. While his classmates were watching movies instead of reading screenplays, Fay was able to take a glimpse at a more vibrant world through the written word. It was this love of literature that led Fay to develop a strong interest in film, especially the role of a screenwriter. As a college student at New York University Abu Dhabi's School of Film and New Media, she has studied abroad in different cities on several continents. Drawing inspiration from the myriad of cultures she witnessed and experienced herself, Fay created a series of documentaries based on local migrant workers in the UAE, hoping to reflect on larger family and cultural conflicts from a microscopic lens.
4. Qi Qinwen, a documentary translator
German-Chinese, Born in Lanzhou, Raised in Nanjing. Qinwen has been in Germany for 15 years. He was the representative of the University of Göttingen in China and engaged in many discourses between Chinese and German universities for nearly ten years. He is now a teacher in the School of Foreign Languages at Hehai University, guiding students to explore the world of German and English. Orchestrating his passions and knowledge of languages, he also learned to speak Italian, traveled to many continents such as Europe and the Americas, and published translations of Heidegger and his Wife (2016), The Photographer of Auschwitz ( She's from Mariupol (2021), of which She's from Mariupol, translated and published last year, won the top ten of Douban's high score reading list in 2021.
