Encounters

Yang Jiamin describes herself as a “rational idealist”, something the musical producer and CEO of Seven Ages Production hopes all of her staff will become. When I sat down with her at her office near the iconic Poly Theater in Beijing, I found myself sitting opposite a practical dreamer.

Cui Rui has tried combining Chinese stories with Hollywood screen writing techniques in his films, making the most of what he learned from growing up in China and studying in the United States. This multicultural life journey has led him to pay more attention to themes like self-identity, culture, and belonging.

Cui Rui still remembers his first visit to a cinema. The 8-year-old was shocked by the rich combination of images, music, and sounds he experienced and the strong emotions they conveyed to the audience. This encounter planted the seed of a dream in filmmaking, which came to fruition through years of hard work.

"Quarantine pounds" has become a hot topic on social media, and as life slowly returns to normal, people are looking for ways to drop the weight they gained when they were stuck at home. Chris Cordner, who is a certified personal trainer, shares his personal experience doing workouts at home during quarantine. He also gives us some tips and strategies to help keep you and your loved ones healthy.

Chris Cordner traveled to China from the United States for the first time in 2011 as an exchange student from the University of Maine. He was so impressed by the booming economy and the job prospects he found in Beijing that he was determined to come back. Two years later, he was accepted into a graduate program at Tsinghua, one of China's most prestigious and influential universities. Although he was a student of international relations, Chris found a fulfilling career path in the fitness industry and landed a job as a coach at a gym after graduation. Over the past few years, he has gained popularity in Beijing as an advocate of fitness and healthy lifestyles.

Ling Hui is serving as the secretary-general of the YouChange China Social Entrepreneur Foundation. Over the past decade, she has been promoting social innovation and focusing on ways to improve poverty alleviation work in China’s rural areas.

Ling Hui has been involved in the not-for-profit sector for about 15 years. She started volunteering for an NGO in Beijing in 2005 while she was a graduate student at the University of International Business and Economics. One of the programs she signed up to provided training to leaders of the hemophilia association. Through this experience, she met face to face with hemophilia patients and heard their stories. This experience completely changed Hui's career goals, and she switched from aiming for a career in business to one centred on work with non-profits.

Among the 42,000 medical workers supporting Hubei Province, more than half of them are women. In the early days of the lockdown of the provincial capital Wuhan, all kinds of essential supplies were organized for medics, but traditional conservative views about women’s health meant that some essential were neglected. But soon a volunteer team called "Stand by Her" emerged. When Lei Di learned about the difficulties Wuhan’s female medics workers were facing, she joined the team of volunteers without hesitation so she could lend a hand.

When the city of Wuhan was locked down in an effort to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, thousands of volunteers stepped up to help get medical supplies to hospitals, to buy and deliver daily necessities to senior citizens, and to offer mental health support online to people struggling with the intense emotional strain of their situation. 27-year-old Lei Di was one of the city’s volunteers.

A journalist with five years of experience behind her, Huang Yue volunteered to go to the city of Wuhan in the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak. It was a time for many firsts in her career - it was her first time covering a major disaster, the first time she’d visited the intensive care unit of a hospital, and the first time she did three live broadcasts in one day.