June 2nd, 2008
Rae, JP, and I took the redeye flight to Newark, NJ and Providence, Rhode Island yesterday evening. We’re on the East Coast to interview two more scholars, Lingzhen Wang of Brown University and Amy Dooling of Connecticut College. The weather in Providence is great; it actually feels like the Bay Area with sunny skies!
May 20th, 2008
Rae and I are heading down to Southern California for our next round of filming and interviews for The Qiu Jin Project. We had a a very productive past three weeks filming in Berkeley, Saratoga, San Jose, and our very own Santa Clara. Next up are Irvine, San Diego, Connecticut, and Rhode Island!
Today, Tim and his friends helped us return the furniture back to the Teak House in San Jose. Our garage is looking and feeling a lot emptier now that our 19th-Century Chinese Set has been taken down!
March 5th, 2008
Apologies on the lack of updates. We’ve been busy traveling to and from various cities in China. The day after arriving in Shanghai, we took a van out to Shaoxing, where Qiu Jin’s childhood home and the school where she taught at are located. There, we interviewed several scholars and officials, including Qiu Jin’s grandnephew! We also went to monument at the site of her execution by Qing Dynasty.
After Shaoxing, we spent several days in Hangzhou, where there is another memorial dedicated to Qiu Jin. Before her death, she requested that she be buried next to the tomb of General Yue Fei near Westlake. We got some more great footage and photos of the monument.
Tomorrow, we’re headed to Beijing on the final leg of the tour. I’ll have some more time in the next few days to upload some images from the first two weeks of our trip!
February 23rd, 2008
We just landed at Hong Kong International Airport and are waiting in baggage claim. The flight was safe and uneventful — just a little long at 16 hours. We watched several movie during the flight, including Minority Report, My Lucky Star, and Rescue Dawn. For the last movie, we watched in on my MacBook Pro using the new iTunes Movie Rentals feature from Apple. Once we get our film done, we’d love to get it distributed via iTunes!
Upon our arrival and exit from baggage claim, we were greeted by my parents and Rae’s parents, who took United to fly to Hong Kong. We took a 30-minute ride to our hotel for the next few days, the Royal Plaza Hotel.
Right now, it’s 10:44 pm our time, around 6:45 am back home in Santa Clara. Tomorrow, my cousin Peter is getting married to Zelda. We’ll be partaking in the wedding festivities for much of the day. We’ll take the next few days to get acclimated to the surroundings, recover from jet lag, and prepare for the meat of the trip, starting the 27th when we fly to Shanghai.
Check out photos from our flight to Hong Kong today!
February 22nd, 2008
We’re less than 12 hours away from boarding a Cathay Pacific Airways plane for Hong Kong! Over the next three weeks, our team of five people will be traveling and filming scenes from The Qiu Jin Project. Rae and I are excited to kick off principal photography for the documentary.
Here are some photos of what we’re bringing. Most of our photo and video equipment is contained in the Pelican 1510 case. The 1510 can be carried onto an airplane. It’s got our video camera, digital still camera, lenses, and accessories. It’s good that it’s relatively small (compared to this huge Pelican case I also own) because it forces me to bring only the essential equipment. The large gray bag contains my clothes, audio XLR cables, and my tripod. We’re bringing a small Gitzo 1128 tripod for photo and light video work. When we arrive in Shanghai next week, we’ll rent a heavier tripod for our video work. Finally, the laptop bag contains our MacBook Pro, which we’ll be using to download footage, process images, and stay in touch with the world.
