We were lucky to catch up with Anna Chi recently and have shared our conversation below.
Anna, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
I have to say I learned my resilience from my childhood. I was born and grew up in China. When I was little, before Chinese people have privately owned properties like today, most of the Chinese people’s accommodations were provided by their workplaces. My mother was a doctor so my family lived in my mother’s hospital. The hospital was in the front and the residential area for people who worked at the hospital was in the back. If I wanted to go out, like going to school, I literally had to go through the hospital itself in order to go out! The hospitals (my mother worked at different hospitals during her career) kind of became part of my playground. I called the doctors and the nurses uncles and aunties as if we were all one big family!
As one big family, to “survive” in our neighborhood with so many kinds in different age groups and more or less all stuck in the residential area of the hospital, one had to learn and develop certain skills that would make her or him the “leader” of the neighborhood kids. At the time when China hadn’t started the “One Child” policy, all the kids in the neighborhood had siblings, I was the only one who didn’t have any sisters or brothers, younger or older. It was a blessing and a curse. I was picked on by other kids often but at the same time, since I didn’t have to worry about a disagreeing sibling, I could make alliance with anyone who seemed more popular at the time. Slowly, I became the popular one. I became the dealbreaker. All different neighborhood kids’ groups wanted me to be part of them. I learned how to survive on my own. I learned not to relying on others and I learned I could be anything I wanted to be. Yet at the same time, I would not have survived on my own if I had not relied on the kids that I surrounded myself with. Though what we did were all childish stuff, I would still say those experience taught me how to be resilient. At the same time, I also know that resilience is great to have but one can’t achieve success without others help. I still have fond memories of some older kids taking me in under their wings, treating me like their little “princess” sister!
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am an independent filmmaker working and living in Los Angles. As I said earlier in the interview, I was born and grew up in China. I came to the United States to go to UCLA film school. It was very hard at the beginning without speaking any English and not having any friends. But I knew if I could overcome these difficulties, I would be able to become a filmmaker to tell the kind of stories that mattered to me. That’s exactly what I did!
Even though English is my second language, I have been able to write, direct and produce English language movies ever since I got my MFA degree in Film Productions in the 90s. I am very proud of myself for making films for the underrepresented communities when the diversity and inclusion were not part of the daily conversations yet. I have made it a personal mission to tell stories about Asian women, about Asian immigrants. It’s a very narrow path, even lonely at times, but I keep on asking myself “if I don’t tell their stories, who will?”
My latest feature film is called “The Disappearance of Mrs. Wu”. I shot it in 2019 but before I was able to finish the film, Covid shut everything down. After three years of delay, I was able to finally release it in 2023. After a very successful theatrical ran in March 2023, the movie is now on Amazon, Apple +, YouTube, and other online platforms. I really hope more people will see it. Though the story is about three generations of Chinese women, I believe audiences will be able to relate to the characters through the lens of mother and daughter relationship.
Currently I am working on a Christmas screenplay for a major network, and I am very excited about it!! Stay tuned!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
There are so many qualities, skills that are important to have in what you want to do. If I have to pick three to comment on, I will say that “passion, respect, and be happy” are top of my list. I believe it is very important that we love what we are doing, waking up every day with an eagerness to embark on whatever it is in front of us is truly important. If we are not passionate with what we choose to do, chances are we will not be able to have the success and the fulfillment that we want in our life. However, I am also a true believer about being respectful in what we do. We don’t live in this world alone therefore we can’t work alone either. Respect to others, especially the ones that are different from ourselves. Respect to the world, respect to nature, also respect to ourselves are all part of the essential ingredients for a successful and happy life and work. Reminding ourselves the blesses that we have, the privileges that we have. Finding the joy and pleasure in our lives, in what we do. Be happy even when things don’t look too rosy because there will always be sunshine after rain, Spring always comes after Winter.
To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
People say parents are the first teachers for their children and I couldn’t agree more. Though my parents are totally old-fashioned Chinese parents from a generation that doesn’t know how to show their affections and loves openly for their children, they made sure that I learned to be kind, to be generous, to work hard and to never stop learning from others. My mother was a doctor in Jinan at the beginning of her career, and Jinan is the capital city of Shandong province so it was, and still is, a big city. But during the political turmoil of Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, she was relocated to a small countryside hospital. However, in my memories she treated her patients always the same whether they were city people or were countryside people.
China was very poor at that time, it was a common occurrence that I would find a stranger or two at our home when I came back from school that my mother had offered them some food to eat or sometimes just glass of water to drink (we were equally poor too even though my mother was a doctor). Those countryside people would bring eggs and a jar of canned fruit as gifts for my mother, to thank her for being their doctor . Most of the times, my mother would accept half amount of the eggs they brought but never the jar of canned fruit! When I asked my mother why she wouldn’t take the jar of canned fruit which I was dying to have because we didn’t have sweet stuff to eat, she always told me, “they have chickens so they could get more eggs but they don’t have money so that jar of canned fruit could be reused as a gift over and over again when they need it.” With this answer, my mother had blended “kindness, generosity and consideration” all together for me to take with me for the rest of my life. She always tells me helping others is helping yourself because you never know when you would need others help.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bigllamastudio.com
- Other: IMDB page: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0156873/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3
