Meet Meiying Wu

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Meiying Wu. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Meiying, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
I go through my creative ‘routine’ to stay inspired: Every year, I go to film festivals to watch others’ work, observe their creative approach and reflect on my own work. And it doesn’t only happen with film festivals, opportunities are everywhere. When watching YouTube videos, listening to music and reading magazines, I get visual inspirations. These inspirations keep my creativity alive. I always feel the urge to make great work when I see great work.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m a multimedia journalist who aims to amplify marginalized voices and produce stories about communities often hidden from the mainstream news narrative. I speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and English. I’m a freelance video journalist, and I most recently worked as a video producer at POLITICO, where I created the POLITICO Show on Snapchat and made visual content for a variety of social platforms. Before POLITICO, I freelanced for publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and BBC.

As a multimedia journalist, I’m most excited about the opportunity to think about the best medium to tell a story: Is it a text piece? Photo essay? Video? Interactive? That process helps me understand the story and my audiences better.
Right now, I’m working on a personal project about meeting my half sister for the first time, at her wedding, and I’m thinking about using a variety of mediums to dig into our intergenerational trauma.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think independence, gratitude and patience. These might not necessarily be ‘qualities’ but I think they’re most important. I had to be independent and a self-starter in my creative journey as a foreigner: Since I moved to the U.S. for my bachelor’s in journalism, I took on the ride by myself and have had daily conversations with myself to seek my motivation and encouraged myself to stick to my passion. I’ve been thankful for every opportunity I had and every mentorship I received, and I believe gratitude leads me to more opportunities. Last but not least, patience: Sometimes we don’t see great outcomes right away, but as long as we keep working on our craft, opportunities arise.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I don’t think the two are conflicted. As a multimedia journalist, I care about different formats of storytelling and want to explore new possibilities, which includes things like illustration, collage and animation, so I practice whenever I have the opportunity. But I also spent my work time mostly focused on producing, filming and editing videos to keep improving my ‘strengths’.

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