The Best Director

New York’s June weather was still chilly, with drizzle at this time, making the hotel’s window glass hazy. After a day’s shoot of “The Devil Wears Prada,” Jessica and Wang Yang drove to New Jersey’s IZOD Center to watch the NBA finals’ first game between the Spurs and the Nets. This year, the Lakers were eliminated by the Spurs in the Western Conference semifinals, and rumors about the disharmony of the OK duo were flying everywhere.

And it seemed the Spurs’ odd-year championship “curse” continued, as they won over the Nets tonight. Coming back from watching the game, as soon as Wang Yang entered the hotel room, he remembered the text message he received in the morning, “I graduated!” Today was Natalie’s graduation day. Of course, he had known for a while that Natalie had her thesis approved and her grades were up to standard, so there would be no problem graduating from Harvard. He had briefly congratulated her that morning as well.

Now, he was making the official congratulatory call. As he hung his grey coat on the rack and took off his shoes, Wang Yang said to Natalie on the phone with a smile, “What’s the plan for life next? Staying in the field of psychology to delve deeper, hoping to snag a Nobel in Medicine in the future? Or switching to acting in the film industry to see if you can get an Oscar for Best Actress or something?”

“Uh, life plans… I don’t know.” Natalie burped, having just come back from the graduate celebration party, and lay sprawled in exhaustion on her bed. Her flushed face slightly drunk, she said into the phone, “There are so many things I want to do! But a person only has one body, so for now I’m most interested in acting! It’s pretty interesting, and I’ve got some fame and achievements, can’t waste that…”

Wang Yang slipped into his slippers and got up to go to the bathroom, laughing: “Your choice.”

“Haha!” Natalie laughed, opening her eyes; his voice seemed to disperse her lethargy, bringing her spirits up as she chuckled a few times, “Enough already! Oh, by the way, I looked really cool today wearing the graduation cap. You should have seen me. You would fall in love with me; I looked too cool.” Wang Yang splashed water on his face, washed his hands, and laughed, “I was cool back then too. It was one of the happiest moments of my life, finally not having to study anymore!”

Natalie couldn’t help but laugh softly, remarking, “You mean high school graduation, right?” Then she heard Wang Yang say “Wait a moment,” and the line went dead for a while. Natalie sat up, tousled her messy hair, and walked towards the computer table while speaking, “Hey? HELLO? What are you doing?”

After comfortably peeing and washing up, Wang Yang picked up the call again and greeted her with a “Hey,” hearing Natalie’s voice saying, “Are you in the room? Is there a computer? Let’s video chat!” Stepping out of the bathroom, Wang Yang replied, “I don’t have a webcam, why do you want a video chat?” Natalie asked with a “Huh,” “Why don’t you buy a webcam?”

As they talked, Wang Yang went to the desk, opened his laptop, connected to the internet, and accepted Natalie’s video call request through the messaging software. Her image appeared on the screen. She was wearing a cartoon dog print shirt and jeans, her cheeks flushed with a touch of tipsiness, her long hair disheveled over her shoulders, looking more like a nightclub drinker than a Harvard graduate.

“So, can you see it?” The Natalie on the screen adjusted the camera angle and leaned closer to the lens with an exaggerated smile. Her voice came almost simultaneously from the laptop and the phone. Wang Yang burst into laughter, “I can see!” Because he had a built-in microphone, he closed the phone call, set the phone down, leaned against the wooden chair, and asked with a laugh, “You can hear too, right?”

“I can hear but can’t see! I can’t understand how a billionaire can be so stingy that he wouldn’t buy a webcam?” Natalie raised her middle finger toward the camera lens. Suddenly perking up, she said “Right!”, got up, and walked out of the frame. She soon came back with a black graduation cap, put it on her head, gazed suggestively, and laughed, “How about that? Cool, huh?”

“Very cool, very handsome.” Wang Yang looked at her disheveled appearance, her graduation cap askew, and couldn’t help but laugh out loud, “Cool, incredibly cool… That suits you! This image summarizes your college life really well, haha…”

Natalie laughed out loud on the screen, too. She took off her cap, tossed it up, caught it and set it aside, and laughed as she said, “A little bit, but not that crazy. However, these years at university have indeed given me a lot, a lot of interesting experiences. My understanding of acting and life has changed a lot since high school. Maybe that’s the benefit of schooling!”

With a serene smile on her face, she slowly tied up her long hair, seemingly reflecting as she said, “You know, ever since I was young, I was taught, ‘Natalie, read!’ ‘Natalie, read!’ There were so many rules from childhood, family relations, manners and etiquette…You could be disobedient in other things, but you had to read, read conscientiously…”

“Oh God! Save my daughter, the doctor, she’s drowning!” Wang Yang interjected with a laugh. Natalie burst out with a snort and rolled her eyes unusually, saying, “As if Chinese families aren’t like that.”

This was a widely circulated classic joke, satirizing the Jewish notion of ‘expecting the child to turn out to be successful’ and a mother’s overindulgence. How can you tell which one is the Jewish mother from their cries for help? Other mothers would shout, “Oh God! Save my child, he’s drowning!” A Jewish mother, however, would cry out, “Oh God! Save my son, the doctor, he’s drowning!”

This situation naturally exists in Chinese families as well. Thinking of his own family education from childhood and that of other Chinese-American classmates and friends, Wang Yang shook his head slightly, then suddenly realized he didn’t have a camera on and said with a laugh, “Not in my house. My parents are like Gypsies, now they’re wandering, so happy! But in the general philosophy, Chinese family education is different. Whether they are Jewish, Chinese, or others, being pushed to read is all because of ‘rising above others, becoming part of the upper class of society, becoming an outstanding person’.”

“But what makes someone outstanding? If there are other ways to reach the upper echelons of society, do we still need to read?” Wang Yang sighed with resignation, it was really a matter of tailored teaching, as he continued, “Similarly, for becoming a person of ability, if we could add ‘learning what one enjoys brings pleasure and wisdom,’ succeeding in what we like to do, wealth and life will follow, and we would also become the most outstanding in the field.”

Reflectively he said, “No matter what social status you are in, it is the wise who are truly capable; clearly, this is what one should truly seek from reading.”

“Fun, wisdom, the capable…makes some sense,” Natalie laughed. She frowned slightly and said, “Anyway, growing up with a Jewish family background, I always felt like it would be unacceptable not to go to college, I had to go! And to the best one! Seriously, if I couldn’t go to Harvard, I would feel so useless. Why do you think that is?”

Wang Yang burst into laughter and said, “That’s easy, you need Ivy League validation!” After the laugh, he thought about his previous words and suddenly had a new idea, taking the opportunity while the film had not yet completed post-production to start copying, Daniel Wu needed to record a few more lines…

“Exactly! I’m so envious that you don’t need those validations.” Natalie picked up the diploma cap next to her, put it back on her head, and looked at her computer screen with a very satisfied expression. Wang Yang sent her an emoji of a beating, laughing, “If it comes to the hard work of studying, we Chinese are definitely at the forefront, except for me.” He recited leisurely, “Studying till morning, crowing at chicken’s call, that is the time for a young man to study hard.”

“What does that mean?” Although Natalie could listen and speak Chinese without any problems, she didn’t quite understand the ancient poems. Wang Yang explained, “It means you should study from 11pm to 5am.” Natalie frowned and shook her head, “That’s not good. When do you sleep? And if you sleep during the day, why not study during the day?” Wang Yang replied, “No sleep, study during the day too.” Natalie laughed skeptically, “Is it possible to not sleep?” Wang Yang said with a laugh, “Why don’t you ask Da Vinci?” Natalie shrugged, “That’s why he died so young.”

Wang Yang laughed and didn’t argue the point; that wasn’t what he meant. Looking at Natalie on the screen, he said, “This poem is actually a very picturesque scene, with the lights from the window, the shadow of someone holding a book moving around, and maybe a rooster sleeping by the house, you can tell how hard that person is working! Just take it as the week before exams, forget about the problem of sleep.”

“Ah!” Natalie nodded in realization. After thinking for a moment, she laughed, “Pan the camera up, hang a moon in the sky!”

“I’ve been studying ancient Chinese poetry lately. I’ve found some poems to be very picturesque and meaningful, really fantastic,” Wang Yang exclaimed as he thought of those poems, “Oh heavens! Wonderful, incredibly wonderful!”

These poems from over a thousand or several thousand years ago have a lot of artistic conceptions that are indescribable; they strike the soul directly. Their visual imagery is extremely strong, capable of constructing a complete picture with a variety of atmospheres—whether ethereal, elegant, or solemn. This sense of “wandering with spirits and objects” and “unity of poetry and painting” is something that many Western classical poems from movements such as Romanticism lack.

Only modern Symbolism and Imagism, which emerged in the early 19th century from Japanese haiku and ancient Chinese poetry, capture such ethereal and distant artistic conceptions. Take, for example, William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” However, compared to Tao Yuanming, Yeats’s lyricism seems somewhat lengthy and disrupts the visual imagery.

Represented by Ezra Pound, the Anglo-American Imagists, on the other hand, were not verbose. After studying Japanese haiku and translations of ancient Chinese poetry, Pound summarized three principles of Imagism: “Direct treatment of the subject,” which is about visual imagery; “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation,” and “As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.”

Ezra Pound believed that an image is conjured in an instant, relying entirely on intuition, without revealing any emotional ideology, and purely through the description of the visual scene evoking the reader’s feelings. He even said, “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.”

His renowned work, “In a Station of the Metro. The apparition of these faces in the crowd. Petals on a wet, black bough.” achieved just that.

Imagism was cool, understated, concise, and unusual, but Wang Yang felt it also constrained the expression of artistic conception. This limitation was also a reason why Imagism was short-lived. Pound’s lack of understanding of the Chinese language and culture resulted in numerous errors and a loss of the artistic conception in his secondhand translations of ancient Chinese poetry based on Japanese versions and Fenollosa’s manuscripts.

“You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.” This is the result of translating “The boy came riding on bamboo stilts, circling around the bed playing with green plums.” Wang Yang felt very fortunate to understand Chinese characters and have studied Chinese culture from a young age, directly experiencing the “Images” Pound sought all his life—what a lucky thing!

Because translation is translation, whether there are errors or whatever the school of thought, the artistic conceptions of ancient Chinese poetry only elicit that subtle feeling when one understands Chinese characters, that direct, striking visual impact: “Inquiring of the boy beneath the pines, he says, ‘The master’s gone alone herb-picking somewhere on the mount, cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.'”, “Old vines, a cold tree, crows at dusk, small bridge, flowing water, people’s homes, ancient road, western wind, thin horse, the setting sun in the west—the heartsick traveler at the edge of the world.”, “Lone smoke on a vast desert, a long river where the setting sun rounds.”…

These poems with their montage techniques, ethereal and vast artistic conceptions, are his current favorites and also his gateway to the world of “Firefly.”

These poems made him feel he had found a way to merge Western cowboys and Eastern aesthetics, inspiring many storyboard ideas; he had already constructed an important scene… it would definitely be interesting.

Wang Yang had previously been infatuated for a time with Romantic and lyrical poetry, the kind that wrote, “Natalie, playing Mathilda, as if a sprite fallen to earth…” After that, he came to see it as contrived and artificial, and for a while, he grew tired of all poetry, never fully understanding ancient Chinese poetry.

However, with his recent re-exploration of Chinese culture, now he finds and can confidently assert that, at least for him, the most enchanting poems in the world are these ancient Chinese poems with strong visual imagery and rich artistic conception.

“No wonder Kafka said Chinese books are an ocean in which one can easily be submerged in silence.” Wang Yang unleashed the verbose side of a director, giving Natalie, who looked back from the notebook screen, a lengthy talk starting with Romanticism, moving on to Symbolism, then Realism. He was about to discuss Dadaism and Surrealism, like Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” but recalling that Nolan was not yet that Nolan, he changed the subject.

Natalie had some issues at first, but then she simply fiddled with her mortarboard, listening to him speak in one breath. The drunk look on her face began to fade, and she discovered the miraculous effect of Wang Yang’s incessant talking as a sobriety aid.

“You know Kafka said Laozi is like the colored glass balls kids play with,” Wang Yang wasn’t satisfied just yet, having talked about poetry, he brought up Kafka and continued enthusiastically, “rolling from one corner of thought to another, but its core is still tightly locked. Laozi is too profound, and we are too superficial. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between human nature’s good and evil and nature…”

Natalie’s head dropped forward onto the table as she whined, “I just graduated, can I stay away from books and thoughts for a while? Dude, not now, I can’t even see you…”

“I’m just saying… that’s the beauty of reading, you can have all this fun,” Wang Yang shook his head with a smile and stopped talking. Natalie gave a thumbs up to the camera and chuckled, “Ha, that’s wisdom! My head was quite foggy, but now it feels like I’m taking an exam! Alright, it seems I have to delve into the sense behind those poems too. Maybe deep down, I am also Chinese!”

She said this because Kafka, a Jew, had said, “Deep inside, I am Chinese.”

“I don’t know,” Wang Yang sent a goofy face her way, laughing, “I’m not a psychologist! That would disappoint my mom.” Suddenly, Natalie started to laugh lewdly and asked, “Young, I know you were very sassy at the MTV Movie Awards the other day, making all those big butt, fat butt jokes…” She snickered, smacking her lips, “What’s the sense in that?”

“Of course, it’s the sense of the butt,” Wang Yang couldn’t help but laugh. Why had he felt “surrounded by butts” these past few days? He laughed, “But don’t underestimate the power of butts, they’ll make you convulse with laughter.”

Slapping the mortarboard on the table, Natalie looked at the camera and said, “Wow! You mean your butt stand-up? I love it! But I haven’t seen it—I was at a party today and didn’t watch TV, and it’s not online… Can you just tell it to me? No, no, no, it wouldn’t have the atmosphere of being there… FUCK! I guess I’ll wait a bit longer! Don’t spoil it for me.” Wang Yang responded, “I didn’t plan to.”

“Oh, I remember now! Isn’t it my birthday in a few days?” Natalie suddenly exclaimed with excitement, “I’m heading back to New York. On my birthday, I’m planning a birthday party at home to celebrate my 22nd! Ah, I’m 22 years old, my goodness…” Her expression suddenly turned serious, “So you know, right?”

Looking at the face on the screen, Wang Yang nodded naturally, “OK, great plan! I’ll happen to be in New York, can I come?” Natalie nodded with satisfaction, gesturing dismissively, “Sure, bring your hot girlfriend! If she doesn’t want to come, you still have to, you got it? I’ve already told everyone ‘the amazing Yang is coming!’, you better not embarrass me.”

“Alright, no problem,” Wang Yang agreed. Why wouldn’t Jessica want to go? Even if she didn’t, Long Island was just across the way. Natalie in the screen then chuckled, “You have to do a stand-up act at the party to cheer everyone up, better prepare well!” Wang Yang immediately sent an angry emoji, laughing in annoyance, “Please! You really think I’m a stand-up star? I won’t agree to that.”

“Then how about a martial arts performance!” Natalie, undeterred, put on a cutesy young look, “YOYO, it’s my birthday!” Wang Yang let out a few fake laughs, “NANA, you just want to make fun of me, huh! OK, what martial arts performance, breaking boards? Then you better prepare the boards for the act.”

“I’ve heard of this one stunt, breaking a large stone with the chest. How about that?”