Jing (鲸没有中心思想) · Originally published on Douban, 2020-09-19
Junior year drifting in Beijing; living in a basement; the graduation-film team blowing apart; failing my first attempt; graduation goodbyes; making it through with 399; life at the Film Academy; reflections on the whole review process
Keywords: drifting in Beijing in my junior year, living in a basement, the graduation-film team imploding, failing my first attempt, graduation goodbyes, getting in with 399, life at Beijing Film Academy, reflections on the whole review journey
As I write this, it’s around the end of last April. I had just been admitted to the Film Academy’s graduate program, and for me that meant a very important chapter of life had closed. Today I saw the countdown on my phone — it turns out a thousand days have already passed since my first grad-school exam. I’ve now set out on another journey, and I hope it can be some encouragement to myself.
The hardest task of our lives is self-analysis — trying to comprehend our own nature and resolve all the conflicts within it.
—— Robert McKee, Story. Marked at the start of this journey, around January 30, 2017.
I have to be honest: peeling myself open and showing the real me to others is an extremely painful thing for me. You may see an ugly, even sordid version of me. But I believe that only what comes as close as possible to the truth holds any power. What you’re about to see is a three-year visual memoir of my own — a record of my life drifting in Beijing and grinding through the grad-school exam.
Studying in Beijing in October 2016, and hosting Brother Zha’s campus talk in November — these two things filled me with longing for this city. For who I was then, it was the best possible place for “image-making.” With neither a job nor a place to live lined up, I bought a cheap four-hundred-something-yuan ticket from Kunming to Beijing (with a layover) and left my comfort zone — for an unknown city full of temptation.
I had a few goals in going to Beijing. First, the graduation film was about to start shooting; as the team’s lead, I wanted to gain more real film-project experience for it, and to earn more money for it (I figured I’d be putting in about 15,000 yuan myself — a huge sum for me back then). Second, I wanted to do a master’s in the Film & TV Technology Department at the Film Academy, but the local exam-prep where I lived was hopelessly unprofessional (they didn’t even know the Academy’s exam had only one test site, at BFA itself). So I planned to first do a year in the Academy’s continuing-education program to pave the way, scout out Beijing’s exam-prep agencies along the way, and then sit the exam.
My first stop in Beijing was crashing at the place of a good friend doing the continuing-ed program at the Film Academy. That day happened to bring off-the-charts smog — my first time seeing real smog, and honestly I was a little excited. Because my flight was at night, I dragged my heavy suitcase (so stuffed that a wheel later broke off) through several near-last buses and finally reached my friend’s place.
What shocked me was that my friend in the program wasn’t renting his own apartment but living in a hotel near the Film Academy. He told me a single room nearby rented for around 3,000 a month, while one of these long-stay hotels was only three or four thousand a month — with an auntie to clean, and if you didn’t stay over the winter and summer breaks, a year’s cost came out about the same as renting your own place. Beijing’s housing truly shocked me for the first time. The price of one single room in Beijing could rent a whole apartment near my school in Kunming for several months.
After leaving that friend, I went to stay at the home of a not-very-close friend in Tiantongyuan. He owed some online loans and was hustling alone in Beijing — not easy. To save money and stay close by, he’d moved into a basement. I didn’t bring a quilt, so we squeezed onto one small single bed under a single blanket; some nights I’d wake up frozen. It was my first time staying somewhere like that, and with the nightmares, I barely slept those days. Later I moved alone into another basement for a week.
During my time in the basement, I came across a piece of writing — roughly, a Beijing native arguing that the people who live in basements aren’t people but rats: lazy gluttons who ruin the city’s civilization.
My god — how are they rats?
Living here were a big brother who’d come to Beijing for medical treatment, an auntie working as a cleaner to put her kids through school, and me — newly arrived with nowhere to stay, trying to save money. You couldn’t say they contributed much to this city, but they were all flesh-and-blood people, full of longing.
Over those next few days I landed a job at a post-production company a friend introduced me to, but the pay was just too low. I took it with a “ride one horse while looking for a better one” mindset. The company was south of BJUT, and I lived north of Tiantongyuan; commuting took nearly four hours a day, and I’d usually get home around nine or ten after dinner. But to write the script for my graduation film, every night I’d force myself to read screenwriting books until one or two in a room crawling with little northern roaches, sleep a few hours, and set out again at seven-thirty to catch the subway.
Because of those roaches, for the week-plus I stayed in that other basement I didn’t dare even take off my coat to sleep. The basement was damp, cold, and carried a particularly foul smell; every morning, walking out of the residential building to catch the subway, I’d unconsciously sniff my own clothes, terrified the basement’s odor would follow me onto the crowded train and be noticed.
The Cannes-winning film Parasite has a similar detail — that damp smell that seeps into your skin, impossible to shake no matter what soap you use or what clothes you change into. When I saw that scene, my eyes welled up.
Later, over a free weekend, I moved out of the basement that was driving me to the edge of a breakdown, into a youth hostel near the company called Da-something. On my second day there, security or property management came into the hostel (which in fact didn’t meet Beijing’s fire-safety codes) and ordered every tenant to leave Beijing. They confiscated everyone’s ID cards except mine, saying the IDs would only be returned once you’d bought a train ticket out of Beijing. I hid in the top bunk, holding my breath and faking sleep, and that’s the only reason I slipped through.
I later heard that the owner, “Brother Er,” pulled a lot of strings and spent a lot of money to get everyone’s IDs back.
Even though it was now a dorm-style four-person room, the environment was far better than the basement, the rent was a good deal cheaper, and there were people around my age to chat and play chess with. Compared with the previous days, this left me much more at ease — I no longer had to crawl up so early to rush to work, and I got a few easy, restful nights of sleep.
At the company I worked as an editor. My first project was cutting the trailer for a web film — a real film! That made me, forever longing to work in cinema, incredibly happy. I cut it with the utmost care, even using an editing program I was least familiar with. Once, riding down in the elevator with the company’s boss (who didn’t run specific projects), he even went out of his way to praise that cut — I was thrilled. Before the Spring Festival break, my supervisor told me they planned to put me in charge of color-grading a TV movie after the holiday. I was almost out of my mind with joy.
Then came the New Year. The Lunar New Year fell early that year. I spent about six days at home, and on the fifth day of the new year I took the train back to Beijing, because I’d picked up a fairly urgent side gig (a film-outsourcing project). Back in Beijing, I stayed at the hostel again. During that stretch I worked at the company by day, then secretly borrowed the company’s computers after hours to cut the side gig; when I got tired I’d just sleep on the office’s couch-chairs. I went days without returning to the hostel, and days without opening a book. Thanks to that side gig, my finances in Beijing loosened up a little, and I could start scouting a new place to live.
On February 14, Valentine’s Day, Chazelle’s new film La La Land opened in China. Taking advantage of a free evening, I bought the cheapest late-night ticket within three kilometers (I remember agonizing for ages over that twenty-something-yuan ticket — I’d been too impatient and watched a cam-rip in early January, so I kept wavering on whether to see it again) and went to the movies alone. On the walk back to the hostel, earbuds in, listening to “City of Stars,” humming along as I strolled through a near-empty late-night Beijing — this city of over twenty million people really is full of loneliness.
On February 22 a heavy snow fell on Beijing. By then I was already in a sealed grading suite working on that first film they’d assigned me. My supervisor actually let me use the 200,000-yuan factory-grade grading console (because no one else was using it just then), and I was over the moon. Stepping out of the grading room after work, everything outside was a vast blanket of white — for a southerner who rarely sees snow, it was truly beautiful.
The hardest thing for a southerner to get used to in Beijing has to be the water — it’s just awful. After boiling water in the kettle, a layer of scale would be left behind, something unimaginable back in Jiangxi or Yunnan. Only later did I learn that the company’s drinking water had to be poured through a filter machine (before, I’d only known the bottled-water dispenser kind).
Because the company didn’t cover meals, I gradually figured out the tricks to eating cheap. Right after the New Year, Meituan and Ele.me were running promotions with huge discounts; combined with shop deals, I could often order grilled-meat rice bowls for ten-some yuan that even came with several drinks. Eventually the whole department copied my ordering, to the point I briefly worried whether the sellers could even turn a profit. Later the sellers changed the discount scheme and it stopped being worth it, so I’d go to nearby Beijing University of Technology for lunch over the midday break — twelve yuan got you a great meal there. Later still, after moving out of the hostel and renting my own place, I’d just go home and cook lunch myself. With Meituan coupons I bought loads of frozen dumplings, and I ended up eating frozen dumplings for two whole months (a homemade meal cost under ten yuan). I really do admire my stomach’s loyalty.
About renting a place — I got pretty lucky. A colleague’s friend had rented the living room of a partitioned apartment right next to the company, and this friend (also called “Brother Er” — Beijing has so many Brother Ers, haha) traveled often for work and wasn’t home much, so he wanted someone to split the rent. Jiangong Jiayuan was less than 500m from the company (at one point I could clock in from bed by phone); you had to cut through an upscale complex to get there. The room was big and clean, with a large floor-to-ceiling window, and Brother Er was easygoing and looked after me. 1,150 a month, utilities not included — we hit it off instantly. At the time I thought: finally, a place to land in Beijing.
In early March, that grading project locked in before the New Year was wrapping up. I’d been fairly confident going in, but this project utterly shattered my confidence — it was the first feature I’d graded. It made me realize I lacked not only project experience but also aesthetic cultivation and the most foundational technical knowledge — and those aren’t things you get by being thrown into more projects, sink-or-swim. (This one was shot on a RED Raven (the Raven had just come out then, and the old DaVinci version didn’t yet support its new codec), so I never managed to import the raw footage into DaVinci. My conform workflow wasn’t solid enough either, and that TV movie tormented me for weeks on end.)
In March, schools began their grad-exam interview rounds, and at the same time the new year’s enrollment posters from exam-prep agencies plastered the BJUT campus. By then I’d already given up on the continuing-ed plan, because for someone as broke as me, the (Beijing Film Academy Cinematography Department) program just wasn’t worth the cost.
On March 12, a free Sunday, I searched up a few exam-prep agencies on Baidu, booked a consultation, and went straight over. (That agency ranked extremely high on Baidu searches; only later did I learn Baidu held a stake in the company. I went straight from the search because a friend had told me on the phone these agencies are all about the same, so I hadn’t really planned to be picky — something I later deeply regretted not being more careful about.)
After a week of agonizing (before this, an HR at a company I’d interviewed with told me, “Don’t dream of working and studying at the same time — you won’t pass.” So that whole week I kept turning it over: should I sit the exam or not? My final conclusion: sit it! Whatever it takes!), I asked my father for 30,000 yuan and signed up. (To steel my resolve, I sold my most beloved camera.)
And so, my road to the grad-school exam officially began.
It was also in that month that Naruto, the anime I’d grown up watching, officially came to an end.
Since I’d decided to take the exam, the next step was settling on a major. I only wanted Beijing Film Academy, so there was nothing to agonize over school-wise. At first I planned to apply to the Film & TV Technology Department (the Academy’s more post-production-leaning department), but I found that its one program last year required math on the exam — and I hadn’t studied math in four years, so the exam-prep teacher advised me against it. True enough, I’m scared of math (one teacher called me “the worst math class-rep in history”; I may have a psychological scar around math in big exams — I always choke). That left my options pretty limited. At first I chose the “Cinematography Department,” which sat close to the Technology Department (it also relates to grading, and I figured a student with post skills might have an edge in the Cinematography interview). But right around then came the “Alyosha” incident that was blowing up online; through it I learned some history of the Academy’s School of Photography (different from the Cinematography Department), and discovered that one school had split off from the old School of Photography (gossip: they reportedly couldn’t stand some of the School of Photography’s ways and followed the old dean off to forge their own path). Since this school’s program was very similar to my undergrad major, and the competition wasn’t as fierce as the Cinematography Department’s, I finally chose the School of Audiovisual Media’s (the School of Photography’s competition ratio the prior year was about 14.5, the School of Audiovisual Media’s about 5; the first year I applied, Cinematography’s was 25.6 and Audiovisual Media’s 6.8 — looking back, those ratios really were small) — Audiovisual New Media Creation.
During that time I was always squeezing out more time to memorize vocabulary (between April and June, I spent a good two-plus months going through every grad-exam word on Baicizhan), forcing myself to get into gear as fast as I could. Because I had to discuss the graduation film remotely with classmates at night, and vocab usually ran until three or four, and Beijing gets light early, I’d often only fall asleep after dawn (Beijing’s pre-dawn sky, a deep slate-blue, is so beautiful).
Luckily the company wasn’t very busy then, and with flextime and my formidable slacking skills (when clock-in was required, I’d dash down to the company entrance at 9:45 to clock in, then go home for a second sleep), I usually didn’t head in to work until after my homemade frozen dumplings and the company’s midday break (and whenever I had nothing to do at the office, I’d memorize grad-exam vocab on Baicizhan). That state didn’t last long — I quit at the end of May.
After quitting, I made a special trip back to school for the graduation film’s pitch meeting (a gathering of the team — our group was strong, and the teachers had high hopes for us; lining up equipment — we’d talked an equipment vendor into providing cameras for free, an SLR Magic anamorphic widescreen test; and attending the school’s graduation film festival). Watching my seniors win awards at the festival, I thought: next year I’ll definitely walk away with one too, so college won’t end with regrets. Before I left, the producer classmate promised me she’d handle everything in the group during the half-year I’d be studying for the exam. I thought: at last, I can settle my mind for the next half year and focus on the exam — then, once it’s over, throw everything into finishing this film.
The day I left Kunming, a rainbow arched over the school. I love this city so much.
After spending a month-plus back home in Nanchang (reviewing while taking my driver’s test), I went back to Beijing for an exam boot camp. During that month at home, a study-buddy and I split the cost of the online course for Major One (mentioned earlier), and I also found senior students willing to tutor me on the specialized subjects.
(I found the senior who tutored me on Major Two through the Kaoyanbang app (cut to: how to find people on the app); the senior who tutored me on Major One was introduced by a friend at BFA. The agreed prices ended up being: Major One, 150 for two students together per two hours; Major Two, one-on-one at 400 per two hours — basically a yuan every 18 seconds. I later felt Major Two was just too expensive and wasn’t improving much, so I stopped. There are many ways to find seniors to tutor you — it just depends on whether you put your heart into it.)
Back in Beijing, I went straight to the boot camp at Beijing Geely University, where the exam-prep agency was based. Thirty days of classes blitzed through English and Politics. A classroom of nearly a hundred people was nothing like the small-class teaching the enrollment teacher had promised; my reaction then was, “Damn it, I’ve been conned.” The quality was so poor that by the later part of the camp I couldn’t even be bothered to attend.
Something painful also happened during those classes: the college senior who’d agreed to rent a place and study for the exam with me in Beijing suddenly became unreachable. It was utterly out of the blue. To attend the in-person classes, I had to stay in Beijing to study, but apartments on Xueyuan Road near BFA were absurdly expensive, and I couldn’t find a temporary flatmate. At my wit’s end, I discovered the existence of “exam dorms” (mentioned earlier — commercial paid dorms specifically for students staying in Beijing to study). It was really just a shared dorm, except it offered a study room with an exam-prep atmosphere. With no other choice, I settled on the cheapest 6-person room (1,300 a month). Little did I expect that, in the end, the exam dorm would be the biggest help to me of all.
A few days after I’d booked the dorm, the senior who’d gone missing called me out of the blue. He told me that during those missing days he’d been lured into a pyramid-scheme cult, and only escaped by jumping off the car under the pretext of going to the hospital to change a dressing — and in doing so even got one of their dens busted.
My god — life really is more surreal than the movies.
After that I came to the exam study room in Xisanqi (now closed). The studious atmosphere pulled me into the zone right away (it was from this point that I felt my review had truly gotten on track, that I’d found the feeling). In that windowless 6-person room there were people aiming for Peking University, for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for BUPT, and friends like me aiming for the Film Academy — each one got up earlier than the last. Waking to find several beds already empty would fill me with deep guilt.
Because my schedule was a mess, I often had to nap at many points throughout the day, and my roommates nicknamed me “Six-Naps Bro” — roughly, that I slept six times a day. I thought it was fitting; the name kept me on guard.
After that I, too, learned from my roommates and worked out my own standard review schedule. Because I reviewed so late, mornings were usually rough and getting up was hard, so I bought this Vietnamese Red Bull on Taobao (later, when the supermarket ran a promo, I switched to Hi-Tiger — both cheaper than Red Bull, affordable). One can each morning to wake myself up, or one whenever I was especially drowsy, to reset my schedule — it worked remarkably well.
Both exam years I drank Red Bull like a maniac, to the point that now the mere smell of taurine makes me want to vomit.
Because I was still in the first semester of my senior year while reviewing, the school kept sending me bad news (or demands that I come back for photos and the like), which badly disrupted my focus. (Once the school called me back to take my graduation portrait; the administrative teacher said if I didn’t come back, they wouldn’t let me graduate. I’d just gotten into review mode, and having to go all the way back for one photo — not to mention the airfare — disrupted my pace; hearing it nearly broke me, and I even had nightmares over it. Later I looked it up and learned you could take it at any Xinhua studio and it’d be the same. The school’s administrative standards were all like that.)
The most painful of all was that my graduation-film group fell apart right at this time. The school required the lead creators to be present to explain the work, but we were either out of town or studying for the exam; freshly in review mode, I was stretched too thin myself. The producer classmate who’d promised to carry the flag for half a year was also out of town and couldn’t make it. The group chat was full of complaints (because if the defense didn’t pass, the graduation film couldn’t be shot, and no one could graduate). I really did fall apart in that period — should I temporarily give up the exam and go back to deal with the graduation film? (I knew that going back basically meant giving up that year’s exam.) During those days of deciding, I dreamed of these two things over and over. For me, the Film Academy was the place I’d always wanted to reach, and I’d already poured nearly half a year and a large sum of money into it, with only three months left. On the other side, the graduation film was my one goal throughout college; winning an award at the academy’s film festival was something I’d longed for over four years, and I’d started preparing for it a long, long time ago.
But what truly broke me was a long message the screenwriter classmate sent me over those days. She told me she’d decided to quit and “park” herself in another group (essentially trading money for a graduation-film grade). Only then did I realize the situation back at school was even worse than I’d imagined — there was no holding anyone together anymore. The mutual trust the group had built over years dissolved in an instant. I couldn’t bring myself to blame anyone, because in the face of the looming pressures of society, there were no idealized graduation films anymore — only academic obligations.
Ideals, in the end, are just ideals — utterly powerless beneath the iron hooves of reality.
And so the exam became my only remaining path. “I have to get in, or I’ll surely regret my decision later,” I told myself. From this point on, I grew more extreme, reviewing ever more obsessively.
I went several nights without sleeping well after that, and realized the reason I’d come to Beijing had already changed. When the graduation film and the exam couldn’t both be had, I (was forced to) choose the exam. For the exam, I gave up even the graduation film I valued most.
To improve my memory, I desperately bought all sorts of memory-boosting drugs.
Since it was my first time reviewing, I had no experience and was terribly inefficient (at that point I didn’t even know who Xiao Xiurong was). But the upside of reviewing in the study room was that there were many exam friends here — second- and third-time takers — from whom I gleaned some precious review experience and materials. At night I’d also sneak peeks at everyone’s books after they’d left the study room, secretly checking their progress~ 🤓
Here are my recommended review methods for each subject I sat:
Also, since these were humanities exams, the fit between pen and person matters a lot. Before the exam I tried out pens that suited me, and I personally recommend four:
“Pilot P-500 [pen]”: Performance is very close to the Uni UMR-83E, but it adapts poorly to different paper. Down to personal taste.
“Pilot BX-V5 [pen]”: Adapts to all kinds of paper, plenty of ink and rarely skips — I love it, though it bleeds through on some paper. I currently use it as my everyday pen.
“Uni UMR-83E [refill]”: The three pens above are the ones I brought into the exam, but this is the one I finally chose — unmatched in writing speed, and very comfortable paired with Uni’s UMN-105 barrel (the barrel looks ugly but is very comfortable). I tried the E, K6, and K4 versions of this refill, and the E version still seems best.
“Zebra JF-0.4 [refill]”: This is what my study-buddy finally went with. Performance is also close to the UMR-83E.
(A little trick here: the exam requires a 0.5 refill, but it’s not strictly enforced; my handwriting looks messy at 0.5, so switching to a finer 0.38 or 0.4 refill made it cleaner.)
During this stretch, something extremely painful also happened: a film called Pure Hearts: Into Chinese Showbiz suddenly became the subject of heated discussion on Douban. The director had done his undergrad and master’s at the Film Academy and a PhD at Peking University’s School of Arts (I was memorizing a book written by his PhD advisor at the time).
What truly pained me wasn’t the ignorant fearlessness of a director with a dazzling diploma locked inside an information cocoon — it was that experts, scholars, even directors I admired all vouched for him; capital and power toying with the film art I love. While young filmmakers struggle at the bottom of the industry, our industry squanders its resources like this.
At the end of November, Coco opened, and right around then a fire broke out at an inn called Jufuyuan in Beijing’s Daxing district. Because of the cramped living conditions, many people died, and because of this incident, I heard an even more grating epithet for migrants during that time. Afterward, the Beijing municipal government launched a citywide sweep of fire hazards, and my exam apartment became a focus of the sweep — my packed 6-person room most of all. Inspectors came wave after wave. With only a few weeks left until the exam, the dorm manager came to me repeatedly, saying that because of the failed safety inspection, we might all be cleared out.
My roommates agreed that if we were cleared out, we’d go find a short-term rental together. December was tight on time, and again came the nightmares — dreams full of hauling my things out after being evicted. The scene was just like the one in Ai Weiwei’s installation, Ye Haiyan’s Belongings.
I finally made it to the exam. With most students returning to their home provinces to test, the exam apartment had emptied out. The day before the exam, I moved to a hotel near the school with a study-buddy also testing for the Film Academy.
Tip: Book the hotel early, or the ones nearby will be taken and you’ll have to stay far away. You can usually book around September; once booked, call to confirm it went through. Nearby hotels may suddenly hike prices right before the exam — I got burned by that my first year.
Before the exam you have to listen to “Good Luck Comes”
My program, Audiovisual New Media Creation, was assigned to a room on the 8th floor of Building A (the main teaching building). The small room sat about twenty people and was much warmer than I’d expected.
I was a bit nervous the night before and didn’t sleep well, but fortunately all four exams went fairly normally overall — except for not finishing the “cloze” in English and getting the meaning of “immersive media” wrong on Major Two, the rest were fine. Coming out into the drizzle, I felt like a prisoner long held in custody, finally released.
My father posted on his Moments that he’d treat me to a whole roast lamb when I came home. “Finally I can let loose,” I thought.
After that I met up with everyone I’d put off seeing for half a year, then fled back to Yunnan. With no graduation film left, having wandered for a year, returning to school carried a sense of loss.
On February 3, I was still on my way to my grandmother’s when the scores came out. I was so happy I shouted out loud on the bus. 377 (my first-attempt score) — among the previous year’s admitted students, that score would have been second place. I never imagined I could score so high. I was brimming with confidence, sure I’d be admitted. But within a few days, I found there were classmates who’d scored quite a bit higher than me, even one with 413 (that year’s top in the whole school), and suddenly the pressure of the interview round shot up too.
A senior runs a public account called “Yang-something BFA Exam”; every year, after the first-round scores come out but before the overall rankings, it does a mock ranking with high accuracy — useful as a reference.
What you have to prepare for the interview round is a résumé, a portfolio, interview questions, plus an English self-introduction and answers to common spoken-English questions; and because there’s a written test too, you also need to read papers the department’s various teachers have written, especially recently published ones. To make reviewing easier, before the interview round I returned to Beijing and rented a short-term place near the Communication University. I spent over two weeks carefully designing my résumé in Photoshop, cut the best parts of the hundred-some films I’d made into a showreel, and even used Huabei to buy an expensive suit for the interview (bad example: don’t copy me wearing a suit — especially don’t dress like you’re selling insurance; just wear clothes that suit your own style). I was thinking I’d take the Film Academy at any cost, then deal with everything else after. Looking back now — if there’s a phrase like “blood rushing to the head with lust,” then back then it must have been “blood rushing to the head with the exam.”
During that time, I’d shuttle alone every day between the Communication University’s study room and my place, holding onto a beautiful hope; when I got tired at night I’d play a bit of PUBG (I’ve quit now) — pretty happy.
The first-round ranking list comes out a month later than the scores. Eleven people made the interview; full-time plus part-time, 9 would be taken in total. I ranked 4th on the first round, so my hopes were still high.
The Film Academy’s interview round is held very late — it doesn’t start until the end of March, which means almost no other school is left to transfer into. By then plenty of transfer notices had already appeared. Film & TV Technology was the major I’d originally wanted; before the interview round, when I saw the Technology Department’s transfer notice, I couldn’t help clicking to apply — because one of the specialized subjects was different, the result was of course a rejection.
On interview day, the morning was the written test and the afternoon the interview; the spoken-English and the interview were held separately — one student interviewed while the next waited in another room. We entered one by one in order of first-round scores.
“Introduce yourself first.”
“What’s the significance of this film you made (referring to my showreel)?”
“Which teacher’s graduate student do you want to be?”
“Since you want to be Professor Chen’s graduate student, what can you bring him?”
“Just editing? What else can you do?”
“I see Mistika among the software you know — you know Mistika too?”
“What are your plans going forward — how will you arrange your next few years?”
“What’s the significance of your working with film stock?”
“You still haven’t grasped my meaning — what’s the significance of your working with film stock?”
Inside a not-large office, seven or eight teachers from the school sat in a half-circle, with the department chair, Professor Su, in the center.
After the interview, I’d often find myself unconsciously replaying every little detail of it — perhaps subconsciously trying to pinpoint where I’d gone wrong in some part of it. I kept thinking and thinking, from March all the way to June, and still hadn’t gotten past it. In this video of mine are my reflections on that period.
↑ My reflection video on this chapter of my life (you can also watch directly on Bilibili)
Later, after I got in, I happened by coincidence to run into my former advisor and we talked for a long while. Thinking it over, all that anxious overthinking really had been unnecessary — you just need to open your heart and talk with the teachers with a respectful mind. Teachers who’ve read countless people can pretty much tell after a few exchanges whether you’re the student they want; overly elaborate preparation can, instead, backfire.
On April 5, I woke early and kept waiting for the results, but the list wasn’t released until around 3 p.m.
After the results came out, light snow began to fall in Beijing. A friend asked me out to eat; knowing I was in a bad mood, he wandered the Film Academy with me for a long time. Afterward we finished a meal at “Chiji Skewers” by the back gate, and for the whole meal the two of us barely spoke a word. The reason I mention this is that having someone with you really does make things much more bearable. Last year, I brought up that dinner with this friend I hadn’t contacted in ages. He replied: “It really has been a long time. Lately I’ve been busy working and reviewing at the same time. Some things in life can’t be predicted; if it makes your heart ache, it means the love is genuine. Either way, that’s a process growth must go through. I’m truly glad we met at such a crucial juncture in each other’s growth, striving toward the same goal. Thank you for every encounter — everything in the past was to make us into better versions of ourselves. Let’s keep at it together.”
After the results came out, I went back to Kunming, because having left in my junior year, I had many courses to retake. So during that stretch I had to stay in Kunming the whole time. I heard a study-buddy whose first-round score wasn’t high, but who had a relative working at a certain school, passed the interview round because of it — news like that hit me hard back then. My friends were busy with graduation projects, with work, with starting businesses, while I could only stay at school taking dull general-education classes. Lost, idle, sinking in the shadow of failure — my college friends were also scattering in different directions around this time, and the campus was thick with the melancholy of parting.
I urge you, take this golden cup; drink your fill and do not refuse.
Flowers bloom amid much wind and rain, and a life holds partings enough.
After graduating and returning home, I’d meant to lean on my foundation and try the same major for another year, but somehow I couldn’t muster any drive.
Then this year’s enrollment brochure came out, and I found that the Technology Department I’d so wanted to apply to actually had a new program that didn’t test math. It felt like embers flaring back to life. I sold the Element grading panel I couldn’t even bear to use, and decided to throw everything into one more year’s gamble.
This year carried a heavier burden; I didn’t dare imagine the outcome of failure. I took my old specialized-subject materials to an exam group and traded them for the latest English and Politics online courses, and began this year’s review. (It was while trading courses that I met @Jessmi, who’s great at English — she helped me with English, I helped her with the specialized subjects. Having buddies who help each other out like this makes the exam much easier.)
After that I returned to the exam study room. Because of last year’s “Daxing fire,” the building I’d lived in before was no longer allowed for use, which cut a lot of bed spaces and drove lodging prices up quite a bit; the cafeteria was forced to close too, sending review costs soaring.
The school had public lectures given by department teachers. Because I lived fairly far from school, on lecture days I had to crawl up very early to catch the bus — but the lectures were immensely worthwhile.
Into October, the weather gradually turned cold, and the smog came with it.
The sealed 6-person room ran the AC (blowing right at my top bunk), and the CO₂ levels were sky-high — drowsiness, oversleeping all the time. Usually the last back to the dorm, before sleeping I’d crack the window open a slit for ventilation, which annoyed the two lower-bunk roommates near the window. They said if I opened the window again, they’d report me to the dorm manager and force me out of the apartment. I didn’t open it again. After oversleeping the next day, I made a decision. I decided not to sleep in the dorm! And it was from this point that my review began to grow more and more extreme.
The office building the study room was in had a little closet leading up to the roof, where almost no one ever went. So this became where my exam friends “claimed seats” to recite. To get up early, I bought a sleeping bag and a recliner and spent nights right up there. I’m someone who cares a lot about how others see me, and waking in the morning I’d run into classmates coming up to recite — awkward, inevitably — never mind that I was sleeping under the office building’s surveillance camera. But the effect was pretty striking: I could get up early, and the sleep quality my band tracked improved too.
Going to audit classes at the Film Academy every Wednesday was the happiest, most relaxing time of my week. While auditing, I met a study-buddy — Bowen (now a very good friend). He’d previously studied nuclear engineering, and since we’re both from Nanchang we hit it off quickly. He’d come to test for the Film Academy out of love for film; this was his third attempt — the first two were also for the Technology Department, where he’d stumbled on math, so this year he switched to my same major. After talking with him, I was badly shaken: I felt he’d surely break 400, while I had no certainty at all. Excluding recommended admissions, the program had only two spots, and rumor had it that students from the department itself were also testing (in-department students are a disaster for cross-major applicants — they fill nearly every slot). Meeting Bowen shook me hard, and around that same time the office-building manager spotted me resting there at night on the cameras, so I was forced back to the dorm to sleep — and with it, my study efficiency dropped again. During that period, I broke down.
After that came the final month’s sprint. I moved my sleeping spot inside the study room; around two at night, when the room had mostly cleared out, I’d open up the recliner and rest by my desk. My desk was by the corridor, so to avoid awkwardness I’d force myself to get up and tidy away before 6:30 — sleep was especially scarce then, with my band tracking about four hours a day. Sometimes, unbearably drowsy at midday, I’d grab another nap. And so I held on for over a month, all the way to the exam.
Before the exam, I moved to near the school a day early.
The night before the exam, I discovered that the talisman I’d always kept in the small pocket of my backpack — the hair of my late grandmother, kept in a drifting bottle — had spilled out, the cork having aged, with my grandmother’s hair scattered all over the pocket. Grandmother passed away in 2009; carrying this keepsake, I’d been through many things important to me over these ten years, including the high-school and college entrance exams… This was the first time in ten years the cork had failed. Weeping, I spent over an hour putting the hairs back into the bottle one by one. Grandmother must have been so worried about me.
Then I washed up, set my alarm, and got ready to sleep. Though I lay down around ten, I still wasn’t asleep by nearly 5 a.m. (with just over three hours until the exam began). My mind kept running through the people and events since I’d come to Beijing at the end of 2016, tossing and turning, utterly unable to sleep. I thought of the roach-filled basement when I’d first arrived, of the friends who’d thrown me a welcome celebration right after my first-attempt first round, of the snow falling across the sky the day my first-attempt interview results came out, and of the girl who’d talked with me through the night… I was afraid I still hadn’t worked hard enough, afraid of failing the family and friends who supported me. I tried hard to tell myself: I’ve already given it everything — let heaven decide the rest.
(First exam) For Politics I drank a blue-bottle Red Bull and barely held off the drowsiness. At midday I tried to nap but couldn’t sleep.
In the afternoon was English, the subject I’d pinned my greatest hopes of improvement on. I drank two Red Bulls (one blue, one orange), but the drowsiness still hit — maybe it was from drinking too much Red Bull, but I was incredibly sleepy while my heart raced, utterly miserable. During the reading section the words spun before my eyes, and all I could hear was the classmate beside me flipping pages. In the end I didn’t even finish the questions (no time for the short essay, so I scrawled something; the long essay was half-done; the cloze was left blank). Coming out, my heart was ash — I felt this year was a failure.
That night, after checking my English answers, I felt there was no hope this year. I sent my family a message and went to sleep without much review. (Back then I didn’t know there was such a thing as “melatonin”; later, when I had insomnia, taking melatonin let me fall asleep quickly, with striking results — I’d suggest anyone in the same situation give it a try.)
The next day’s two exams went unexpectedly well.
The day after the exam ended, I went job-hunting and landed an interview at Homeboy (a film DI company), which had just come to Beijing for the continuing-ed program in 2016. The company had a wonderful atmosphere, and I thought at the time that if I didn’t get in, I’d just stay here.
(At this company I also got to work on many projects, which familiarized me with industrialized film workflows — actually a big help for my later interview round.)
On February 15, the first-round scores came out. As expected, I only got 58 in English (that score is so low it briefly made me worry I’d miss the subject’s minimum cutoff). Politics, 70. But both subjects on the second day went very well: Major One (Art and Film Foundational Theory (professional master’s)), a schoolwide unified exam, 143 (that year’s schoolwide top was 145); Major Two (Foundations of Film & TV Technology, taken by all students in the major), 128. (Bowen and I had shared lecture notes before the exam, and the two of us tied for first in this specialized subject.) Total: 399.
After that I kept working at the company until about ten-some days before the interview round, when I finally began reviewing for it in earnest.
The second year’s interview round built on the first year’s: revising the résumé and the Chinese and English self-introductions, asking a friend to collect the political-review form from my hometown’s talent market, and studying the advisors’ books and papers.
The interview round was held on April 2. Because of the Zhai Tianlin incident, the exam had become extraordinarily strict. All in-department part-time transfer spots were gone. The Technology Department’s interview round included a morning written test (similar to Major Two, but all subjective questions, seemingly testing a student’s preferred direction and technical foundation; there was a question about “previs (previsualization)” that I answered off the mark, which probably cost me quite a few points), an afternoon hands-on session (watching several film clips on a Mac and then making a PowerPoint in WPS explaining their technical principles), and an interview (spoken English and a specialized interview, held in the same room with about 10 teachers seated inside). Because my exam number was near the front, I was the first to go in for the interview, and stood talking with the teachers for nearly an hour. You could clearly feel that the science-leaning Technology Department teachers liked to drill down into a candidate’s area of interest until the student couldn’t answer anymore, trying to gauge the depth of their study. (Last year, the more art-leaning teachers cared more about an intangible “feel.”)
After the interview round, I didn’t want to face the final result alone in Beijing, so I went home to sweep the graves. My uncle told me, “Your grandmother up in heaven must have helped a lot with the exam this year.” I said, “Mm.”
This year’s results came several days late; on the afternoon of April 11, I saw a message from a study-buddy on WeChat: “Congratulations.” In that instant, I knew I’d gotten in.
Bowen, @Jessmi, and I all got in too.
I stood on the balcony and called my family and friends one by one to share the good news.
Watching Aixi Lake in the distance, migratory birds passed through the mist and vanished into the vast white horizon.
I’d more or less turned this chapter over — and suddenly felt a wistful emptiness.
Half a year before I left Kunming in 2016, I was shooting a short film for my homeroom teacher in downtown Kunming, and on the way back to school, a senior who’d graduated that year gave me a ride to the subway on his little electric scooter. Sitting behind him, I asked, “Senior, how’s your graduation film this year?” He said: “That bunch in the group has no heart for shooting — they ran off to make money. I really can’t understand why they won’t even put effort into the last work of college.” “These Yunnan Arts students have two flaws: one is being too arrogant, the other is falling into the money pit. Don’t you ever become like that.” “Mm, I’ll do my best. And what are your plans after graduating?” “Stay in Kunming for now; study more if the chance comes.” “The Film Academy?” “Maybe.”
Not long after the admission list came out, I heard the news of his death. They say he was forced to drink himself to death at a social gathering somewhere in rural Yunnan. A week before he died, he left a brief few-word review on Douban for the film Shoplifters: “Just being alive already takes everything we have.”
Dedicated to a friend who has passed away.
Thank you for the kinship of being truly known.
The road ahead is still long — let’s keep striving on, together.