Group 1 Blog 4

Chinese Cinema in the Bay Area Research Project: Group 1 Blog 4

Found Sources, Challenges, and Questions: Center for Asian American Film Festival (CAAMfest)

Since the CAAMfest isn’t associated with a specific site, for this blog post we decided to delve more into the history of CAAM itself by speaking with Stephen Gong and accessing research materials at the library.

Jessica:

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Stephen Gong, the Executive Director of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), and was able to ask him a few questions about the history of CAAM, its venues, the impact of COVID-19, and Gong’s new personal exhibit opening at the SFMOMA in May.

I understand from your visit to our class that you mentioned CAAM has had recent programming changes such as going from more international to more domestic. How would you describe the current and future goals for the program, and how your programming choices have changed over the years?

We approach the mission of telling stories in media that are more authentic and grounded in the lived experience, we tell cultural stories, we tell history stories, we tell social issue stories. It’s a broad range [and] they all do relate to giving voice to the Asian American experience. The film festival is an important part of our program but it’s not the sole reason we exist. And since there are other organizations, both commercial as well as non-profit, that only focus on a film festival, they might approach what they do on [their] platform in a different way than we do. Our understanding of this and our ability to continually evolve the festival has been this change overtime. That’s because the Asian American community and its sense of itself has changed over the years. As we get succeeding decades other kinds of issues come up.

At least for the first ten years there was so little production. Film production used to be pretty expensive when it was the film medium, even in 16 millimeter film, a roll of film was around $2000. And now that we have very sophisticated digital cameras, in some sense that cost has dropped way down. In the media realm there were so few channels, and most of our films were distributed in film theaters, and that was a very regulated kind of space. It cost so much to make those 235 millimeter film prints to travel around the country, those film prints can cost around $20,000 each. So, in a way, theatrical film distribution was not in the hands of individuals. That’s one reason why in the early years there just weren’t that many films being made. That’s why we would pull in international film, you know Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea. We would select sometimes if there was a relevance to an Asian American audience. Ang Lee’s very first film like Wedding Banquet was filmed in New York, he had been a film student. He was thought of in some ways as a foreign director.

As Asian Americans start producing a lot more, we definitely evolved the festival to really launch an important Asian American film like Better Luck Tomorrow, that could really help bring attention to a film that could be distributed theatrically. A huge festival like the Toronto International Film Festival is the biggest in North America and has hundreds of films they’re premiering. There’s a whole range of films that were individually financed and they don’t have a distributor, so in Toronto if they get selected in a prime spot, a distribution company like A24 will purchase it to market it. We’re seeing an evolution now with corporations that were in the tech area like Amazon and Netflix, and we’ve seen the major motion picture studios now have all been purchased by what had been broadcasters. So Comcast, which was a cable company, purchased NBC and Universal Studios, so that’s where we’re at today.

So what does that mean for a place like CAAM? We started to understand we’re not in that business, we’re not trying to launch a film to make more money for someone, we do want talented people to be pushed forward in their careers. We also fund and produce documentary films for public television, we get restricted funding just for that purpose. We entered into a contract with a corporation from public broadcasting and every year we select films, and those films on average take three or four years to be completed. We want to bring community attention to those films even before they’re broadcast and we want to do community engagement. We did a film called Who Killed Vincent Chen?. So we’re not trying to sell the film, it’s already been licensed to be on public television, and what we want to do and use the film festival space is to share this story with the community. We want people leaving the theater to think, you know, this is really important stuff, I care that this Chinese kid was killed because some angry white people thought Japanese were taking their jobs, that galvanized a movement. So we’re still in that space with the Anti-Asian hate, we’re working on a documentary about a mosque that was burned down in Texas and how the community responded. We’re doing a film on the Atlanta spa shootings. One of the Asian women murdered, she was a Korean woman, her husband was African American and her two grown sons went to the police station to say their mother had not come home and the police officer said, “It couldn’t be your mom because all the women shot we’re asian, and you’re black”. Anyway, that’s what motivates us. We’ve got to share a full range of stories, and reinforce a notion above all that we need to be able to tell our own stories. Our film festivals, more like the LGBTQ film festival, there’s a Jewish film festival, it’s an identity community to kind of gather around issues in the community and feel community.

Would you be able to expand more on this process of the nominations and how you work with some filmmakers while others come in later, including how this quantity of films has changed over the years?

Sure, we call this “This is how the sausage is made”. Back in the day [before COVID] when we were doing our biggest and best 11-day festival our total submission of titles might be about 500-600 films, and we would present about 120. Maybe half of them would be shorts. We modeled our programming off of the San Francisco International Film Festival, which is the oldest film festival in North America and it’s about 60 years old at this point. And what they developed over the years that we adopted like many film festivals would be like six most anticipated films that have just been produced. That would be from a filmmaker that people have known about and it’s their new film, even in the Asian American community. What you’re looking for there is your opening night, your galas, closing night, and then what we would call a centerpiece. Because we support so many documentary films, we would have a centerpiece film for narrative and a centerpiece film for documentary. And on all of those high level films we would actually be paying the filmmakers or the lead actors to come and attend the festival and be there afterwards for the Q&A. And as you can imagine, that’s special. The filmmakers do a brief introduction and everyone’s excited and afterwards they come on stage. 

We would select a competition selection, so it's the best documentary feature, best narrative feature, and you have to create a little voting sheet of paper that people leave with the usher at the end. And the reason we’re doing that is to help the filmmakers who win, because they can then publicize that. Then we have a retrospective, historic program, one of them called “The Spotlight”, which includes a filmmaker, usually with a new film, but we haven’t honored them before. 

Here’s how the selection’s done though: Our festival, we’re working backwards from May 12th, our festival opening night. You have to set the program and make all of your selections ideally two months before. March 12th you actually want to have everything selected, and if you’re in vital negotiation with the filmmaker or the distributor you can bleed a little but you need all of that because in the old days we would have a printed catalog where you need all that information ready. So working backwards from that, whittling down from 500 films to 120, how long is that gonna take? What happens is we do the call for entries in August, and it usually has a November deadline. In the classic days you’re not trying to watch all 500 of these films as the festival director, so what all of us maintain is an annual screening committee. You devise a system where every short film would be viewed by at least two different people, it’s like a triage, you're both giving a ranked score and writing a little bit about it and then it moves up the line. What we want to end up with is four or five shorts packages at usually no more than half an hour. So you need to take that 500, and let’s say 300 of them are shorts, so you want a couple of rounds so you can get down to that 100. But then you have to come up with a theme that makes sense for that program, so that’s a programmer’s articulation. And the festival director doesn’t work alone, usually there’s a small team of four or five of us. The neat thing is to present a package of films that don’t all say the same thing but are leading the viewer through a journey in watching them all.

These are all running parallels. In our best years, certain filmmakers like Justin Chon the Korean American filmmaker has done two or three films that we’ve shown at our festival, you know he really cares about the Asian American community. We want them to consider premiering with us or at least letting us show their films. So those films are done a bit differently, those are invited. They don’t necessarily have to apply, our festival director calls them up. We try to create that relationship, so that’s what determines those big nights.

The documentaries, because we’re supporting them, we treat those specially, we know which ones are coming to completion and would be broadcasted, and we want to launch them well and bring more attention to the documentary filmmakers. We’re living in an age of really excellent documentaries being made, it’s a special kind of filmmaking, it has deep, deep meaning. 

When we get to the 90s, it was this huge flowering of LGBTQ cinema, because in some ways that voice had been suppressed even within the Asian American community. During the Vietnamese era people began coming over from refugee camps in the 80s. My Vietnamese students were trying to understand this experience because their parents weren’t talking about it a lot, and would feel isolated until coming to Cal where there’s an Asian American studies class. Five or ten years later suddenly we have three or four features a year. A lot of young Viet American filmmakers have gone back and they are prominent in their film industry. 

So anyway, the film festival is actually made up of a lot of really interesting programs and if you can imagine a big eraser board with all your theaters and venues and then the programming team would start to slot and move films around. 

Speaking of venues as you mentioned, how have the experiences been different at various locations like the Roxie, Castro, and Great Star Theater? What goes into this process of choosing a venue?

For us the situation is even changing now and in not a great way, a lot of theaters are closing and they’re under a lot of pressure - that would be the overall theme of concern. This will be the last year for the Castro in its present, original state, a company has just signed a 30-year lease with the theater owners to turn it more into a multi-purpose venue with a flat floor where audiences can stand which would mean taking out the rake. We’re trying to figure out a way to push back on this actually. It’s its own process of how you try to hold onto the venues.

Anyway, a primary venue for us for many years was the AMC Kabuki theaters in Japantown. One of the reasons was they had about eight theaters there, it was in a historic Asian American community, and there was parking right underneath. So that was a great place for us to center the festival. And then another theater nearby was called New People, they had a small theater. It was kind of neat to have two venues on the same block, and then we could use a Kabuki hotel to do some panels or a filmmaker summit. We did that for many years. The opening night would be Castro Theater and then we’d go over to the Asian Art Museum for a gala, that’s still our thing. And the Asian Art Museum wanted to partner with us, for instance, because they wanted a younger Asian American constituency to start coming to the museum. They had been thought of as a white institution for their first 30 or 40 years, because they were. That collection was made up from white business men who had gone to Asia and their wives collected art, you know, it was a social thing. So now, they’re shifting. And we have a good partnership that way, and we’ve helped introduce a whole new generation of Asian Americans to cultural work. 

What started to happen more, was we were identifying a few theaters we could present work in. As a business thing, you have to rent the theaters, reserve them in advance, pay a fee, have a whole seasonal staff of theater managers, ushers, volunteers, box office, projection, print traffic. Print traffic in the old days used to be mailing film prints or tapes around, now it’s largely done through digital files. Part of the thing about your venue is, what formats can that venue project in. So the classic one would be 35 millimeter projectors, you’d have to be an old theater to be able to do that. But some of them didn’t have 16 millimeter - so in the old days you’d have to match up, and to an extent you still do. Many venues can show a high quality digital file or a Bluray DVD quality, it looks pretty good but not like a true 35 millimeter. But the thing is, because you no longer have to make up those film prints, and if it’s coming from a commercial distributor, they are quite concerned about pirating. It has to be on a high-level projector that can decode a key and be shown in a certain window of time, otherwise it locks down. And there are relatively few places that can show those files, so that cuts off your higher-end industry work. When we show in Chinatown at the Great Star, that has special meaning, so we might program specially for that. Something with Chinese Americans, Chinese subtitles, there’s a lot of people that live in Chinatown and are Chinese speakers. 

We’re trying to do storytelling in all of its forms. We have done programs with authors, there’s a whole grouping of young adult fiction authors who are Asian American. And so we’ll do a program with them at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and it’s not about film, we want you to bring your families in where we have treats or readings for the kids, stuff like that. This year we’re going to have a big outdoor Filipinx music show in the Yerba Buena Gardens. And that’s because SOMA Pilipinas is one of the historic Filipino neighborhoods.

Speaking of venues, how did COVID impact your festival? Will you continue to proceed in an online or hybrid format since it’s harder to bring out to in-person theaters?

Yeah, as you can see, there are a lot of facets that go into making your decision, how, where, what - the whole thing.  We all went into that first kind of lockdown in late March of 2020, and we were all set to go with the in-person live festival. It was really a scary, weird time. South by Southwest was actually one week away and they tried to actually hold their festival and the city closed them down. It’s probably like a one to two million dollar festival that employs hundreds of people. But anyway, we pivoted, and this Zoom platform we didn’t know about. You’d look into Vimeo or YouTube and think can we show our films on this platform? These other streaming platforms have their own little bells and whistles and you would register to get a ticket and be reminded and given your link. So we did that for a couple of years, and last year an entrepreneur actually set up a giant screen in Fort Mason to do drive-ins. The closest true drive-ins were out in Concord, California or near Fremont, but it’s like a 45 minute drive from the city. Many different film festivals used Fort Mason. It was pretty expensive, it was about $10,000 for a night, so you had to charge like $50 a car. We did a package of like 30 films that were offered virtually, and we got people to watch across the country. There were certain films you couldn’t put on that platform, the more commercial ones that wanted to sell to a streamer wouldn’t allow it. And even if it was not Geoblocked, so you can geoblock and say the person trying to purchase a ticket and watch on their computer, for instance, had to be in California. But you can also block it so that no more than 300 people can watch it, since they still want to show it to other film festivals. 

But anyway, the feedback that we got was very positive, particularly from people that were in lockdown that thought even in regular times, I would love it if I could be able to have this access. So I believe moving forward we will always now look to provide a hybrid festival, and one that has some kind of streaming selections in addition to live. You have to be at a certain comfort level and really love the Asian American filmmaking experience to come to multiple live things in a row. We are trying to make each of the live ones special, it’s not just a film anymore. You do want to have some element that makes it special, so that’s not a bad thing for the enjoyment of an audience member.

Moving forward, what are your future goals for yourself within CAAM? Speaking of yourself, we’ve heard about your exhibit opening up in late May at SFMOMA, would you be able to tell me a little more about that project?

I’ve been so lucky to make a professional career out of alternative media, I didn’t even understand that’s where I was moving until I was halfway into it and then I was like, oh I could be doing this the rest of my life, I really like this. So I was kind of a film historian, but as I look back at this last chapter of my life I’ve learned so much more about the Asian American community. I think more about things like the meaning of storytelling, the meaning in our daily lives, how to be more just. That would have seemed a little bit lofty earlier, I was really just into the history of film and filmmaking itself. So never stop following that thread of continuing to learn in your life.

This little SFMOMA thing, one or two things to acquaint you with some of the issues, you know we’re all seriously thinking about, how do we shift away from a structure that kinda defaults culturally to white male in power, in so many ways. The larger thing of course is, white men aren’t a targeted enemy, I think some ways power replicates itself and wants to stay in power. If we were in China it’d be a Chinese man who’d want to stay in power. But I do think Martin Luther King was a big influence and if we believe the moral arc of the universe is to bend toward greater participation and greater justice for everyone we do what we can. So, I think we’re at this unique space as Asian Americans, or as all people, that share these thoughts that there are communities that have been silenced, left out of power, purposely. And it’s not so much in the Asian American community I think the advantage we have because we have access to education, what’s our reckoning with the legacy of slavery? What I didn’t understand when I was your age still, was that from the 1600s to the mid 19th century it fueled all the wealth of the West. Which is why reparations are not out of the question. That’s what I think about a lot every day anyway is how do we use this position we have and the things we care about, and the people we can reach? So what’s the connections between Asian Americans, Asian American hate crime, George Floyd, and affirmative action? Where’s the intersection of that and what can storytelling do? Who do we try to reach? In the culture and the arts sphere, I believe information can take you so far, or even public policy. But we know the 13th and 14th amendment that tried to create equality once and for all after the Civil War, but we know reconstruction failed because white men in the country were not ready to embrace it. So this is where the arts have a unique way to help people change their minds. And where young people can make a break with the ideas and values that their parents or families may hold. I do think effective storytelling can maybe make things better with each generation.

A picture of Stephen Gong from the SF Film Society Blog

Further Library Research

After my interview with Stephen Gong, I delved deeper into library research to find more primary sources for CAAMfest. Jianye He from the East Asian Library directed me towards two primary resources I could find on campus, one being the Him Mark Lai papers from the Ethnic Studies Library, and another being the Maxine Hong Kingston papers from the Bancroft Library. I was able to contact Sine Hwang Jensen, an Asian American and Comparative Ethnic Studies Librarian, who kindly set this archive material aside so that I could come in to view it in-person. 

Within the Him Mark Lai papers there was a folder titled “National Asian American Telecommunications Association” (NAATA) which is what CAAM was formerly known as. The folder contained much more material than I was expecting, and it was surreal being able to carefully sift through material dating back all the way to the 1980s. I went through the material in chronological order, which is how it was placed in the folder originally. As per the library instructions, I have not included any photography taken of the archives, but I will describe them in detail. 

One of the more recent materials it contained was a large printed program for the festival in 2001 (the 19th festival). On the large cover it included the dates and locations, which were from March 8-18 at various venues, including the Kabuki Theaters in Japantown that Stephen Gong had mentioned, as well as the San Francisco & Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. The program, which was over 40 pages long, included a table of contents with pages designated for NAATA members, festival sponsors, opening and closing night gala, special programs, ticket information, and more. The executive director at this time was Eddie Wong, who I found more information about shortly after. During this particular festival, the program listed Rod Pulido’s The Flip Side as the opening night gala and Gene Cajayon’s The Debut as the closing night gala. The festival calendar was very helpful in listing each day grouped with what films would be shown at certain times and locations. Additionally, the festival program page goes into further detail by summarizing which country the film was produced in and a quick summary of the work. Notably, towards the end of the program is a description of ticket prices at each venue, which for this festival was about $8.50 for General Admission, $7.50 for NAATA Members, and $6.00 for Students/Seniors/Disabled. A ticket ordering form was included below this information. In one of the last pages I made sure to check for Stephen Gong’s name, and he was located under the Board of Directors. This program differed slightly from another NAATA Distribution Catalog published a few years earlier from 1998 which had a slightly smaller page dimension without a glossy texture. However, despite the artistic differences, the main layout of the program remained the same with an index, introduction, and list of the programs. The 1998 catalog included biographies of each filmmaker accompanied by a photo of them. The Indexes in the back were grouped as well, by ethnicity, genre, and audience range. In another 1993 catalog, I glanced again at the back to find Stephen Gong on the Board of Directors as Vice Chairperson, with Nancy Araki as Chairperson.

Next I found an article from the Asain American Network, where they discuss a NAATA event from February 1993 that invited seven women filmmakers to engage in a roundtable discussion, before the screenings of their films at the Asian American International Film Showcase the next month. Elsa Eder interviewed these women, which included Windy Chien, Eileen Lee, Keshini Kashyap, Azian Nurudin, Laddawan Passar, Dharini Rasiah and Michelle Taghioff.

I came across a cut-out November 1996 news article by Alethea Yip titled “New Director at NAATA”, Yip introduces Edward (Eddie) Wong and his journey as a political activist to executive director of this organization. Yip mentions Wong’s political action at UCLA, where he “fought for the establishment of an Asian American studies center…and became one of the program’s first students”. He also was involved as the western regional director of the Rainbow Coalition, Yip notes, where he met the Rev. Jesse Jackson and worked with Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. After 12 years with the Rainbow Coalition, Wong decided to direct his attention to his passion for media arts with NAATA, remarking, “As we all know, there is a marginalized presence of Asian Pacific people in broadcast and television and we need to stand up and give the public’s knowledge of our history, of our contemporary lives, and, in that way, hopefully broaden people’s appreciation of our role in this country”. Yip points out that Wong had to find a way to save NAATA, as the festival was struggling for funding at this time due to changes in government funding for minority consortia from Congress. It’s fascinating reading this from a perspective 26 years in the future, as Wong thankfully must have found success with alternative funding for the festival to still be going very strong to this day. Yip ends the article by referring back to Wong’s words which deeply resonated with me and reminded me of what Stephen Gong spoke about in our interview, as Wong states, “It’s still about empowerment…One of the few unifying forces is entertainment and information media”. I thought this was a great way for Yip to end the article on Wong, and it’s amazing to see the resounding impacts NAATA (now CAAM) has had in uplifting and drawing together the Asian American community.

Another archive I did not expect to come across was titled “Tales ‘N Toons: A medley of Asian American movies just for kids”. This was a program I did not realize NAATA provided, and it dated all the way back to August 1991. The program markets itself as “offer[ing] children a fun alternative to drab Saturday morning television programming. Short films about identity, friendship, diversity and prejudice are combined with live cultural performances, stimulating cultural awareness and understanding. More importantly, the festival offers Asian American children a rare opportunity to see themselves on screen”. It was fascinating to discover that NAATA invested in such a diverse range of programming that even included programs for children, led by festival coordinator Bob Uyeki. This short film festival also utilized the AMC Kabuki 8 Theaters, on every Saturday (of August 1991). 

Next, I came across a small square pamphlet with a large “10” on the front. Inside the pamphlet the dates “1980-1990” were printed large enough to cover the entire page. This pamphlet did not indicate a festival, but rather a celebration of NAATA’s tenth anniversary held November 15th, 1990 at the Asian Art Museum where film highlights and live entertainment would be included.

Another pamphlet appeared shortly after, this one specifically designed to market the theatrical premiere of Christine Choy and Renee Tajima’s Who Killed Vincent Chin? in March 1989, which is a film Stephen Gong mentioned to me. Gong also noted the significance of this film’s role in justice by featuring the story of Vincent Chin, the racially motivated murder of a Chinese American engineer by two white men in 1982, so it was very interesting to see one of the original pamphlets for this event. This premiere also took place at the AMC Kabuki 8 Theaters.

Surprisingly, a newspaper page from August 1985 was next, which featured an article by Ken Mochizuki titled “‘We cannot any longer accept ghetto hours’”. Mochizuki describes the event: “About 200 major Asian American media figures and community leaders from across the country gathered last month at the second national conference of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA) in Los Angeles to share their work and formulate strategies for combating the rapidly escalating racism and stereotyping of Asian Americans in the mass media”. The critical issue of debate at this NAATA conference, Mochizuki notes, was Michael Cimino’s film “Year Of The Dragon”, condemned for its degrading representations of Asian Americans. When I briefly glanced at the picture accompanying the article, I was pleasantly surprised to find a young version of “Steve” Gong himself! The picture’s label noted him as the assistant director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, and he sat next to several others including James Yee, the executive director of NAATA at the time.

While reviewing the material, Sine pointed to a different box full of CAAM archives that had been reviewed by another group, so I took a look inside there as well. I found more recent CAAM programs in this box, dating closer back to 2007 - 2010. Additionally, and more unexpectedly, I also came across personal programming notes from the programming director in 1986, Janice Sakamoto. Her handwritten notes were scattered all over the typed page, which included a note to the editor and summaries of each program. There was even a programming notes document from 1985, which included the opening remarks made at the NAATA Media Arts Conference, as written and signed by Jeanette Dong the Conference Coordinator at the time. James Yee also signed the program. This concluded my archive search in the Ethinic Studies library.

Next, I was looking forward to reviewing the Maxine Hong Kingston papers but unfortunately the Bancroft library was booked until the end of April. However, I got an email from the library the next day saying that someone had canceled their appointment, and was able to go in the next day to review the archives. (Yay!). The NAATA material was said to be located in Box 47 Folder 22, to which I found, sadly, only a single pamphlet depicting an opening night gala for Kayo Hatta’s 1995 The Picture Bride.

However, I didn’t want to end my search so abruptly, so I decided to delve deeper into other folders within the Maxine Hong Kingston papers. This led me to discover lots of information about Kingston herself, namely that she graduated from Berkeley in 1962 as an English major and Political Science minor. Kingston later gained her teaching credential at Berkeley in 1965, teaching at many highschools and colleges, mostly in Hawaii. However, I discovered from her Account of Career that her true passion was writing rather than teaching, and she has written several critically acclaimed works such as The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey. It was very interesting to learn about her process of writing each book. After reviewing the archive, I asked the librarian more about what the name on each box means, and they told me Maxine Hong Kingston has actually donated many boxes to the library, which included this one pamphlet on NAATA. Moving forward, I would love to find more primary and secondary information on NAATA, and learn more about how these resources all piece together.

Ryan:

I decided to make an appointment at the BAMPFA film archives to do some further research on CAAM fest before it became what it is today. While attending the archive, I found numerous promotions for the festival before it was under the CAAM name. Attached below are some pictures I took while at the archive. 

Grisis:

During this time, I approached a Chinese council member of the California Asian Art Museum who shared with me a blog post he had written.

The longest-lived Chinese artist appeared in CAAMfest

In 2016, CAAMfest opened with a short two-minute film tribute to the 105-year-old Chinese-American artist Tyrus Wong, who was born in 1910 in Taishan, Guangdong and immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was nine years old. Speaking on stage at CAAMfest, he expressed his gratitude to his parents, who made it a rule to speak Chinese at home and English outside, so that he could integrate Chinese and American cultures well.

*Additional information: Tyrus Wong’s “Chinese style Jesus” is put in San Francisco Chinatown Church for over or even more than 80 years until it has been taken out for Tyrus Wong to sign his name on it at Asian Art Museum. Moreover, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Eric Mar announced that March 9th in 2016 is “Tyrus Wong Day”.

Stephen Gong, the CAAM's then executive director, said that today's politics are filled with arguments from all sides, and that the role of the arts is to bridge us, to help us understand each other better. The slogan for this year's CAAMfest was “Come Closer”, and Tyrus helped us do that.

*All translated from Chinese, sorry for any small mistakes I might have made.