The film, now titled Living With Dead Hearts, explores the issue of kidnapped children in China and how it affects the parents, the children and the whole community. And it needs your help to finish being made.

Earlier this week on his blog Imagethief, Will Moss wrote a poignant and humorous post that couldn’t have summed up better why, as a new father, this issue touches me deeply. So rather than rehash that point here with half the quality of Will’s post, please go read it.

After you’ve done that, please take a moment to watch the following trailer for the film, read my interview below with Charlie and consider giving what you can to help this film be made.

Lost Laowai: What originally moved you to pick up this cause and build a documentary around it? Was there a catalyst or specific moment that made you feel this had to be made?

Charlie: After we made Kedong County, which is not good but showed us that we probably could make a good documentary if we put more time and work into it, I was actively looking for a topic to make a longer and more serious film about (Kedong County was just something we did kinda for fun over a weekend, basically). I had been interested in the topic of street children ever since I first moved to China, and I had learned about kidnapping and how that connected from an ex-cop Chinese friend of mine when I was living in Harbin. So I was thinking actively about the issue, and how we could approach it in a way that would be meaningful and at the same time (hopefully) not get us arrested.

When I read this article by Austin Ramzy in TIME last year, I realized that the angle he took–focusing on the search and personal stories–might work well for a film. We were researching and raising money for the film that is now called Living with Dead Hearts within about a week of my reading that.

Lost Laowai: How has the project changed since last year’s round of funding and starting filming? Any unexpected challenges or obstacles?

Charlie: Well, we’ve obviously learned a lot over the year, both about kidnapping and about filmmaking since this is our first time, and that has changed our outlook a bit. The original structure we had in mind for the film has been changed a bit, although we haven’t settled on a final structure yet. And we’ve come across new subjects whose stories are too interesting not to pursue, so where we once planned to mostly follow one family, now we’re already following two and making plans to go shoot a third when we have time. It may elongate the filmmaking process but ultimately their cases are very interesting and very different from each other, so we’re going to follow them and see where they go.

Practically speaking, things have gone fairly well. The biggest challenge we’ve found thus far is that several places our subjects live seem to be enforcing a regulation that requires foreigners to stay in at least three-star lodgings — we’d been planning to stay in fleabag joints, so that’s raised our travel costs quite a bit from what we had planned for. Other than that, it’s been about what we expected. Travel with so much heavy gear is exhausting, of course, and our subjects have gotten a little harassment from the police for speaking to us in a couple cases, but we knew that would be the case from the outset.

Lost Laowai: In what ways has being a foreigner affected the production and how have you handled it?

Charlie: Aside from the housing issue, there’s just the general issue of access, which is pretty key in the documentary field. People want to see films that can take them a place they couldn’t go themselves, metaphorically speaking, and that means getting people to trust us and open up to us and tell us these intensely personal stories. Needless to say, my being a foreigner can be an obstacle to that, because people are extra suspicious. I should note that at least in some cases, they’re right to be nervous, as this is a pretty “sensitive” subject and talking to foreigners with cameras can definitely attract attention you don’t want.

So, I’ll give you two examples of this. For example, prior to our filming my wife had been a volunteer with Baby Come Home for a little while. When she told them about the film and asked if there was someone who we could interview, they told her that not only would they not grant us an interview, but that she couldn’t continue to volunteer for them as long as she was associated with a foreigner working on this project.

More or less the same thing happened when we got in touch with Yu Jianrong, the CASS professor who started that Weibo campaign to help street children. We never spoke with him directly, but his assistant was very willing at first but every time we spoke with them we couldn’t seem to nail down an actual time to shoot the interview. Eventually, I realized we were getting the run-around, and then someone forwarded me an interview Yu had done in the Chinese press where he said he doesn’t ever talk to foreigners associated with the media. That’s really frustrating, although I understand where it comes from. For people with some power or position, there’s not much they can gain from talking to someone like me, and quite a bit to lose.

Lost Laowai: Aside from donating to the film’s production, are there ways that the expatriate community can get involved and help?

Charlie: Yeah, there are lots of ways! The easiest is just to help us promote it by sharing it with your friends, family, and followers online. Maybe you can’t afford to donate right now, but some of them can. Beyond that, of course, there are a million other ways to help too. Last time we raised money, the publicity also led a bunch of people to get in touch with us and offer their help with everything from research and translation to photography.

It was also through a connection from the last round of fundraising that we got to know the folks at the Xinxing Aid center, who we’re donating 20% of the money we raise to this time around. As of the time of this interview, we have already gotten an offer from one person to help us out with the production any way he can, and a number of other people have offered help with promoting the film or have offered their expertise as interview subjects; we’ve already found two new experts to interview.

So there are lots of ways people can help. A little simple promotion is the easiest way, but we’re obviously on a shoestring budget so we’ll accept all kinds of help, all people have to do is send us an email and tell us what they can do! One of the things we will need going forward is music, so musicians especially can help by donating us songs assuming that (1) they own the copyrights to every part of the song and (2) they’re willing to grant us legal rights to use it in the film and the film’s promotional materials. Obviously, not all music is going to fit — sorry, death metal guys — but we’ve already gotten some music and we’re going to need quite a lot to score a full-length film.

If anyone out there is a composer, especially a composer who can work with Chinese instruments as well as more modern ones, donating that kind of talent (for example) would be invaluable to us!

Lost Laowai: How has producing this film, and being involved with this film, changed you and the way you look at China?

Charlie: Well, it’s forced me to go a lot of places I wouldn’t otherwise go. For example, we spend a lot of time in Taiyuan — the city once described in GQ magazine as “a fucking shithole” — and while I can’t say that characterization is wholly inaccurate, it has a sort of special significance for me now just because of some of the experiences we’ve had there shooting, and the kindness that we see from these people who invite us into their homes and just open up for us in a way that’s quite remarkable and moving.

Of course, if you just visited Taiyuan the way a tourist does, you’d never see any of that, and you’d never see the places we see, down these back alleys, the places where people actually live. It’s good to have something to remind yourself of that, because traveling in China can easily become about the public transportation and hotels and tourist sites or bars or whatever. The film forces us to travel, but to completely ignore all of that stuff and focus very intensely on people. And then of course you see that behind this modern city there are these tiny tragedies that are just everywhere. For us it’s kidnapping, but if we were making a film about forced demolition or the problems of rural-urban migration or anything I imagine it would be the same. Making a film or doing any project kind of like this just forces you to get out of your daily mindset and routine and look at things from someone else’s perspective for a little while. In our case, that’s often really depressing, but it’s also important.

It’s especially important for me because I get into routines very easily and have to work very hard to force myself out of them. What’s great about this film is that it’s now so much bigger than just me that I can’t back out or make excuses; I have basically forced myself to get out there and talk to people and learn something.

Lost Laowai: When do you expect production to wrap up, and any word on distribution?

Charlie: We hope to finish it up before the end of 2012, but I’m not making any promises at this point. It’s our first real film, and I expect we’re going to hit some points in editing where we go “Oh crap, we didn’t get a shot of this…” or “We really need to get more of this…” and then we’ll have to go out and shoot whatever we’re missing. Ultimately, I’d rather spend 2 years making a great film than 1 year making a crap film. But there does have to be a balance between that and just working on a project with no end in sight, and a deadline forces you to make decisions and think about what’s really important. So, our deadline is by the end of 2012, but I reserve the right to push that back further if need be.

As far as distribution is concerned, we don’t have anything nailed down yet. The goal is to get it in front of as many eyes as possible, and we’ll do whatever it takes to do that. We’ve already had a few representatives from schools reach out to us to say they’d like to invite us to speak and hold screenings there, and we plan to submit the film to some festivals as well to see what kind of interest and reaction there is. We’re also considering digital distribution options of course, and donors [of a certain level] will get a DVD copy of the film as soon as it’s done regardless of how it’s being released. But beyond that, we’ll have to see how things go as we get closer to that point; like I said our main focus is to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible and we’ll ultimately go with whatever we think can best accomplish that.

Within China, of course, things are a little different, because there’s no hope for any independent documentary to be screened commercially, and certainly not one like this. But there are some small independent festivals, and some filmmakers also organize screenings on their own. In China, we’ll probably try to combine some screenings in major cities with some kind of digital distribution options, probably that would allow people to watch it for free because especially in China, it’s more important that people see it than anything else really.

But we’re still a ways away from all of this, so I can’t be sure about anything yet. First, we’re worried about making a good movie and doing justice to these people and their stories. If we can accomplish that, then distribution is the next major hurdle, but while we’re still filming, our focus is basically 100% on trying to get good footage and true stories.

For more information, check out Living With Dead Hearts (and this page on ChinaGeeks), and if you’re able, please consider helping this film get made with a donation.

You can follow Charlie on Twitter.

One of the original founders of Paper Republic, Brendan is a host of the Mandarin Chinese language learning podcast Popup Chinese, and teaches a course in Chinese-English literary translation at IES Abroad Beijing.

He also (and far too infrequently!) blogs at bokane.org (English) and 在北京找不着北 (Chinese). He lives in Beijing with his wife and two cats.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

Brendan: I’d been sort-of interested in Chinese from a fairly young age — partly because of a general interest in languages, and partly, I guess, because of a family friend who had studied Chinese in university, spent a couple of years teaching in Beijing in the early 80s, and always brought me Chinese-themed presents. And then I turned seven and decided I wanted to be an archaeologist instead, or something, and the interest faded into the background. It reemerged when I was 15 and my parents gave me a copy of Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation (I wouldn’t say “translation,” though I would’ve then) of the Tao Te Ching, and I decided that I’d like to read it in the original.

So I signed up for night classes at the local community college and studied Chinese more or less halfassedly for a couple of years, and then had the chance to spend the summer after high school in a program run by Stanford and Beida. Actually being on the ground in China made the language come alive for me, and if I hadn’t been hooked before, I certainly was afterwards. When I went back to the States, I got drawn in deeper by Chinese literature, and once I started studying Classical Chinese (which is, I maintain, where a lot of the good stuff is), I was pretty much done for.

Instead of going to my second year of college, I took a job teaching English up in Harbin for a year. It was not really the best year of my life — though it was great for my Chinese — and I actually might’ve quit if I hadn’t been accepted as a foreign student at Beida. I moved down to Beijing, fell in love with the city all over again, and the rest is history.

That’s more of a history of my interest in the language than a description of how I motivated myself to learn, I guess, but the driving force all along has just been interest. Chinese is now a much more common subject of study than it was when I was starting out (which was not all that long ago!), and I’m curious to see how that will change things for people. When I began learning Chinese in 1999, it was still kind of the exclusive province of the sad monomaniac; now, it’s a class you can take in high school. (And in elementary school in some cases, though I suspect that the classes are about as useful as all other elementary school language classes in the US.)

I’ve told people, half-jokingly, that learning Chinese as a foreign language is easy — all it takes is about five years of obsessive focus. At the very least, it takes a strong interest — and I encountered Chinese at a time in my life when I had the interest and the drive to follow up on it.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

Brendan: You can find Chinese-as-a-foreign-language textbooks from the 1800s on Google Books, if you look. A lot of them are great reads — Chinese for Imperialists (Chapter 3: “I said ‘hot water,’ you impudent boy”), Chinese for Missionaries (Chapter 7: “Your beliefs are superstitious nonsense and your grandparents are in hell”), etc. — and if you look at them, you’ll notice that the methods used to teach Chinese really didn’t change much between 1880 and 2000: artificial dialogues, vocabulary lists to be learned by rote, and minimal explanation of grammar. In general, I think Chinese textbooks — then and now — reflect the unspoken (perhaps unrealized) assumption that most students won’t make it past the first semester, so nothing ever gets explained in any kind of adequate way until like the third or fourth year, if people are lucky. Heaven forbid that anyone ever try to save students a bit of time by explaining at the outset that “adjectives” in Chinese are really stative verbs, or that 是 doesn’t mean “to be,” or anything else that would tell them how Chinese is different from English. Sometimes you’ll even hear people come out with ridiculous statements about Chinese not having grammar — while expressing disappointment about their students’ poorly formed Chinese sentences.

This is gradually changing, as Chinese pedagogy is slowly becoming grounded in something other than native speakers’ naive and unexamined assumptions about how their own language works. The general state of things still isn’t great, but it’s getting better, and there seems no longer to be the assumption that anyone studying Chinese is going to commit to it for the next decade or two. There are now even people studying Chinese and other things! It’s not just for prospective sinologists anymore — which is a pretty healthy thing, I think. Over the last few decades, and especially in this past one, there’s been a realization that not everybody studying Chinese is going to want to read Warring States-era philosophy (or that they’ll just read the damn 论语 in translation the same way Chinese people do), and so teaching materials have moved increasingly in the direction of presenting the language with a focus on communication. They’re still not great, of course, but if you put, say, Integrated Chinese next to the old Practical Chinese Reader, you’ll see a huge difference. (Though I do have a massive soft spot for the old PCR. Friends of Gubo and Palanka, represent!)

And then there are Chinese-learning podcasts like Popup Chinese (where I’m one of the hosts, full disclosure!) and ChinesePod (where I know and like a lot of the people). I don’t actually agree with the claims that Chinese-learning podcasts can or should or ever will be able to replace a good classroom environment, but I am kind of an old fart in some respects, and this may be one of them. Taken as supplementary materials, though, they’re great stuff — something that I really wish I’d had when I was starting out. With Popup Chinese, since we’re often addressing a more advanced audience, I try to take the chance to spend a little more time on the mechanics of things — how a certain pattern or sentence structure may work, or some finer points of intonation — just because that’s the sort of thing I always wanted to know more about when I was studying. (And I try to do it without getting boring, which is always tricky.)

The internet has been an absolute godsend for language learners everywhere. Back when I was starting out — which really wasn’t very long ago — if you wanted to watch Chinese TV, you’d have to go to a store in Chinatown and buy a bootleg VCD of the CCTV Chinese New Year Gala to watch at home six months after the fact. If you wanted to read something in Chinese, you’d have to go to the public library and root around through their selection of Chinese books, most of which were Qiong Yao novels or something similarly barf-worthy. The bigger your local Chinatown, the better your selection, of course, but I distinctly recall it sucking even when I went on trips to Manhattan’s Chinatown in 2001. Then again, it’s probably also that I didn’t know what to look for then. And don’t get me started on newspapers. You might have been looking for an idea of what was new and cool in China, but you’d end up getting time-delayed snapshots of lowest-common-denominator, squeaky-clean popular quote-unquote culture — not so different, come to think of it, from what you got in your textbooks.

Even leaving aside — which would be a mistake — the Chinese-learning podcasts out there, there’s such a wealth of content on blogs and Weibo and Renren and Youku nowadays. Say you want to follow the news. Instead of bothering with newspaper coverage (which is written in a dull-as-ditchwater “professional” register that hasn’t changed much in decades), you can scan Weibo for posts about a given topic to get a sense of what people are thinking. When (and I do mean when) you find some new Weibo meme that proves impervious to your dictionaries, you can turn to Baidu Zhidao, where someone will assuredly have asked about it. The Internet, and particularly Web 2.0 sites like Youku and Weibo, disintermediates between students of Chinese and the Chinese language as it’s actually used. It lets you dip your toes into a stream that’s flowing, instead of the algae-covered kiddy pool that we used to be stuck with.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

Brendan: People learn in different ways, and have different areas of interest. The foundational stuff — tones, Pinyin, characters — is going to be the same for pretty much everybody (though more on that later), but once people get to a more or less self-sufficient level, they’re going to want to spend more time on the things that interest them — classical Chinese, spoken Chinese, business Chinese, or whatever. The key thing is to recognize that there are two aspects to language ability — input and output — and that being able to deal well with input doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to produce acceptable output. It’s important to address the output side of things as soon and as often as you possibly can.

There are some things you can do at home — character practice, flashcards if you’re into that sort of thing (I’m not), reading and writing practice. But as you can see, they’re mostly very artificial things: for anyone really interested in interaction, you’re going to want to step outside and actually talk to people. This goes for internet nerds too — chatting on QQ only gets you so far. And as John Pasden said in his answers, the thought of structuring my entire study of Chinese around any series of textbooks just makes me want to stick my thumbs into my eyes. Once people have gotten to a level of Chinese where they only need to break out the dictionary once or twice per sentence, it’s time to step outside and get lost in the biomass. That’s easier to do if you’re actually in China, but as I said above, the Internet has made things a lot easier for people stuck elsewhere.

I’d strongly recommend that people pay more attention to Chinese literature and composition. Right now, I’m not aware of any program that pays much in the way of attention to second-language students’ Chinese composition skills (beyond maybe teaching them how to write a resume), which is a real shame. I used to write a blog in Chinese, and I found that it helped me straighten out my understanding of how certain things worked stylistically in written Chinese.

I’ve been lucky. I absorb information through the eyes pretty well, so my learning style worked well with the methods of teaching that were around when I started, which were mostly text-based. That happened to overlap with my main interest, which was (and still mostly is) Chinese literature. At the same time, I’ve been living in China since 2002, so I haven’t been able to follow my natural instincts and just crawl up into books: spoken Chinese is still a part of my everyday life. My spoken Chinese is by far the weakest aspect of my Chinese ability, but because of my environment it hasn’t been able to atrophy too badly.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

Brendan: Tool? Dictionary. Go out and get a good one — a good paper one, if you can. Electronic dictionaries are awesome (and I use Wenlin and Pleco all the time, as well as pirated custom Chinese-Chinese dictionaries for the OS X Dictionary.app), but the sheer inconvenience of looking something up in a paper dictionary will make you more likely to remember it. Paper dictionaries aren’t the way to go for work, or for anything where time is really of the essence, but if you’re studying at home, there is still nothing better, in my experience. A pocket dictionary will get you through a conversation or a road trip; the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary will get you through a novel; the 汉语大词典 will get you through just about anything written before 1911 (but probably not all that much written afterwards). Once you’re able to, or maybe even a little before you’re able to, switch to a Chinese-Chinese dictionary for a more accurate picture of the language on its own terms.

Record yourself speaking Chinese. I spent a year back in the US to finish up my college degree, and in order to keep my spoken Chinese from going entirely down the toilet, I started making myself record a one- or two-minute audio diary every night. It was painful — think about how uncomfortable you feel when you hear your own voice in English, and now add in mangled tones and stuttering — but it did a lot for my accent and the overall naturalness of my speech.

If you want to learn how to write characters by hand (something that people are increasingly ignoring these days; I sympathize, but think it’s probably a fool’s economy), get a few 字帖 — the character-tracing workbooks that students here use. They’re a completely mindless way of getting characters into muscle memory; you can even use them when you’re watching TV or something.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

Brendan: The Johns (Pasden and Biesnecker — yes, I cheated by peeking) mention tones and Pinyin, and it’s pretty hard to go wrong with those. I’ve come increasingly to believe that it may actually be a mistake to start learning characters too early on: they subtly reinforce the popular but wrong notion that Chinese is “made of characters,” and by pulling learners’ attention towards the syllables that they represent, they might lead to unnatural pronunciation focusing on syllables rather than words. Then again, maybe not: Pinyin-only instruction is still kind of a new thing, and it’s too early to say whether or not it’ll help learners speak more naturally at the outset.

I think there’s probably something to be said for encountering other ways of romanizing Chinese early on. Not long after I started studying, I found a couple of old Yale textbooks in a second-hand shop. In the Yale romanization, the sound that Pinyin romanizes as “x-” is “sy-” — a less elegant, but slightly more accurate way of representing the sound. (Pro tip: make an ordinary “sh” sound, then put the tip of your tongue behind your bottom teeth.) The Yale textbook also had a good description of how to make the “ü” sound that so often gives native English speakers trouble. (Pro tip: make like you’re going to whistle.)

I often see people online arguing about the relative merits of simplified and traditional characters for learners. The arguments are crap on both sides: simplified characters are probably slightly less inhumane, but otherwise there aren’t that many differences between the two, despite how it may seem at first.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

Brendan: The dirty little secret of Chinese language learning (and instruction!) is that nobody learns the tones right the first time around, unless they’re really unusually gifted. A lot of that is just because tones are weird for those of us who come from languages that don’t use lexical tone; part of it, too, is that existing teaching materials don’t really do a very good job of teaching tones as they’re used in actual speech. (John Pasden’s tone pair drills should be required reference material for anyone writing a Mandarin textbook.)

Oh, man, this is going to sound really discouraging, but: there are some mistakes, like getting the tones wrong the first time, that I think everybody is going to have to make for themselves as part of their study, and then fix for themselves later. The good news is that once you’ve gotten to the point where you can see that you’re doing something wrong, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to do it right.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

Brendan: After I’d been studying Chinese for about three years, my parents got me Wenlin for Christmas and I started using it to read real-world Chinese texts on my own. It’s no longer the only game in town for Chinese students, but it’s still probably the tool I use most often when I’m working.

Pleco offers the same ABC dictionary (among others) and a whole bunch more goodies (OCR through your camera phone? So this is what the 21st century’s going to be like!) in mobile form. Nciku is a very useful resource for technical terms and English-Chinese (which Wenlin is nearly useless for); Adso is good for helping to make sense of particularly torturous sentences; International Scientific’s online interface to the 说文解字 and to scans of seal, bronze, and oracle forms of characters is hours of fun; Baidu Zhidao, which I mentioned above, is great for any kind of new coinage, meme, or line of film dialogue.

For more from Brendan, check out Bokane.org, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.

John surely doesn’t need much introduction for anyone studying Chinese. In China for more than a decade, John’s been mastering the language for most of that time, including securing a masters in applied linguistics in Shanghai. He pens the popular Sinosplice blog, oversees academic content and serves as host at ChinesePod and founded AllSet Learning, a Shanghai-based consulting company that offers highly customized learning solutions for frustrated learners of Mandarin.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

John: Well, I came to China specifically to learn Chinese, so it would have been kind of a shame to go home mission unaccomplished. I also have a stubborn side, and I was shocked and dismayed that no one could understand my Chinese when I first arrived in China after three semesters of university study. But that also strengthened my resolve to overcome the pronunciation hurdle.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

John: Everything is better! There are better textbooks, numerous podcasts, plenty of videos, tons of blogs, iPhone apps, and desktop software. I came to China with a paper dictionary. That thing was my best friend for my first year in China.

I guess in some ways it’s harder to get started now because there’s so much “noise.” It seems like it was more work 10 years ago, but it definitely felt simpler.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

John: Always multi-pronged. It’s not just that different methods are better in different ways, it’s that variety will help keep you interested. I think many learners jump in with a lot of enthusiasm, and they’re prepared for the mental challenge, but they’re really not prepared for being bored out of their minds. I mean, if your plan is to buy the whole New Practical Chinese Reader set of textbooks and just work your way through it, you’re going to have a very tough time. Diversifying your tools and sources of input is a must.

And, of course, don’t forget the “talk to Chinese people” prong. If your desire to speak the language is fueled by a desire to communicate with Chinese people, regular reminders that your hard work is starting to pay off in tiny dividends will do wonders for motivation.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

John: Well, I learned Chinese mainly by just going out and talking to people. Every time they said something I didn’t get, I wrote it down and looked it up later and just kept truckin’. This method requires a thick skin and a tireless attitude, but it really pays off… as long as you have a decent dictionary. For me, the dictionary was key.

If you don’t have the environment on your side, then I’d say ChinesePod is a great resource. I’ve been working on the material there for over 5 years, and much of it is the stuff I wish I had when I was learning Chinese.

Above all, you have to find some material that interests you personally, and the tools that help make that material more accessible.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

John: Pinyin and tones. Yes, I started there, but I should have stuck at it a bit longer!

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

John: Don’t underestimate the importance of good pronunciation. It was a huge bummer to study Chinese for almost two years, arrive in China expecting to hit the ground running, and then discover that no one could understand me.

Yes, the difference between “q” and “ch” matters. You really do need to learn to pronounce “yu.” Tones aren’t going away, even if you try to just talk really fast. Yes, getting all these right can be painful at times, but once you get them, they really pay off immediately as well as down the road.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

John: You’re making me feel very self-promotional here, but I work hard to create what I feel is missing. So of course I recommend Sinosplice.com, ChinesePod.com, and the stuff we’re doing at AllSet Learning in Shanghai. My favorite dictionary is Pleco, and Skritter continues to do really cool things around writing practice. Of course the best “resource” ever is Chinese people!

This is the industry I’ve devoted my career to. I’m only 10 years in, and I’m looking forward to some productive years ahead.

For more from John, check out Sinosplice, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.

For the third installment in our weekly Mandarin Monday series that discusses Chinese learning we’ve hit up David Flynn. Dave is originally from the UK, he’s been living in Taiwan and learning Mandarin Chinese for the last five years. He founded and runs ChineseHacks.com a blog dedicated to effectively learning Chinese; and co-founded MandarinPoster.com, a handy learning tool for any student of Chinese.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

Dave: The story of how I got started learning Chinese is a strange one, though I think it might be similar to other foreigners who find themselves in Taiwan before they actually decided to start learning Chinese. I came to Taiwan right after graduating from a computer science degree in the UK and at the time I couldn’t write a word of Chinese, and the only Chinese I could actually speak was a few words that I had managed to pick up from the first few lessons of Pimsleur (which didn’t turn out to be much use since it’s heavily oriented for mainland Chinese).

I came to Taiwan because I had met my girlfriend at the time in the UK, she was Taiwanese, and I planned to visit Taiwan for a few months after graduating. Well, two months in Taiwan went by quickly, and I found myself in need of another visa. I did one visa run to Hong Kong before looking for other ways that I might be able to stay in the country, and that’s when I decided to learn Chinese. Learning Chinese in Taiwan you can stay for 3 months, which is the length of one semester, and you can keep extending your visa for the duration of your studies.

I didn’t plan to study Chinese for almost 4 years, it just happened. After I started learning I realised that I actually found it really interesting, and it very quickly changed from being a way to a visa, to becoming one of my main reasons for staying here.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

Dave: I study Chinese in Kaohsiung, a city in the south of Taiwan. Even though it’s the second largest city in Taiwan, the number of foreigners here is really low. Though, I like it this way. It allows me to immerse myself in my Chinese studies and, with the exception of a few friends who can’t speak Chinese, means I can restrict myself to only using Chinese to communicate.

For the first few years I didn’t really use online resources much, there weren’t that many as I remember. I had briefly used ChinesePod, but after starting classes I found myself using resources that came directly from the teachers and a huge amount of my time out of class was spent drilling characters in those special notebooks that Taiwanese children learn to write characters. It’s for this reason I didn’t pay much attention to what others were doing at the time or at what stage the online learning scene was. Though what I can say is that the amount of people learning Chinese has increased immensely. I was at Kaohsiung airport recently and after buying myself a souvenir Taiwan flag mug the woman commented that all of the foreigners today had spoken excellent Chinese and that soon someone in her position might not need to know English. An exaggeration, I’m sure, but still goes to show that learning Chinese is turning out to be more than a passing fad.

The number of online resources has really increased in the last few years, though. Even since I started ChineseHacks in early 2010, there has been numerous blogs popping up and even social network style Web sites focused solely on learning Chinese.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

Dave: I’d have to say multi-pronged, and simply for the reason that no one method is perfect, and not every method suits every person.

It’s difficult for beginners, though, because the last thing you want to do is overwhelm yourself, especially at the start. I’d say that people starting out should just pick a class or an online course for beginners and stick with it to the end. I just mean an introductory course that might cover a phonetic alphabet and then a few basic modules. This way you can get a good idea of what you’re dealing with and have at least a basic understanding of what Chinese is. Then start branching out in other areas and reading around the subject.

One thing to be careful not to do, is to spend a disproportionate amount of time learning one aspect of Chinese. Depending on your goal and where you are learning, one aspect might be more important and valuable than another. For instance, if you are in Taiwan or China, you need to focus on speech and conversation over writing.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

Dave: For me it’s got to be books or magazines — something that I can look over, write on, and study anywhere. Though I know it depends on the person. I know some people who like to watch cartoons or movies over and over. I like movies as a way to passively study while relaxing, but for actually studying it’s got to be written material for me.

I always have a pencil in my hand when reading a book. I draw a line between the words so I can clearly see them (this is one drawback of reading Chinese, the words don’t have a space between them like in English). If I come across a language construct then I draw a box around each part of the construct. Then I’ll circle words I don’t know and when words come up a lot in the text I might write them in the margin to come back and review later.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

Dave: First learning a phonetic alphabet is obviously the way to go, and most course are structured this way anyway. Though what I would say is don’t overly focus on the phonetic alphabet itself. From what I’ve heard, courses in the West focus on Pinyin and then the learners only read Pinyin for months before actually reading Chinese characters. In Taiwan we learnt the Zhuyin phonetic alphabet for a couple of weeks while at the same time being introduced to Chinese characters.

My point is that you should expose yourself to Chinese characters as early as possible and in the early stages make sure you at least look at the characters that you are learning the phonetics for.

As I mentioned above, you need to get a solid foundation laid for you to build on. But after you have learnt the basics and have a phonetic alphabet under your belt then I would start looking for learning materials that you are actually interested in. I always think that materials aimed at native speakers are the best, so don’t be afraid to start looking in places other than textbooks for interesting materials to learn.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

Dave: I honestly feel that in the first year or so of Chinese I spent too much time drilling Chinese characters. Though this was through no fault, or choice, of my own. The course that I was enrolled in at the time focused heavily on writing characters, and each week we would have a writing test. Obviously this has value, and I know it’s what the children in Taiwan do, but when you’re an adult learning Chinese you don’t have as much time as a full time student and I really think that this time could have been better spent on other aspects of learning Chinese.

I also used to get quite frustrated at a shop or on the street in Taiwan when someone would refuse to speak Chinese to me. Refuse is a harsh word — it’s more that they wanted to practice English, or didn’t know that I could, or wanted, to speak Chinese. Though in retrospect I can see that it didn’t really matter that much, and compared to places like Hong Kong where you have no idea what language the other person can speak I think Taiwan is a great place to learn Chinese.

I also wish I had started blogging about Chinese earlier. Something that always held me back was that I would constantly think “I’ll just wait until my Chinese is a bit better, then I’ll…”. The problem is that the time never seems to come as you always think your ability could be better, or that other people are better than you so what’s the point. My advice now would be to just start. Writing about the learning process is a great way to solidify and organise your knowledge.

I would even say keep a diary or write a blog in Chinese, so you can use what you are learning while you are acually learning it.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

Dave: I focus mostly on books, and during the first few years of learning Chinese I used to buy books aimed at children of around 10 to 12 years old. You’re probably imagining me reading a big picture book with huge Chinese characters, but I don’t mean those kinds of children’s books.

In Taiwan there is a biographical series aimed at young adults about famous people and the story of how they came to be who they are today. The only difference between them and an adult book is that the characters have Zhuyin next to them and overly complex words might be omitted out in favour of simpler equivalents. I remember reading the story of how Google was founded, and also a biography of Bill Gates, so next time you are at the book shop don’t rule out the children’s section as there really are some gems in there.

Online I rarely read Web sites that are targetted at learners. What I like to do is read Web sites and online content aimed at native speakers, and I use a selection of Firefox plugins that help me convert web pages into Traditional Chinese (since I learnt Chinese in Taiwan), read words that I don’t know using a pop-up dictionary, or annotate web pages with a glossary of keywords. With these tools^* you can turn any Chinese content into learning material.

I really think that the sooner you start reading and studying content meant for native speakers the better. You’ll find that most textbooks won’t teach you so called ‘real-world’ Chinese and depending on your teacher you might be stuck learning more formal Chinese. I recently heard a Chinese teacher tell a student that they shouldn’t watch TV in Taiwan as there is a lot of slang and it would be bad for their studies. In my opinion, what is the use of of learning a language if you can’t use it like a native speaker? Imagine going to the UK and only learning the “Queen’s English”, you wouldn’t last 5 minutes in most cities.

^* Tools I use to read Chinese online:

• Perapera-kun: Chinese Popup Translator
• 新同文堂 (New Tong Wen Tang)
• MandarinSpot: Annotate

For more from Dave check out ChineseHacks, as well as his personal blog: Tech & Tea. You can also follow him on Twitter. And, of course, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday (I’ll even do my best to get it posted on Monday!).

This week we speak to Kellen Parker, co-founder of Sinoglot, an organisation of Chinese linguistics researchers. Kellen is an American linguistics researcher who’s spent the last few years in Shanghai as a grad student, and currently resides in Seoul where he’s researching Mandarin use among Korea’s overseas Chinese population.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

Kellen: Language is really interesting. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, so I may as well be putting that time to good use. That’s what pushes me to spend the time trying to constantly improve. The initial push, however, was me not wanting to be the jerk who couldn’t communicate with a single soul in the country I chose to live in.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

Kellen: Pleco’s OCR is the first thing that comes to mind. Actually smart phones in any capacity. I didnt own one for my first three years in China. I finally bought an iPod and everything changed. There are also more specialist type resources available like Carl Gene’s site or the work of my co-contributors on Sinoglot. More learners are producing more insightful commentaries than I was aware of four years ago.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

Kellen: Multi-pronged, to an extent. The biggest thing has to be speaking all the time, but people shouldn’t neglect being able to read or understand more complex grammar.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

Kellen: Contact with the language. Dictionaries and grammar primers and all that are nice but secondary. Don’t go buying a bunch of books if you’re not going to spend the time to try what you’re learning.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

Kellen: I never took a proper class, and sometimes I wish I would have. It would’ve saved me a lot of time making a lot of simple mistakes.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

Kellen: Not so much a mistake as a pronunciation issue. No one explained ü correctly. Many people explained it incorrectly. It’s not “oo” like many western learners say it and it’s not “ee” like many Koreans say it. It’s somewhere in the middle. Learn r and x and sh and learn them early.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

Kellen: As mentioned above, Carl Gene’s site is good, and other sites like Chinese Hacks that give some themed post. I used to use nciku a lot for example sentences but the Qingwen iPhone dictionary by Karan Misra replaced that a while back. Jukuu.com and cibo.cn are awesome for sentence construction and obscure vocabulary respectively.

For more from Kellen, and a whole host of posts about Chinese, check out Sinoglot, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.

Our first guest in the series is John Biesnecker. John is an American software developer who has been in China since 2003, and has been working on his Mandarin since 2001. He, his wife, and his son live in Shanghai, where he works at ChinesePod.

Lost Laowai: What was the largest driving force in spurring you to overcome the challenges and actually learn Chinese?

John: I think more than anything living here was and continues to be the largest driving force. Lots of second language acquisition experts talk about having a high tolerance for ambiguity as being a good thing for learning a language, and I’m sure they’re right, but I have a very, very low tolerance for ambiguity , and so not understanding pretty much drove me crazy. I’m an avid reader, too, and I couldn’t stand being illiterate. My only choices were to either learn Chinese or go home, and I chose the former.

Lost Laowai: How has the Chinese learning landscape changed since you first started learning — what’s better/worse?

John: There are so many more resources available now than there were when I took my first Chinese class in university in 2001. Pretty much every aspect of learning Chinese has been and continues to be touched by technology, making everything at least a little simpler and more convenient.

I don’t know that anything has gotten worse. In my eyes life as a Chinese learner is much, much easier now than it was a decade ago.

Lost Laowai: Do you believe a single method of learning works best, or would you recommend a multi-pronged attack?

John: I suspect that most everyone has one or a handful of methods that work really well for him/her, but that those methods aren’t the same for everyone. I’d say when you’re first starting you should try out anything and everything, and you’ll likely find yourself slowly settling into a few routines that work for you.

Lost Laowai: What do you feel as being the most effective tool in learning Chinese?

John: Honestly, books (and magazines, and newspapers). Obviously you need all four aspects — speaking, listening, reading, and writing — to really be able to communicate in Chinese, but I think reading trumps in terms of bang for your buck. The sooner you can read, and the more time you spend reading, the better off you’ll be (this is probably true for every language, including your native language). Sure, characters present a rather unique challenge that a lot of other languages don’t have, but they’re not going anywhere, so you might as well just suck it up and start reading.

Lost Laowai: Where do you think a new learner should start, and is that where you started?

John: If I were to do it all over again, I’d really pay attention to the fundamentals — pronunciation and tones, how pinyin works, the radicals, etc. My one semester at university sort of glossed over those and I didn’t pay them much attention, and a couple of years later I had to undo a whole lot of bad habits and learn them right. No sense in doing that to yourself if you don’t have to.

Lost Laowai: What mistakes, if any, did you make when learning that you hope others can avoid?

John: Well, the above, not paying enough attention to the fundamentals. Also, spending too much time trying to figure out the “best” way to learn things, rather than just plowing into them and learning. There are probably cases where a bit of strategic thinking will pay off, but most of the time it’s probably better to just put in the time and get the studying done.

Lost Laowai: What are some of your favourite resources (online or off) for learning Chinese?

John: Pleco is the best Chinese dictionary. I’m biased, but ChinesePod makes some pretty terrific learning material. Beyond that, bookstores and televisions are your friend.

Be sure to check out John’s blog, and follow him on Twitter. Also, check back next week for more Mandarin Monday.

This Bruce with boots (or Clint with a kick) premise for a film seemed strange and intriguing, so I decided to probe a bit further into what the movie was all about. My interview with Jakob is below. But first, how about a more official synopsis (and a trailer):

Guerino, a cowboy from Italy, travels to Shanghai in search of his sister Elisa, who was working as a model in China but mysteriously vanished. In Shanghai, Guerino finds an unlikely ally in Jieikai, a local Chinese, whose girlfriend also mysteriously disappeared while working in the same modeling agency. During their search to uncover the truth, they are dragged into a dark world of criminality, corruption and human smuggling affairs. When things take a bad turn and innocent people start getting killed left and right, Guerino takes the matter into his own hands in order to save his sister before it’s too late… Driven by his thirst for vengeance and his desire for justice, he vows to take down every single link to this chain of smuggling affair following his one and only rule: kick first, ask questions later.

Or see it on Vimeo

Lost Laowai: Lets start at the beginning — when did the idea to make this film first hit your radar? What was its genesis?

Jakob Montrasio: I have to start way back in 2007. That was when I read a very short news article about a girl from Chongqing who tracked down the murderer of her father – it took her a decade to find him! But she never gave up and eventually brought him to justice. This piece interested me so much that I had my wife dig up all the news she could find about it and translate them for me. Eventually I learned that she also lost her mother and to make it short, the story touched and moved me. So I started to write a script about her, about her vengeance. It’s called Red Decade and currently in the third draft and I am still trying to find financing for it.

Then, in 2009, I met Shangdown‘s lead actor Christian Bachini for the very first time. He and Shangdown‘s action director Richard Chung approached me to be the cinematographer on a short film for them. Unfortunately, I was unable to join the crew at that time – but Christian handed me his showreel. I took it home and watched it some time later, and was blown away by it. His reel was very rough, very low budget and from a technical point of view not very sophisticated, but man, he could move! There were some awesome moves in it and being a fan of martial arts, I immediately thought of shooting something with him. A bit frustrated from not having shot Red Decade yet and with my wife being eight months pregnant and thus unable to travel much, I used the christmas time in 2009 to write another vengeance script – but with Christian as the lead actor in mind.

The first Shangdown script just flew out in less than two weeks, I had many unused ideas from Red Decade left in my head and having a foreigner kick his way through Shanghai opens up so many new possibilities. After reading the first draft, which took Christian quite by surprise, as I hadn’t told him about it, he immediately committed himself to the project. We started to look for locations and to prepare everything in spring 2009 and then started shooting as it got warm enough.

LLW: I read that you had originally intended the film to be more of a comedy with a “buddy cop” feel to it — what changed and why?

JM: When I started writing Shangdown I wanted it all: Comedy, action, martial arts, thriller… When you’re writing you start to remember all those awesome movies that you have seen in the past, and try to let them inspire you as much as possible. The inspiration for the first Shangdown script were from all over the place; from Sergio Leone to Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan to Akira Kurosawa. I personally love films such as Rush Hour, which worked perfectly with a little mashup of martial arts and western buddy cop comedy, or Blues Brothers, which is arguably the best buddy comedy ever made. But I also love westerns such as Unforgiven, or the more recent 3:10 To Yuma, which are really serious and way slower.

We realized very fast that this mashup wouldn’t work in our favor–to build tension up but to have too many buddy comedy style “funny moments”. So Christian, Michael Ziming Ouyang — who also plays a villain in the movie — and I revised the script and eliminated or changed many of the quirky scenes and dialogues, turning them into more violent, more gritty ones. We still have Jiekai though, the supporting role, fantastically played by Daddy Chang, who adds a lot of comedy through his style and dialogue. He was actually a last minute change and we got really lucky getting him on board. The actor who was supposed to play him in the first place had to drop out due to schedule conflicts.

LLW: What was your interest in melding the Spaghetti Western-Kung Fu Action genres? Do you think there are similarities between the two styles?

JM: The Spaghetti Western and the Martial Arts Eastern are, from a plot point of view, actually quite similar. Usually they have a lead actor who ends up fighting someone much bigger than him, out of personal conflict or due to a need for help — or simply for money. There are, of course, differences in the sets, the actual action and some more things. For example, Spaghetti Westerns from Leone have the famous stare-downs, because the actual shooting is quite quick – one shot and the enemy is down; whereas martial arts are exciting through the moves and stunts. We combine those two and mash them up.

The last mashup in this style that I’ve seen was the Sukiyaki Western Django, but there they used guns and shot and shot and shot … I didn’t like that very much. I think using martial arts in a Western that’s shot in the East is much more exciting.

LLW: It’s interesting to me that Leone’s Dollars Trilogy kicked off with a remake of the Japanese film Yojimbo. These films all seem to mix up Asian and European directors, actors and locations; and use principally a North American “Western” concept of cowboys and gunslingers — does this say something about the universality of these themes and how they are accepted and understood across cultures? How do you think that plays out in Shangdown?

JM: I think the typical David versus Goliath concept appeals to the audience, and Akira Kurosawas films are pretty much quoted in every western, whether on purpose or not. I wonder where he got his inspiration from. It doesn’t matter where you are, what culture you’re in, if you see someone fighting or tricking out someone bigger than himself, it’s exciting.

My personal favorite Kurosawa film is The Seven Samurai, which was also remade into the Western The Magnificent Seven, and the topic of it is simply honor. The honorable samurai take on a huge enemy knowing that they wont make it, but try anyway, to help the poor village people. It’s fun to see that! Tragic in the end, but fun! John Woo’s Hong Kong films have the very same topic, but he transfered it into the cops of the southern metropolis. In a way, he’s referencing The Seven Samurai at the end of Hard Boiled, when Chow Yun-Fat saves the baby from the exploding hospital.

Also, 2010 and 2011, with stuff like Cowboys & Aliens from Iron Man director Jon Favreau, are years of the cowboy comeback. Even videogames sell cowboys well; look at Red Dead Redemption, pretty much the best game of the year. Cowboys are really “in” again and martial arts will always be.

LLW: Shangdown was entirely filmed in Shanghai, correct? How was filming in the city? What was the biggest challenge filming there?

JM: We have one scene in the movie that was actually shot on a tea mountain in Ningbo. But all the rest is in Shanghai. We shot all the major scenes in May and June 2009, so the heat was one of the biggest challenges. Christian was wearing the heavy cowboy outfit, which had three layers of clothes and heavy leather cowboy boots; he and the stunt guys drank a lot of water, let me tell you that. Another issue that is typical for any kind of video and film production was the locations. We scouted a lot, especially to find perfect places for the martial arts scenes. We were so unhappy with the look of a certain martial arts scene and martial artist that we actually reshot it entirely somewhere else with someone else.

Also, I never wanted to shoot the beautiful side of Shanghai, and even though we have one shot near the bund — you can see it in the trailer — we always looked for locations that show the real Shanghai. And we have a fantastic chase scene that runs through a slum area and then along the Suzhou river. Our director of photography Steffen Reimann did a great job there. But it took quite some time to find all those locations. Shooting on HD and with a small crew we didn’t run into any problems with authorities, except once when we shot near the train station, but luckily it all went pretty smooth and well. Shooting in Shanghai is always rewarding and even after shooting there corporate videos, advertising, tv-shows and other stuff for over 5 years now I don’t get bored by it.

LLW: Speaking of not getting bored — with Christian Bachini doing all his own stunts in the film, were there any close-calls or hard falls in the filming?

JM: Christian decided to shoot the movie even though he had an knee injury. He flew to Italy right after we wrapped shooting and had it operated on, which resulted in a six month-rehab for him. During the shoot he hurt himself maybe three times, but never really seriously. The most dangerous stuff we shot was probably the car chase stunt, where he was on the roof of a VW Santana, and the stunt where he jumps onto a moving van. One of the stunt teams we worked with — for one day only — was much harder, because they actually tried to charge us during shooting extra, for simple stuff like falling on the ground, on top of their normal charge. That was more frustrating than anything! We had to change the choreography around them on the spot, which was really annoying.

LLW: What were some of the most rewarding aspects of working on this film?

JM: Like I said, learning on the job is always very regarding. Every time you finish shooting and you pack your camera and whatnot, you have this great feeling of having something accomplished that day. And then you go back home and check the footage and it looks great. It’s such a nice feeling. After shooting a scene for a couple of days, and then seeing it edited and running smoothly… it’s beautiful.

Shooting a movie is so much work, and the rewards are that much bigger. You have the scripting phase, where you can go batshit crazy — on paper at least — then you have the preproduction phase, where you imagine where to shoot what scene, you start to build the movie in your head. We went to various places in Shanghai to get Christians costume together, and seeing him in full cowboy gear for the first time was a blast, too! The actual shooting consists of so many arts, so many people: You have the director of photography, who frames the image, the actors, the location. It was very rewarding to work with the great team that we had. Oh, and how great it felt when Jon T. Benn confirmed! He is the villain in our movie and was the villain in Bruce Lee’s The Way Of The Dragon! He has this presence… You’ll see it.

LLW: The film is set for release this spring, correct? Where will people be able to view it? Do you have distribution of some sort lined up? Will you be making it available online at all?

JM: That’s right, I can’t nail down a date just yet, we still have a little reshoot scheduled, and some more CGI stuff to composite and color correction work as well as editing to do, but I would say end of March, beginning of April, around that time we should hopefully premiere. We’re looking into distribution but we’ll probably go the normal route, submitting it to film festivals first and trying to get picked up there. I don’t have any plans for online distribution, but if we find a distributor who wants to do that, then I’m open for anything.

Bio: Jakob Montrasio

Jakob Montrasio was born in Freiburg, Germany. Jakob started making short stop-motion films with his father’s camcorder and a pile of Lego. His life-long love affair with film lead him in 2003 to pursue it as a career. Shortly after visiting the Festival de Cannes in 2005, Jakob moved to the “New York of the East”, Shanghai, China, and started to shoot. In the past five years, Jakob has not only worked for high profile clients such as Porsche, Dell and Microsoft, but also managed to open his own production company, write three feature film scripts, work on the big budget production John Rabe in the visual effect crew, and shoot his first feature film – Shangdown: The Way of the Spur. He currently lives in Shanghai with his wife and daughter Emily.

Shangdown — More Information

• Official website
• Facebook Page
• IMDb
• Jewelz – “Get Started” Music Video (feat. action from Shangdown)

Dubbed with the quirky moniker “Electric Voices and Stinky Tofu“, The book is an illustrated journey of ah-ha moments for any Westerner who’s spent time in China. Magnus, and his wife MingXing, have cartooned nearly every “China moment” I could think of — inking out what we all know from living here — China’s one wacky place.

I chatted with Magnus recently about the book and living in China. Here’s what he had to say:

Lost Laowai: What is “Electric Voices and Stinky Tofu”, and what was the motivation for creating such a book?
Magnus: We’ve done over 400 comics on our site now and we wanted to make a book to collect our first year’s comics and make them more readable than what you see on the web. The comics on the web are smaller than the book (according to the DOTS PER INCH. Typical internet comics are 72 dpi but in the book the comics are 600 dpi.) and the book’s words are easier to read and are of much better quality. Plus we added a nice story to the book and some doodles of our first comics that will not appear on the site.

LLW: How long have you been a cartoonist? Is it something you do full-time or just on the side?
M: I’ve been a cartoonist my whole life. I entertained all my classmates with doodles of what the teacher was saying at the time. Right now MandMX.com is part time. I do digital restoration as a full time job but I would love it someday to be a full time cartoonist. That’s my dream!

LLW: Your comics tend to meld together comedy, cultural observation and learning. Which of these (or some other) is foremost to you in creating a successful comic?
M: If I can get all three of those things into one comic I’d be happy. But I guess I try to use at least one of those in each comic. If it’s not hilarious or something about the culture then at least it should be educational. But for those studying Chinese I think each comic is at least somewhat educational.

LLW: Where do you draw (pun intended!) most of your inspiration for your comics from?
M: For comics in general I draw my inspiration from Charles Schulz the creator of Peanuts. I grew up reading his comics and also Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes. I draw my inspiration for our MandMx.com comic from my everyday experiences and adventures in China. I am an avid reader about news and everything that has to do with China. At first when we thought of this idea I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough material but I’ve been shocked over the years as the material just keeps coming.

LLW: Along with running MandMX.com with your wife MingXing, you also produce a video podcast with your well-named son, Studying Chinese With Ryan. How has having a mixed-culture family shaped both your comics as well as your outlook on living in China?
M: It’s been a wild ride I’ll tell you that much. We named our son after our favorite website… Ryan of Lost Laowai. KIDDING! No seriously, it’s been a good partnership with MX since she translates all my crazy ideas. Sometimes I’ve had to throw ideas out since they just don’t make sense to her or she’ll tell me sometimes “Chinese wouldn’t think that’s funny.”

LLW: What first brought you to China?
M: I came to China like many to teach English. I went back to the states and studied Chinese in Boston and got a TEFL certificate and then returned to China. The second time I unintentionally met my wife.

LLW: Having lived in China for a solid amount of time, what advice would you offer for those foreigners who have just arrived or are planning to move here?
M: Come to our site and learn about China! But I would also just keep a few things in mind:

• Eat everything.
• Lower your expectations.
• Have a sense of humor.
• Get ready to be frustrated.
• Learn Chinese.
• Get ready to look at your home country in a very different way.

LLW: What’s up next for MandMX, and how can people learn more about you guys?
M: We hope to have another book at some point in the new year. We’re trying to sell the book through Google but I know there might be some trouble with that in China. People can always have their family members in Western countries order the book and we’ll ship it to China! Just make sure the address to China is there. We’re on Twitter where I post about China news and what my bilingual son says that makes us both laugh! We’ve got a Facebook Fan page and we also do China Stories. If readers have funny stories about their time in China or talking to Chinese in their home country or anything to do with China they can go here and send the story to us and we’ll try to make it into a comic. We’ve done a few already, my favorite one is about the sterilized potato!

You can order “Electric Voices and Stinky Tofu” here.

I generally accredit Neocha as the source of reversing my opinion about creativity in China. The site is a SNS for Chinese creatives of all disciplines, and while it’s all in Chinese, it does a great job of bridging out to the English speaking world with its NEXT player for streaming independent Chinese music, and the awesome NeochaEDGE blog that showcases the best of Chinese creativity where ever it may bloom.

I chatted with Neocha founder and CEO Sean Leow, as well as The Shanghai Restoration Project’s Dave Liang to get the skinny on the album, the Expo and the state of independent music in China. Here’s what they had to say:

Lost Laowai: How did the idea for eXpo come about? Did the Shanghai Restoration Project approach Neocha, or vice versa?

Dave Liang: The concept was conceived in late 2009 during a brainstorming session between the two of us over coffee. Ever since we met back in 2008, we’ve been thinking about ways to bring more exposure to the local Chinese independent music market. Putting out a compilation during the Shanghai Expo seemed to be the perfect way to do this since a lot of media attention would be on China at the time. With Neocha’s access to independent artistic culture in China and SRP’s brand establishment in the West, we felt it would be an ideal partnership.

Sean Leow (left) of Neocha & Dave Liang of The Shanghai Restoration Project

Lost Laowai: Why the “eXpo” title — what does electronic music have to do with the Shanghai Expo?

Dave: “eXpo” by definition is “a collection of things (goods or works of art etc.) for public display” (according to WordNet). Since countries from around the world were coming to Shanghai to show off their works during the World Expo, we felt it would be appropriate to show off a portion of China’s artistic culture at the same time. We felt electronic music would not only be the most accessible outside of China (no lyrical barriers) but also best represent China’s modernization. Lastly, the “X” in “eXpo” represents the 10 artists selected for the compilation.

Lost Laowai: No doubt China is banking on the 2010 Shanghai Expo being a heck of a follow up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Do you think it will do more, as much or less in giving the world a better idea of what the country is really about?

Sean Leow: The 2010 Shanghai Expo seems to be primarily directed at a domestic audience so we don’t think there will be as much of an effort on foreign PR as there was for the Beijing Olympics. As a result, the Expo will not really give the world a better idea of what China is all about and they don’t want to mess with the good impression it created during the Olympics anyway.

Lost Laowai: So, how does China’s independent music scene and youth culture play into that?

Sean: To be honest, we don’t think it will play into that at all. Whether the government is promoting to domestic or foreign audiences, we highly doubt they will use independent music and creative youth culture-–it’s just not on their radar in any meaningful way.

A lot of projects in Shanghai are not formally tied in with the Expo as the bureaucratic red tape to get “officially approved” is fairly burdensome. Projects like eXpo and others are simply releasing around the same time as all eyes will be focused on Shanghai at the time.

Lost Laowai: What do you think is the most common misconception the rest of the world has about China’s (electronic) music scene? What’s the reality?

Dave: Most people are simply not aware of the electronic music scene in China. Not only has China traditionally not been a source of music in this genre, language and cultural barriers (lack of developed independent music market) have made it difficult for global electronic fans to discover good Chinese content. With the artist community sites such as Neocha enabled by the Internet, it is now that much easier to find music around the world.

eXpo artist ZLOX

Lost Laowai What sense or feeling do you get from the artists on the album about potentially reaching a much wider audience than they’ve ever had before by being on this album?

Sean: They are certainly excited and we can’t wait to show them promotional material, reviews, etc. once the album releases. For almost all the artists on the album, this is their first time ever being apart of an official CD release, not to mention being listed on iTunes, Amazon, China Mobile and having a physical release within China.

Lost Laowai: How about choosing the tracks for the album? What was given the most priority — cross-culture playability, relative diversity of content or simply the best of the submissions?

Dave: All three. We wanted to pick songs that would appeal to a Western ear and didn’t really care what style it was within the electronic genre. We went through hundreds of songs and picked out the ones we liked the most and narrowed our selections down due to a variety of additional criteria (e.g. was the artist willing to participate, did the artist still have the original audio files, etc.).

Lost Laowai With radio play, wide-physical distribution and TV appearances reserved almost exclusively for pre-fab pop acts; how do Chinese indie musicians find their audiences?

Sean: Almost entirely via the Internet. There are a few independent labels which may pick up an album here or there, but it’s almost entirely up to the artist to promote their music and shows through the Internet. This avenue is effective within China as most young people, and especially creative culture participants, use the Internet as their key sharing and consumption platform.

We’re trying to give them one additional channel with eXpo by promoting their work to a Western audience that they would otherwise have a hard time reaching.

Lost Laowai It seems like a rising wave of creativity is coming out of China, why is it happening now? Or has it always been happening, but the rest of the world just didn’t have access to it?

Sean: It’s a combination of the two. The sweet spot for creatives right now are the post-80s generation who are getting to an age and level of experience where their creative work can really stand out. At the same, audiences outside of China have not had much access to creative culture with the exception of the contemporary art scene. Projects like eXpo and our work at NeochaEDGE are trying to change that impression.

eXpo artist B6

Lost Laowai So, what’s the future of the independent music scene in China?

Sean: Despite the obstacles that exist in the local market, we’re optimistic that the indie scene can find its footing and continue to develop. There is a lot of passion and goodwill among the people in the scene, which is always encouraging.

Many of the economic issues that the independent music scene is facing in China are the same that exist around the world with piracy–-that is really a global industry-wide problem that will hopefully improve soon. Domestically, we hope that mainstream media can do more to promote independent music as this is a crucial (yet highly monopolized) channel for the scene to grow.

Lastly, without a proper ecosystem for Chinese electronic musicians to develop within, it’s difficult for anyone to make a living off of their music. The result of this is that no Chinese musicians have the time to fully develop their talent and truly influence the scene. There is only one musician (B6) on the compilation who can make a living off of his music.

With the eXpo compilation we’re trying, in our own small way, to change this by giving the musicians the opportunity to be compensated for their music, which is extremely rare in China. At the same time, a lot of our interaction with the musicians has been an educational process, teaching them about music industry standards, contracts, etc. As a result, we hope they will be better prepared when negotiating with record labels/commercial entities in the future.

Lost Laowai: It sounds like you two work well together. Any plans to collaborate again? What else is on the horizon for you guys?

Dave: We haven’t discussed anything formally, but we’ve definitely enjoyed our collaboration thus far. Our roles were quite complementary (Neocha handling language, content, relationships, Chinese press; and SRP taking on distribution, US press, contracts) so working together again could be easy to pull off with the right idea. Regarding news on the SRP side, immediately after the eXpo release I will be headed to Tokyo to help promote an album I produced for the Japanese artist Miu Sakamoto (daughter of composer great Ryuichi Sakamoto).

Sean: It’s been a blast working with Dave and we’d love to continue in the future with more compilations, music/visual art crossovers or anything else that helps push forward China’s creative community. As for Neocha, we’re continuing to work on some cool consulting projects with brands and agencies through NeochaEDGE. We’re strengthening these capabilities with the “EDGE Creative Collective” which is a carefully groomed cast of China’s premier creative talent that we engage first when delivering against our clients’ briefs / project requirements.

We’re also excited about a partnership we’ve recently established with Artsprojekt where we’ll be setting up shops to turn our Chinese creatives’ work into on-demand products that can be purchased around the world.

Lost Laowai: I’ve listened to eXpo repeatedly now, and really dig it. Out of curiosity, what are your favourite tracks on the album?

Dave: “Moon” by Mu Xiao Hu

Sean: My favorite track is “Song of Night” by ZLOX, but I have to say, it’s hard for me to get Dave’s remix of “Big Pirate Tyakasha” out of my head after a couple listens. Damn catchy.

You can listen to samples from all the tracks, and learn more about the album and its artists at the expoartists.com site. eXpo is available for sale at Amazon and iTunes.

Full Disclosure: I enjoy an awesome ‘professional’ relationship with the Neocha guys, and performed the tech work behind both edge.neocha.com and expoartists.com.

May the 4th be with you.

A before and after photo of a JAR rescued pup

During a conversation about the treatment of animals in China some time ago, I remember a friend saying, “what rights are animals going to have in a country that is still working out the rights of humans?” Anyone that’s ever been to a zoo in China knows just how true this is.

Fortunately, like all things in China, this is changing. Helping along that change in Shanghai is an altruistic group of volunteer animal rescuers called Jaiya’s Animal Rescue, or JAR for short. The nearly year-old organization was started by a woman named Julia and her husband Marvin, who was kind enough to answer some questions for this post.

Lost Laowai: Can you tell us a bit about why you started this organization? Who is Jaiya?

Marvin: My wife and I have always saved animals here in China wherever we were (different provinces). It was last year March 2009 that we both came up with the name in loving memory of our daughter ‘Jaiya Kristina’ who unfortunately died of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) on February 14th, 2009. We named the group JAR – Jaiya’s Animal Rescue.

We want to cooperate not only with foreigners, but also with the locals. We believe that with both foreign and local members working together to save animals in need (healing and finding them permanent homes), it is a good cause to be a part of.

With the Expo nearing, we can see more and more families adopting pets. Even though there are many dedicated and loving pet owners in Shanghai; education is still very much necessary to be able to provide the training, welfare, medical, nutrition, licensing and general animal pet care information to potential new pet owners.

It is also important to emphasize to people that JAR does not have a shelter or a physical address. Due to limitations of resources, we can only do so much in saving animals off the streets of Shanghai. When people rescue an animal, we ask them to help us by taking responsibility and look after the animal temporarily until we find the animal a permanent home. Unfortunately, with the lack of resources, people and funding, in some cases we have to say ‘no’. It is difficult and we do our best to help the situation.

Jaiya surrounded by animals that have been rescued in her name.

Lost Laowai: To date JAR has adopted out more than 100 dogs and 30 cats, that must take a lot of time and commitment. What sort of help do you have? Are most volunteers expats or local Chinese?

Marvin: We rely on our local rescuers. We have approx 30-35 rescuers and it’s increasing as time goes on. We all have the animals in our homes or people who own boarding kennels kindly assist us by temporarily taking care of the animals due to ‘overflow’.

The majority of our rescuers are Chinese, however, more and more foreigners are offering support by volunteering or fostering. We have been actively involved in working with the Shanghai American School and their animal welfare program, called “Because We Care: Animal Rescue and Support Community Service Club”. It was started by teacher and JAR adopter Marney Rosen with the triple focus of educating younger students in the school, fundraising for JAR and helping out with other animal-related community ventures. We are planning to have the students come to one of our kennels and help by painting & cleaning the facility, as well as providing linen, food & pet supplies.

Lost Laowai: In your opinion, is pet abandonment a large issue in China? Why do you think such is the case?

Marvin: So far, what we have seen and in our experience, yes, pet abandonment is a large issue in China.

Animal welfare in China is not implemented the way we like compared to Europe, North America etc. We have seen so many cases where many people buy from pet stores/breeders and have no idea of how to look after the animal depending on the breed. People sometimes buy pets on impulse because the dog/cat is cute, however, they do not realize that there are responsibilities involved (medical care costs, registration for dogs etc).

Spaying & neutering animals is important to lessen the pet population. This is costly, and with donations we assist other rescuers in implementing this. There are so many stray/abandoned animals in Shanghai and with the mating season coming up we have introduced the ‘TNR Program’ (Trap, Neuter, and Release). This is a procedure where we catch ‘compound cats’ and have them neutered or spayed and released once they’re healed. Again, this all depends if we have the funding.

Up for Adoption: Calvin

Adoption Profile: Calvin

Calvin is a male dog, approximately one year old. The rescuers first saw Calvin about a month ago wandering in their compound. After catching him they immediately brought him to the vets for a medical check.

He was given a clean bill of health, and been vaccinated, deflead and neutered. He is a friendly, playful, and gentle dog. He gets along well with people and other dogs. He is a little wary, but given a few days time he will warm up to you.

He would make a great addition to a family! Learn more about Calvin here.

Lost Laowai: Before adoption, all rescued animals are vaccinated, de-wormed and de-flead — those bills must add up. How does JAR support itself?

Marvin: Some of our animals that are available for adoption may unfortunately have had bad experiences living on the streets due to being abandoned, mistreated, abused, and have been traumatized (some may have various bad habits such as chewing, not housetrained etc). With the help and care from our local rescuers, and our dog trainers, the animals have recovered and are deemed adoptable.

We urge the adopter(s) to be patient, loving and committed to these ‘abandoned’ animals. It will help them lead a new life and merge with the family eventually. The build up of trust and confidence will not only be rewarding for the dog, but also for all the family.

Having the animals vaccinated, dewormed, and deflead is the minimum. We also have to ensure the animal’s disposition (character and temperament) are friendly towards people and other animals. We mainly rely on donations from people. We don’t ask for donations directly, however we make people aware that we pay everything from our own pockets to ensure the animal’s well being is taken care of. Any amount given to JAR is appreciated.

Lost Laowai: How do you find foster people for the rescued animals? Do you host events or work with any other organizations to get the word out?

A JAR Adoption Day

Marvin: JAR tries to participate in bazaars/events in the community. We usually participate at the Christmas/Spring/Summer bazaars organized by International Schools such as Concordia, BISS, and Shanghai American School. We also participate in the local community bazaars in Seasons Villas, Vizcaya etc.

Shanghai American School also organized two “Cake Walk” fundraisers for JAR. Donations raised will go towards medical fees, transportation, boarding, desexing of animals.

We have not yet implemented or hosted an event ourselves yet. We are planning to do this once we have a location and an establishment willing to have us host our events. We are also seeking a place to hold our monthly adoption days, as we would like to hold the adoption days in Puxi & Pudong.

Currently, we post information about JAR in forums, “free” website classifieds, recommendations from existing adopters, friends and associates. The best thing so far that has worked out really well is by word of mouth. We emphasize that we are always in need of foster parents to support us due to the overwhelming amount of animals we have in our care.

Lost Laowai: Can anyone adopt an animal, or is there some sort of screening process? How do you prepare the prospective new pet owners for taking care of their new pet?

Marvin: Having a pet takes time, responsibility, compassion, patience and education. Prospective/existing families should able and be willing to spend the time and money necessary to provide medical and overall proper care for the pet. Be a responsible pet owner yourself and then share your knowledge with others. Having a pet is for life.

When a query or a phone call is received, JAR submits an Adoption Information Sheet Questionnaire document to be filled in and returned. Some questions asked are: Are potential adopters willing to pay for registering the dog every year? Is the family going to bring the animal with them when moving to another city, province, or country? Who is going to look after the animal during the day if they are out working? Are they experienced in having pets? Does the tenancy agreement allow pets in the home?

Lost Laowai: How important is the role of the foster families in the running of the organization?

Marvin: We always need more foster parents. It is a great way to have a “temporary” pet here in Shanghai if you cannot adopt, miss your own pet from home or if you want to have a furry companion in general. You get a companion and help save an animal at the same time! We would like to have foster parents for emergency cases (1-2 days) or long-term, depending on the situation, be it to foster dogs, cats, kittens, or puppies.

We are grateful to these people because it takes so much dedication, time and love. When you see a five-day old kitten or puppy survive because of our foster parents, it is a wonderful feeling of accomplishment!

We also need special care foster parents who are willing to take in our sick animals. It would be ideal to have foster parents available during the holidays as sometimes our own foster parents or adopters go on holidays too (summer holidays, the October and May holidays, Christmas and Chinese New Year).

Some JAR Tips on Animal Care and Ownership in China

• It is mandatory to have dogs licensed. It is the law and it is responsible pet ownership.
• Ensure the animal get its yearly check-up and vaccinations.
• Do not leave your animal outside in the winter not unless it’s a dog with thick fur and don’t mind the cold weather, or leaving the animal basking in the heat during the summer.
• Refrain from purchasing purebreds from breeders. Adopting a mixed dog is just as good. JAR and other rescue groups have so many strays that need loving homes. Why buy animals when there are so many available for adoption or out on the streets that deserve love too?
• Find and use a reputable veterinarian. Many unlicensed doctors call themselves vets use fake or expired medicines and do not provide real, professional medical care. If you are unsure, ask your circle of friends, and colleagues or those who have pets.
• Some animals that has been bought from pet stores or breeders are sick or pumped with antibiotics to make them look healthy when they are sold but die soon after. We urge people not to go that route, as it is inhumane. Why not just adopt a rescued animal from JAR or rescue an animal you find and give them a loving home instead?
• Do not allow people be cruel to animals. It is all about education. Coming across situations like this, we would stop, try to explain animal kindness and most likely try to take the animal ourselves if someone continued to hit or abuse an animal.

For people who wish to volunteer, foster, donate or adopt an animal; please use the following information:

JAR – Jaiya’s Animal Rescue
Contact: Marvin & Julia
Web site: www.jarshanghai.org
Email: click to show this e-mail
“…every animal deserves a safe, secure & loving home…”