Meet LingYan | Writer/Director

We had the good fortune of connecting with LingYan and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi LingYan, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
The funny thing is — I studied computer science in college. I had always been drawn to writing and filmmaking, but I never thought about it as a career. I still remember very distinctively at some point into my college journey, I had reached that age of constant self-discovering and self-reflecting, with the sole hope of explaining myself to myself and embracing a certain level of self-consistency. So very naturally, I looked back, reached out, reconnected with my past and current life until an epiphany struck me abruptly. I came to a sudden realization that all the closest friends I had, some of whom I hadn’t talked to for years up to that point, were pursuing a certain form of art and devoting their passion and belief into their works. There should be a reason. I thought to myself. There should be a reason I have grouped myself with these people I love. Am I here on the wrong path? I happened to be reading Siddhartha at the time. It’s fair to say that I did feel briefly lost. Of course the final decision was much more complicated than that, weighing among various factors and back-and-forth considerations, but that courage, and hope too, I felt at that moment was genuine, straightforward, and quite intensive. The best analogy I could think of is something I later learned in a Directing/Acting workshop: Imagine your body is heavy, and you are being pulled by a string attached to your chest. It pulls you forward without you even knowing.
I did not know, until late in college. Then when I did, I did. I acknowledged it and went on with it. Whichever way it goes, I will follow it.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Good question. I’d say I am most proud that I’m always in search of my language, my written/visual narrative for my works. Looking back, I think it might be an engineer’s mentality. I think of art more as a form of building, like a jigsaw puzzle, where I piece together lines and frames of information to form a vision that I’ve been longing for. Currently I am exploring the concept of liminal spaces in both my writing and directing work, and I’m prepared to delve into it for the next few years, along with my long-time interest in the discussion of nationality, identity, Asian family relations, childhoods, and the chaos/magical-realism of modern life. My journey wasn’t easy. The community I grew up in despised art as a fraud. It was hard to believe in these things when stressing about food and a place to live. My parents and I moved frequently, and to this day, I’ve never had a strong sense of home, nor have I ever decorated my rooms. But that’s also why I connect a lot more with my people and communities over actual physical places. So during my years of self-reflection, in my attempt to recollect my early memories to better understand myself, I stumbled upon a particular incident and decided to document it—a story about how a tiny apartment my family used to inhabit in China was accidentally burned down during my elementary school years. My family had a hard time, even though at that time I didn’t fully grasp the gravity of our situation. But yeah here’s an excerpt from that story which I believe will help explain both myself and my work better:
It happened in the middle of the day. All residents were out working. The only witnesses were the family and a small Tai Chi group of retired people. One of them thought his Qi had worked, as he believed he had summoned the fire. The glares. The flames. The blaze. The anger and the miracle. He was positive, for that grand moment, hearing his heart pounding more solemnly than ever, that he’d soon get invited to the National TV to present his Qi to his dear motherland and to restore her glory. The same moment had declared its passing when he saw the family with paper money in their hands and tears in their eyes, through his own tears. He watched the father sigh in the raging smoke. He couldn’t really tell if it was a sigh. He saw the father’s lips hanging open, just one thin line, letting out a curse, maybe, then it must be a soundless curse. But if it was, in fact, a sigh, it was a long sigh, lasting longer than the actual fire itself and had vanished into rebar altogether when the fire department arrived.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I’d definitely book them an Airbnb in San Gabriel or Ktown since my friends and I all share similar passions for great food. And it’s always a pleasure to support local small business owners. One of my guilty pleasures indeed is to build relationships with these local businesses so that when I walk in for lunch, I can simply ask for my regular, please. I will now make sure to do that in front of friends so I can impress them.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
To all my friends. Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it a friendship, I said to myself. Friendship! What a word of honor and significance, always. Yes, it may be a word of oversimplification and generalization; it may be a word that’s been used so extensively that it can feel almost ineffable even if you shout it out, or perhaps it’s the other way around. But jokes aside, most of the time we don’t realize it’s a privilege to keep people around. We live in a chaotic time that encourages instant gratification and prioritizes profit-driven social interactions. For creators especially, because creating is such a delicate process of constructing, reconstructing, and deconstructing, most of us relay heavily on feedbacks and validation so we wouldn’t lose ourselves in the process.
So, to all my friends, here and there, often scattered around in time and in places, this shoutout is dedicated to you, to my Asian and queer community who helped me through the worst of times, and to those who choose to keep me around and keep me sane.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/llllingyan/

Image Credits
Tom Zhou, EJ Yeh