Why did you choose comedy as your unique way to approach intercultural communication? 

I enjoyed doing comedy because comedy is this unique and important window into Chinese culture. It helps me connect with people on a deep personal level and gives me a better angle for looking at China than a lot American who go to China and only think about those big ideas like international relations and finance. Those big ideas may get people upset quickly, whereas if you want to make people laugh, you start with the idea that let’s try to have a good time together. I think it’s a much better way to live and it’s more productive than a lot of other ways I’ve seen people communicating with each other. That’s the story up until January. Since January, I’ve stuck here in Boston. For the last ten months, I’ve been here in America doing videos over the internet. I did a charity show to raise money for Wuhan back in February. My new things have become looking into how the Internet can be used to connecting people across culture. Especially now, when the world is gone so crazy, Internet is more and more blocked off from regular people being able to do things. It’s a lot of fun but it’s also very challenging. I’m looking forward to getting back on stage to do real shows. 

Could you share with us your project LaughBeijing? What’s your mission and vision for the project?

LaughBeijing was the project I started out in the beginning of my Fulbright project eight years ago. At the time, I did not know what I was doing when I went over to China to do comedy. I knew that I was going to have fun and it felt important to me, but I didn’t know why. In those first couples of years, what I discovered was what I really wanted to do with my life was to connect people across cultures using comedy. LaughBeijing eventually turned into the big project I ran for the last three and half year which was the US-China Comedy Center. I rent a courtyard in Beijing and called different performance teams all together to this one theatre. We put on over three hundred events every year. Basically, every night, you could do something at the Comedy Center. You can see a show, you can take an impromptu workshop. We did everything comedy in English and Chinese at the US-China Comedy Center. That was a fantastic experience that lasted from 2016 until January 2020. The theater, unfortunately, now is closed.

The mission of LaughBeijing that turned into the US-China Comedy Center has now turned into my social media channels. Using the Internet with videos over the internet, and interaction with audience and fan base on the Internet to do that same mission. Bridging cultures with laughter and trying to find, even now, some sort of fun ways. Just to remind ourselves that everything seems depressing right now, but it doesn’t have to be depressing. We can choose to go out and laugh together. Just the same way, you can choose to be depressed about how bad things are about the world or US-China relations. Nobody gets to decide that story for us. It’s right there to be done. You can still go out and have fun with your friends if you want. If you want to make funny videos on the Internet, you can still go out and do that. It’s not as bad as it looks. Even if it is bad right now, we are not going to get out of there by being depressed or angry. We need to find a way to enjoy ourselves again. That will help us remind ourselves of why it is good to work together. 

How do you think individuals like us could help improve the mutual understanding of people from two nations either through Internet or through any other ways?

This is actually a subject that I spent a lot of time thinking about recently. A lot of times with Internet, we get obsessed with numbers, like clicks and shares. We totally forgot that we need to have quality interaction online. If it is not a quality interaction, it doesn’t matter if it gets a million hits. It’s probably doing more bad than good. I’ve been trying to define what is a quality interaction online. The first thing to remember is that we are all cultural ambassadors. This is especially why I am interested in reconnecting with GCC because GCC people really understand this. Everything that we do for both good and bad is being the ambassadors to the people of the new country and also to the people back home who may never get the chance to travel to that country. To them, America exists only on the Internet. Vice versa, China exists entirely on the Internet as far as most Americans know. Understanding that each of us when living in another country is an ambassador is important. 

When it comes to quality stuff on the internet like me who make things on the internet and want to do that connection. Remember the idea that who it is you are working with. If I am talking about China, getting Chinese people on the video is important. Recently, there is been a popular video on social media that there is a background footage of life in one country and there is an audio dub over the top of it. They talked about that country while using background footage that was not shot for that video. It’s dishonest because it is not a real person making a real effort to understand the world. Similarly, there is a lot stuff that’s filmed about China where people treat China as if it’s an idea instead of a real place where real people live. 

The big thing I am trying to find it’s acting in good faith. Right now, the problem is that neither China nor the United State is in many ways acting in good faith. Everybody is suspicious. Everybody sees that there is a plot behind this. A Chinese company wants to succeed in America, people say that “oh, they are taking over our teenagers.” In America, you saw in the election, Joe Biden’s son worked with a company that do business in China. It’s that illegal to do business in China? Is that suspicious? Why is it suspicious? I do business in China and I have a Chinese bank account. Am I suspicious? Everyone is looking for a way to be worried and upset. We should be looking for a way to cooperate. That doesn’t mean that we will always be able to cooperate, but it means that we have the hope of succeeding. Because if you don’t act in good faith, there is no way to win. You can come up with the right agreement, but nobody will trust each other, and the agreement will fall apart. Whereas in the 80s and 90s, even though oftentimes Chinese could barely speak English and Americans could barely speak Chinese, we got a lot stuff done because everybody was working under the idea that the world is not perfect but we are going to give it a try. 

For us, individual people, it’s about living your life personally in a way that recognize that you are an ambassador for your country, trying to do the right thing, and taking that extra step to live the right way. Honestly, that’s why GCC is so important. If we get the group of Chinese students that are the type of people who studied abroad in America, the GCC people are going to be in the next generation who are taking over Chinese business, politics, and art. Similarly, a lot of these Americans who go to good schools, learn Chinese, and study abroad in China are going to be in the next generation of Americans who are taking over the American counterparts. Even if just us can learn how to work together, that would be a huge help because we are the people that actually had the experience living in the other country. If we can’t figure out a way to do it, then what hope do we have on the other people who had never gone to the other country?

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