Juliet Zhong

Yilin Zhong in New York, June 2016 https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 6/8-7/8) Time: 16th February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 6-7 video length: 14’07’’ Yilin Zhong: (continued) But you know what, now I’m forty, I couldn’t write that book now. Even though all those memories and all those events are still there, and I still remember them all, if you destroy that book and ask me to write that again, I couldn’t do it now. That’s the difference. Because I had passion at that time, I had the passion to write down all those stories that happened around me in Beijing, at that time. I had all those experience, it’s not perfect experience, but I had passion to write them down in that way. Now I’m forty, those stories and those experiences I still have it, but I can never write it down again. Because I lost...

Yilin Zhong in Chinatown. July 2017 https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 4/8-5/8) Time: 16th February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 4-5 video length: 9’41’’ Yilin Zhong: (continued) If you look at all those backgrounds, and if you dig inside all those characters’ possibilities, that’s quite another story already, I could have written a pure novel just about his mother. But that’s not my job, my job is trying to focus on A-bao: why she became a prostitute, one by one step. That’s the most important key point, and I couldn’t erase that, I couldn’t delete that part. I couldn’t lie to all my readers, just to make this story seems to be more reasonable, or seems to be more believable, or more like reality. I couldn’t do that. Because it is what happened, and I couldn’t change it on this poi...