11/20/2014
The Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre Street New York, NY 10013
Join Val Wang as she shares her unique, not-quite-outsider’s Chinese American perspective of life in contemporary China. She will read excerpts from her memoir, Beijing Bastard, and share film clips from the Sixth Generation directors. Raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Val first stumbled upon Beijing Bastards by the Sixth Generation filmmaker Zhang Yuan during a junior year abroad in Sweden. The movie “opened an escape hatch into a world mirror opposite of the version of China I had grown up with, where we were all nerdy, overachieving droids with no errant desires of our own who lived out of the script as it had been handed to us, marching through the Ivy Leagues into respectable professional careers.” In 1998, Wang moved to China, the land her parents had fled from before the Communist takeover in 1949. She arrived in Beijing expecting to find freedom but instead lived in the old city with her traditional relatives, who monitored her every move. But outside, she soon discovered a city rebelling against its roots just as she too was struggling to find a new, modern identity. Book signing to follow.
Admission: $12/Adult; $7/Student & Senior; FREE for MOCA Member
For more information, please visit
http://www.mocanyc.org