Tide goes out: Small businesses under pressure as insolvency threat mounts
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After losing nearly half of her customers in the coronavirus lockdown in March last year, Sydney small business owner Shirley Sun was starting to think her only option would be to shut down for good.
Her Chatswood-based fitness studio, Leap Health and Wellbeing, had never been quieter, hurt further by its reliance on inner-city office workers. “I was potentially looking at putting my business into administration. It was really difficult and challenging,” she says.
Shirley Sun in her pilates studio.
Credit:Cole Bennetts
Thankfully, after eight months of wrangling with her landlord, Sun has finally renegotiated the terms of her lease and gained rent relief, meaning her business will live on.
A Great Wall is a human comedy about a Chinese-American family that goes to visit relatives in Peking, and within that simple premise are so many inspirations that the movie is interesting even when it s just looking at things.
Although the father of the American family, Leo Fang, was born in China, he left when he was 10. As the movie begins, he is a thoroughly middle-class American, a computer expert in the Silicon Valley. His wife is Chinese, born in America, and their son is a tall, stocky jock type who likes to wear his Stanford sweatshirt. We get the impression they know as much about daily life in the Peoples Republic as we do - which is, as this movie demonstrates, almost nothing.
Not since
Iron and Silk premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991 has a movie based on a memoir about teachers on the front lines of U.S.-China relations come to the big screen. Director Shirley Sun’s mostly-English-language film adaptation of Mark Salzman’s 1986 book in which the author played himself grossed just over $350,000 and was never released in China. It was a film ahead of its time.
What was then a trickle of mutual interest between China and the U.S. is now a matter of daily fascination. Like Salzman, longtime
New Yorker writer Peter Hessler captured his time trying to shape young minds at a teacher’s college in China’s interior.