In 2011, when a rural prep school in Maine invited New York-based director Miao Wang to screen her first film, Beijing Taxi, she was surprised to find so many Chinese students enrolled at the archetypal New England establishment. Not Chinese-American students, but students from Beijing, where she was born and from all across China. “What are all these Chinese kids doing here?”
Nanfu Wang directed and produced the award-winning documentary
Hooligan Sparrow. She was born in 1985 in a village outside Fengcheng city, Jiangxi province, roughly halfway between Hong Kong and Shanghai in southeast China. Her mother and father were farmers who earned extra money as substitute teachers. Busy caring for other farmers’ children, “They didn’t have time to take care of me,” said Wang during a recent interview in New York, where she has lived since 2012.
The highest level of education available in her village was elementary school, which she started at age four. “When I was nine years old, my father sent me to boarding school 60 miles away in the city,” said Wang. When she was 11 years old, her father died and the family couldn’t afford to keep her in school. Her mother encouraged her to learn a trade to support her eight-year-old brother. “My family wanted him to have an education, college, in the future,” said Wang. But she took heart from her late