Ai Mei: A Screenplay

This is the story of Ai Mei, a Chinese girl adopted by American parents. Ai Mei's journey, a magical adventure into time and culture as well as into space, takes her from Rockport, Massachusetts, in the U.S. to contemporary Beijing, and then into the very heart of China. At the Labrang Monastery on the Tibetan plateau in Gansu Province, she runs away from Angie, her American mother, in a desperate search for her birth mother and, hopefully, the answers to questions she has about her origins. With her American mother in frantic pursuit, Amy has a number of unexpected adventures and meets all kinds of people as she finds her way first to Guilin, and then to Hunan Province. In the remote depths of Jianyoung County, Amy finds what she has been seeking.

Many people know me as one of the pioneers whose books introduced the films of the People's Republic to the English-speaking world. In the mid-1980's, I worked in the Chinese film industry in Beijing then under the Ministry of Culture. Later, my first Fulbright had me teaching, writing scripts and making films at Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand; my second had me teaching film and modern American poetry at Shandong University in China. For more than forty years now, I have been an independent experimental and documentary filmmaker, perhaps the last survivor of the Gyphon Film Group. Most recently I have turned from 16mm to digital film for it is especially suited for my personal ethnographic image-making. Remembering Chickens (1993), premiered in Jinan, China. Fragments from Rosemary's Recipe Box (2001), a 16mm memoir of my late wife, Rosemary, premiered on Cape Cod as did Lhamo Tsering (2002), shot on mini-dv at the Labuleng Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Gansu Province. Retrospectives of my work have been held at the Athens Cinema Club and Pittsburgh Filmmakers, where my 16mm films have been archived. Now semi-retired after more than 40 years of teaching, 35 at Ohio University, I spend most of my time with my wife, the ceramics artist Yang Jing, at our home on Cape Cod, making personal films, writing, and photographing my world.