A Quote by Mira Sorvino
I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.
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Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn't force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.
If you don't put out a shirt for eight months, that doesn't mean it took you eight months to make the shirt.
Language-wise, my mom and dad's dialect, they're pretty obscure. It's Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn't something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house.
When I wrote "Win," it only took about eight months, but eight months of sheer pain and suffering because every phrase that's in there - and there are about 130 specific linguistic recommendations - I had to test every one to make sure that it worked.
In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission.
So Mandarin, I picked it up, I spent a year in Beijing studying but then when you don't use it, languages, you just kinda forget it all.
I am Chinese. I speak fluent Mandarin. And I go, 'Man, it's about time a Chinese person could step up to a Hollywood screen, and international screen, and help save the world.'
I had always loved horror films, so I wanted to do something in the horror genre but wanted it to be sweet and charming at the same time. Because there's a difference between watching horror, where you can leave it behind, and writing horror, where you have to live in it for months and months at a time.
Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.
Things are going very smoothly. As expected, there are some minor glitches, and the eight minutes that it took us to get to orbit, we trained months and months for, and didn't have to use any of that preparation, other than being aware and ready.
I joined the air force. I took to it immediately when I arrived there. I did three years, eight months, and ten days in all, but it took me a year and a half to get disabused of my romantic notions about it.
Strangely, from a life-change standpoint, I sold the company I was running and got divorced in the same month. And so there I was, at home, and I'm not the CEO. I took a few months thinking about what I wanted to do. When the first call came in about running a company owned by Deutsche Telekom, I thought it was laughable and really not something I'd do. I took the meeting mainly because the headhunter I knew. At first I thought I was just helping her fill out the roster, but then I dug into it.
The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can't breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.
Adoption has been on our minds for quite a while. The procedure took a couple of months. We wanted a baby, who is around six to seven months old.
The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.
On the mission I brought a flag from China, I brought the stone sculpture from Hong Kong, and I brought a scroll from Taiwan. And what I wanted to do is, because as I was going up and I am this Chinese-American, I wanted to represent Chinese people from the major population centers around the world where there are a lot of Chinese people. And so, I wanted to bring something from each of those places and so it really wasn't a political thing and I hope people saw it that way. I was born here, I was raised in the U.S., and I'm an American first, but also very proud of my heritage.
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