Le Zhou Kan, begun in 2000, was the original predecessor to “Time Out Beijing” and was owned by Hong Huang, the celebrated Beijing media mogul and pioneer of Lifestyle magazines in China (her mother was Mao’s translator, and Hong herself was formerly married to Chinese film giant Chen Kaige). Le was one of a small handful of magazines that combined the resources of western expatriates and locals to delineate and also encourage the growth of leisure, “lifestyle” and entertainment of a mode that many locals might have found to be completely western.
My very first published articles were thus these two reviews, for “Suzhou River” by celebrated Chinese indie director Lou Ye, and “Dancer in the Dark” by Lars von Trier, both of which came out that year.
***Note added 1-19-20: These first two documents are drafts I wrote before my editor did the final edits. There were some substantial differences.
I kept only one copy of the dozens of issues I worked on that year, images of which are presented below. Our then-editor Jerry Chan can be found at: http://facebook.com/jerry.chan2 and https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-chan-987b1924/
Here’s the masthead for the issue I have (whose cover, with the tennis players, is on home page) – my birth name, Wendy Cheng, is under Editorial:
My very first journalism task was to work as a listings editor for Le, and I got to translate addresses of entertainment venues, which were fairly developed in Beijing:
My first trials at interviews were with Zheng Xiaolong, famous in China for “Beijinger in NY,” and Jin Chen, a newbie director. Info from the latter was used for a movie summary, printed here in the upper left hand corner, for “Chrysanthemum Tea”:
