Shanghai July 12 – Writer Zhang Ci shared her newly shot documentary ”Silicon Valley Chinese” with Shanghai audience last Sunday at Hanyuan Bookstore.
Having lived in Silicon Valley for 26 years, it has become a dream for Zhang Ci to shoot the life of Chinese in this place. She is just too familiar with the professors, scientists, entrepreneurs, employees there and she felt it a duty and mission to let the world know their work, life and contributions.

Zhang Ci and her team did a lot of research before shooting and found that the number of Chinese people in Silicon Valley rapidly increased these years. For example, there are about 40,000-50,000 stuff in Google among which about 12,000 stuff are Chinese, while in Facebook 700-800 out of 10,000 stuff are Chinese young men born in 80s and 90s. In the Silicon branch of Microsoft there are only over 1,000 people, however 300-400 people are Chinese.
Zhang Ci felt it the right time to make the documentary and otherwise it would be too late. It took the whole team 445 days to accumulate materials, 3578 hours to shoot and edit. They have interviewed 33 persons and shoot at 50 spots in Silicon Valley. All these are only the beginning of documentary making.

They have now only finished two episodes ever since this January. The first episode took them 5 months and the second episode has just started for 3-4 days. According to the plan, they are going to shoot 4 seasons, each season includes 5 episodes.
The first episode is about one day’s life of four Chinese people in Silicon Valley, who are Cui Yi - Stanford material science professor and world class nanotechnology scientist, Shen Ci’en – founder and CEO of Ufrate Global Incubator, Yu Guoliang – biology scientist who has over 150 patents and founder of Epitomics and Zhang Liang – founder and CEO of Trustlook Mobile Security. As Shen Ci’en said on the premiere at Stanford, when he first arrived in America, he held a “3P American Dream” – “PhD, Permanent Residency and Property”, but now the dream of Silicon Chinese became far beyond “3P”. They have opened a new world and are continuing to struggle.

Every episode will be as long as 45 minutes and every season including one film as long as 120 minutes. Although short videos about 3-10 minutes are very popular now in China, Zhang Ci still used the skill of movie to shoot the documentary. She hopes the documentary will be as popular as “A Bite of China”.
“Of course, I also would like to use mobile phone to give every entrepreneur a 3-minute shoot.” She then cited the story of a Taiwanese boy who had shot bookstore owners all over Taiwan and made a good documentary. “He got 9.7 at Tudou. It was a good way for young men to do things. However, we hope to do serious documentary in a systematic way with good research and study.”

Zhang Ci is still an idealist. Nearly 30 years ago, she was a very popular writer in Yunan and later she immigrated to America at 1988. As one of the four characters in Wu Wenguang’s famous documentary “Bumming In Beijing” (1990), Zhang Cai has a complex for documentary. In 2015, she went back to her hometown in Yunnan and made a documentary called “Belief in Ailao Mountains”, which won the “Best Family Story Award” at The World's Independent Film Festival in San Francisco. ”Silicon Valley Chinese” became her second work of documentary as producer.