My Hollywood Career as a "Fun Story"

"Internet celebrities" are scouted by Hollywood

Cheng, a cheerful girl from Changsha, was admitted to Peking University at the age of 18. However, she also got a full scholarship to study finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. On second thought, the talented woman packed her bags and decided to go to Hong Kong.

After graduating from college, Yang went to work for a famous accounting firm in Hong Kong, which also had offices in the United States. A year later, she passed the relevant accounting exam and moved to the United States. As the entrepreneurial spirit began to sprout in his mind, Cheng started selling T-shirts online, then became involved in organizing book fairs and even public events for New York Times best-selling authors. It was also at that time that she began to work in media and education and became a messenger of cultural exchange between China and the United States.

Despite her busy career, the energetic Cheng has opened up her own online space, a website called "Yang Yang Teaches English". She often posts articles about American culture and people, American slang, networking and dating tips, and lots of new ideas. Using classic American TV series such as Friends and Sex and the City, Cheng taught authentic American English and interesting culture easily and entertainingly, which quickly attracted a large number of netizens.

"In China, there are many teachers engaged in English teaching; But outstanding Chinese teachers are rare in the West. Since I have the passion and spirit to teach languages, I would like to try teaching my mother tongue -- Chinese." With this in mind and the experience he gained from teaching Chinese to foreign students in Hong Kong at university, Cheng published the first "Learn Chinese with Yan Yan" teaching video on his website in 2006. The video is just nine minutes long and vividly explains some very useful phrases.

Soon after, Pepperdine University in California hired Cheng to teach Chinese to its graduate students. Learning Chinese becomes a lot of fun in her class. She uses games, performances, and even rap to help students learn Chinese again in a relaxed atmosphere.

Cheng's popularity has grown as her teaching videos have gone viral online. In 2007, an American film and television production company also noticed the cheerful Chinese girl. At the time, the company was planning to launch a Chinese-language version of "Entertainment Tonight," looking for a reporter who could speak both English and Chinese to cover Hollywood red carpet events, the streets where movie and television stars hang out, and the unique cultural atmosphere of Hollywood. After contacting the person in charge of the company, Cheng became very interested in the job. She felt it would be a "new world" that would help her broaden her horizons, and she believed that the opportunity to meet Hollywood stars would be a rare boost in her efforts to promote the Chinese language and culture. Soon, Cheng took on a new role as a host and reporter for Hello! Hollywood.

It seems to be in her DNA to challenge herself, so she gets excited when she gets a chance to do something she's relatively new to. As the saying goes, "All things are difficult before they are easy." Cheng, who has never done television reading before, had an embarrassing but interesting experience. Cheng says she has never been one to scramble. Faced WITH THE PRESENCE OF Hollywood celebrities and THE MEDIA crowd, CHENG had to force herself to raise her voice AND do everything she could to attract the attention of the stars. Sometimes, she can only step away from the camera and politely do "off-site" commentary.

Early on, Cheng attended the premiere of a movie. She and her peers are looking forward to the many "nobodies" who have walked the red carpet before emerging as "popular stars". So when such a star finally appeared, the reporters around Cheng jumped on her like a tiger, and she has pushed far away before she could move. As she was trying to figure out how to push her way into the crowd, Cheng caught a glimpse of a top celebrity walking down the red carpet. Without hesitation, she rushed up and had a brief but lively impromptu interview with the actor. Because of the successful completion of the task and smug Cheng Yangyan, later found that she had the microphone upside down when the program was recorded!

Even though she is the host of the show, she is as strict with herself as a handyman and treats everyone, even the ordinary workers on the set, with the same warmth. She is a girl who smiles all the time. "In foreign countries, every move represents the image of China. Maybe it is a big statement, but it is true. As a host, she quickly gained exposure and met many Hollywood actors.

"Docking" was an eye-opener for her

The girl was surprised to find that there were thousands of Chinese "plywood floats" in Hollywood. And that number is growing fast every year. Ning Lei, a veteran extra, told her that at first there were only a few dozen Chinese floating in Hollywood, mainly famous domestic actors. However, even the bigwigs can only play a cameo role as the white boss's concubine. Since there were fewer Chinese and even fewer fluent English speakers, it was even available when the crew needed it. At that time, he could earn almost $300 a day as a walk-on. In good times, he had to go to three production teams a day. But later, with the increasing number of Chinese people, the remuneration became less and less, and now he could only earn more than $100 a day.

Most of these "Wu drifters" do not have green cards or regular jobs, and most of them graduated from Chinese film and television colleges. I thought Hollywood was the paradise of movies, but only when I arrived here did I know that American movies rarely let Chinese people play the leading roles, and even if they were made, they would be third-rate roles like refugees and petty traders. However, they are also highly valued by bosses because they are smart, skilled, and hard-working, and because Eastern culture is unique in Hollywood these days. But when it comes to movies that tarnish their country's image, most of them resolutely refuse to appear. In one case, a crew was filming a police arrest of a Chinese arms dealer on Tang Street. At that time, seven or eight restaurant owners banded together to deny the film crew access, let alone a single extra cast.

Of course, life as an extra in America isn't all doom and gloom. There are a few surprises. Ning Lei says his girlfriend in China is a total fan of stars. When she knew he was in Hollywood as an extra actor, she made every effort to let him ask for the signature of big stars and asked the stars to use the props collected and sent to her, so that she could show off to her friends. At that time, Ning Lei still laughed at her childish, but who knows her friend after seeing her love, was even willing to give a high price to let her transfer. Through this incident, Ning Lei found a business opportunity, he registered a shop on the website, that specialized in selling the used things of stars. He paid his extras friends to help collect autographs and props they discarded on set. Then they shoot beautiful pictures to explain which movie is in the props, put them on the Internet to sell, and did not expect to become rich in a few years!

'Indeed, Hollywood is still white,' Mr. Cheng said. 'Black people have always complained of discrimination.' A lot of film roles are mainly designed for white people, so Chinese actresses do have some limitations and less room to play. But there's something unique about Hollywood scripts, and you can learn a lot from them, which is very rare. Yeoh, by contrast, is an anomaly among Chinese actresses. In 1997, Michelle Yeoh, who was famous in Hong Kong, extended her reach to Hollywood and became a "Bond girl" for many actresses. Since then, almost every role of Michelle Yeoh in Hollywood can not do without martial arts, she just relies on a pair of iron fists to play a piece of her world.