Time for Change (June 2007)
I joined YesAsia's editorial team on 1 March, 2005, and now is the time for me to move on. Next month I will be joining British Council Hong Kong as their Arts and Creative Industries Officer, turning a new page in my career.
In the past two years, I did enjoy working at YesAsia, and was particularly grateful for the opportunity to participate in the planning and implementation of YesAsia's content platform YumCha! [Link], apart from my routine tasks of providing regular content for the website.
However, as most of my friends know, the new office location since January, plus the salary freeze, bothered me quite a lot ("My New Life in Kwai Chung" is probably one of the most linked-to pages in this site!), so much so that it started to erode the joy that I could derive from my work. The feeling of being stuck in this geographical location perhaps caused me psychologically induced health problems - if I am to find something to blame for my poor health in the past two months.
Sweet are the uses of adversity. All these problems prompted me to re-think my career, and by chance I saw the opening at British Council. I have never expected to change from editorial to event coordination. There exists, however, some kind of internal logic, I think. On a more abstract level, both my old and new jobs are about content project implementation, only with different platforms - website vs. film festivals, exhibitions, seminars, etc.
The essence of the two jobs, and indeed most of my previous ones, full-time or freelance, has to do with facilitating arts and creative industries while considering all the pragmatic concerns and constraints. In my varied roles, as law-enforcing civil servant, as editor, as event coordinator, this underlying principal is still guiding my career path, as I wrote in the self-reflective essay for On the Road two years ago. And as fate would have it, my study and most of my working experiences are somehow film-related, including my new one starting next month - I have been told to help out in the British Film Festival to be held in September.
It was hard to bid my colleagues farewell, as they were all very supportive and nice and we shared so much fun together. I am sure I will miss them. Before I go, I wrote one final feature article in the capacity of YesAsia's in-house editor on Taiwanese queer cinema [Links 中文 | English]. In the past six months, I have also written quite a few Editor's Picks [Links 中文 | English], and a majority of them were out of genuine feelings. I was glad to have such opportunities, and they shall remain in my fond memories of my days at YesAsia, among all the happy times I spent with my dear colleagues.