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Jiayan “Jenny”Shi is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based out of Chicago who recently finished up her first doc, Finding YingYing. The film tells the story of Zhang YingYing, a Chinese foreign student and aspiring scientist studying at the University of Illinois. In 2017, YingYing was abducted in a black car and subsequently murdered. Most crime documentaries would focus the story on the killer and their experiences leading up to their killing, but the beauty in Finding YingYing stems from its focus on YingYing and her family. Originally set to premiere at this year’s cancelled SXSW film festival, Finding YingYing is a heartbreaking documentary about YingYing’s vibrant life and the horrors that her family has had to go through following her disappearance. I recently had the chance to sit down to talk with Jenny Shi about cultural differences, familial tensions, and why she had to tell this story.
Note: This Q&A has been edited down from the original transcript.
Q: In the film, it says that yourself and YingYing both attended Peking University in China, how did this relation impact your decision to tell this story?
A: When she first went missing, I received news of it through an online group chat. Like everyone else, I was just trying to help out at first. I felt really close to YingYing and her disappearance because we went to the same university in China, so we had that natural connection. When her family came from China, I went to Champaign, Illinois [where UofI is located] and I got really close to her family and the story itself. It was there I met another volunteer, Shilin Sun, who eventually became a co-producer and cinematographer for the film. I was thinking of how else I could help her family, and I came up with the idea of documenting the family and also YingYing herself.
Originally, everyone was hoping that we would find her, but after three weeks the FBI arrested a subject and released a report saying they didn’t think YingYing was alive. I realized then that the story became something totally different. The narrative of these types of stories really focuses on the killer. The way people talk about the heinous details of a crime sometimes seems like people almost glorify the killer. They don’t really pay attention to the victims. I wanted to make a film about the humanity of this tragic story.
Q: How did her family inform you about YingYing and the film itself?
A: I would say like 70% of the time I spent with the family was without the camera. The more time I spent with them the more I found out about YingYing. I learned that she grew up in a very humble village in China and overcame a lot of difficulties and challenges in her life. Her father actually resembles my father a lot. I thought about what if this happened to me, and how devastated my parents would be. I thought about the first time I came here [to the U.S.]. I was so lonely in a foreign world and a totally different environment, but I tried to stay positive and just keep going.
Q: Throughout the film, we see some truly emotionally charged scenes of YingYing’s family. What was it like being a fly on the wall and filming those scenes?
A: That was a big question for me throughout the making of this film for a long time. When I first started the project I was still a student. I didn’t really follow the process of telling these types of stories. It became an ethical question of whether I should film these very emotional moments. Should I leave space for the family? I had lots of questions, and it affected how I made this film. What I ended up doing was trying to keep filming these emotional moments, but I paid very close attention to how the family reacted to the camera at that time. After filming, I asked how they felt and sometimes they said they didn’t want to be filmed, so I had to pay close attention to that. This is a sad story, and if we want to tell the story right this is the process we have to go through.
People also don’t really know how devastating something like this can be and the potential impacts it can cause on a family. For something like this, we wanted to sit down and show the movie to her parents. We don’t want to just send them a link. YingYing’s parents don’t speak English, and YingYing’s mother can’t read Chinese. We need to have someone there sit down and explain what’s going on in the film to them. We had this whole plan set, but the coronavirus happened so we can’t travel to China. We then planned to show them the film before the premiere at SXSW, but that got canceled so everything is currently up in the air.
Q: The film uses YingYing’s diary in the narrative to give insights into her life, how did her diary inform how you wanted to tell this story?
A: This case was already pretty high-profile, especially in China. At that time we were thinking about what kind of story we wanted to tell. It was the summer of 2018 when we got the diary. YingYing’s boyfriend gave us the diary, and we read her beautiful writings about her life. She’s not a perfect person, and you could feel that she was afraid of her new life in the U.S., but she always tried to stay positive. You can also feel her personality in her writing. That’s why I was so committed to this project. I really wanted to make a film about her and also about how her life impacted her family and everyone around her. We tried to naturally weave relevant content in YingYing’s diary into the family’s journey. Finding YingYing has two meanings. The first is to actually find her physically following her disappearance, but it’s also about finding out who she was as a person. “Life is too short to be ordinary,”is the last line in her diary, and I think this line really tells you about what kind of person she was. It’s really a film about YingYing, for her family.
Q: The film contrasts the different cultures of China and the United States and how they handle something like a disappearance and kidnapping. How much do you think cultural differences played a role in her kidnapping?
A: Cultural differences played a very important element in the film. YingYing came to the States and went missing in the first six weeks of her arrival. She wasn’t very familiar with American cultural and social norms, and I think that’s a big reason why she got into the car. For the family themselves, they came to the U.S. exploring a foreign land in a devastating situation. Between visiting the U.S in 2017, going back to China in 2018, then coming back for the trial of the suspect in 2019, it was three years and nothing had changed.
The cultural differences significantly affected their experience in the U.S. They felt really frustrated about the criminal justice system. In China, such a high-profile case would draw national attention. Based on experience, this kind of case has a lot of resources to investigate. It’s a lot different. In the U.S. the system protects both the suspect’s and victim’s rights. When the family was here, they thought the FBI would update them frequently, but that wasn’t the case. The family was hoping for the death penalty, but you could tell how frustrated they were with the results. Now they are back in China with empty hands and nothing, so I think cultural differences and cultural elements bring another layer to this tragic story. [Note: In July 2019, the judge sentenced the killer to life in prison after the jury was unable to decide on the death penalty.]
Q: Why did you want to tell this story?
A: In terms of the filmmaking process, I feel really lucky to have been able to make this film. In documentary filmmaking, we really care about who is the right person to tell the right story. YingYing and I come from similar backgrounds and similar life experiences. It is really different from say, American filmmakers or journalists telling this story. The perspective is completely different, so I thought I was the right person to tell this story. It’s not easy to tell a tragic story like this for a first-time filmmaker, but I had a lot of help from people in navigating this emotional journey.
Q: How different was the transition from making short documentaries to a feature-length documentary?
A: Making short docs made me really interested in the process behind feature-length docs. I want to tell human interest stories, and I enjoy the time I spend with my subjects. Even after I finished some stories, we became friends and that was really amazing to me. I then realized the power of cinematic storytelling. For this story, I just wanted to capture whatever I could, then it naturally developed into a feature-length doc. The core of documentaries is in the story itself, so if there’s a feature film to tell in the story I will go for it. If it’s a story that can be told in a short doc form, then I will tell the story that way.
Q: So what’s next for you?
A: I’m thinking about currently developing other projects, but I’m not sure what they will be. For Finding YingYing, we are going to do impact campaigns helping YingYing’s family. That will take a lot of time even after the coronavirus. I’m also hoping to do more freelancing and journalism work. I want to use my journalism skills to figure out more long-form projects that I can work on.
Stay tuned for my review of Finding YingYing later today.
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Big Star Wars Nerd. Love all kinds of movies, but my favorites are sci-fi, indies, and superhero films. I created SplittingEdge Reviews with my friend Dakota, because we love expressing our views on the different kind of music and films that are out there. You can give me a follow on Twitter: @CorbinStewart12 or Instagram: corbin_stewart
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