On his last night in Wenzhou, Andrew had dinner with someone he'd only just met. They'd started talking that day — the whole thing arrived without warning, a connection that materialized in the final hours of his time in the city. On the table was a small card bearing a Chinese phrase: 世间所有的相遇都是久别重逢. She translated it simply — people who meet will meet again. He was leaving the next morning, and the words landed differently than they might have otherwise. A few days later in Beijing, on his last day in China, he texted her through WeChat that he was sad about going home. She repeated the phrase.
That reading never left him.
The Trip
The trip was part of Kean University's MBA Travel Learn program — a spring break immersion in China. The group visited Wenzhou first: the Wenzhou-Kean University campus, the bustling commercial streets of Wuma, the towering Baizhangji waterfall an hour outside the city. Then Beijing: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, bars in the hutongs.
The landmarks were extraordinary. The Great Wall alone would have justified the trip. But when Andrew talks about what mattered most, he doesn't start with any of them. He starts with the dinner.
Despite all the incredible landmarks, the most significant part of the trip was making connections that transcended every language barrier, every cultural difference — and embraced them.
The phrase on the card became the title of the film. But it was the connection behind it — brief, deliberate, formed across every difference that should have prevented it — that gave the project its meaning.
The Process
Andrew films alone. No dedicated camera operator, no crew — just a Fujifilm X-H2S and whatever lens he has at the time. For this trip, that meant a new 18-70mm zoom; his previous lens had broken days before departure. He was learning a new piece of glass in real time, on a trip with a group itinerary and limited windows.
The approach was simple: film everything that looks cool. On group excursions with scheduled stops and narrow margins, there was no luxury of setting up elaborate shots. It was run-and-gun filmmaking — catching what he could, moving with the group, always aware that the bus was leaving in ten minutes.
Some moments were more intentional. A cigar on the sidewalk outside a food stall. Sitting cross-legged on the pavement while a vendor worked behind him. These were the frames he could control, the small pockets of stillness between the chaos of group travel.
I'm still figuring out my travel filmmaking loadout. But the philosophy is the same — film everything that looks cool and figure it out in the edit.
The Edit
The film opens with a monologue — a technique borrowed directly from Wong Kar-wai. In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels: these are films defined by their voiceover, by characters narrating their interior worlds over images that move independently of the words. Andrew wanted that same quality — a voice setting the terms before the images take over.
The monologue introduces the phrase: there is a Chinese phrase that translates to people who meet will meet once again. It could be a blessing or a curse, depending on who. In my experience, it was nothing but the former. The structure mirrors another film that shaped his thinking — Celine Song's Past Lives, which introduces the Korean concept of In-Yun (the idea that relationships across lives are fated) as a narrative framework. Andrew wanted the same device: a cultural phrase as an entry point, a lens through which everything that follows can be read.
The footage cuts roughly chronologically — Wenzhou first, then Beijing — but the monologue gives the edit an emotional logic beyond sequence. The music deepens it further. Teresa Teng's "Tian Mi Mi" — one of the most iconic Chinese-language songs ever recorded — threads through the film. The choice wasn't arbitrary. The dinner companion had recommended the 1996 film Comrades: Almost a Love Story, which stars Maggie Cheung — a Wong Kar-wai regular — and uses Teng's music throughout. The recommendation closed a loop between the filmmaker's influences and the real connection that inspired the film.
What It Means
Andrew's previous films carry melancholy. That's the register he knows — longing, distance, the weight of things that didn't work out. This film is different.
For many on the trip, China was eye-opening. Andrew arrived with an open mind already — he wasn't looking to have his perspective shifted. What he didn't expect was to have his heart opened. The distinction matters. The country offered plenty to see and appreciate, but the experience that lingered wasn't visual. It was relational.
It opened my heart more than my eyes.
The title of the film, like the phrase it borrows, carries a duality the monologue acknowledges. People who meet will meet again — that could be a promise or a threat. For Andrew, standing in an airport about to fly twelve hours home from a country he'd never visited before, it was the only thing that made leaving bearable.
The proof is in what persists. The streets of Wuma, the waterfall at Baizhangji, the view from the Great Wall — Andrew still carries all of it. Not as memory alone, but as living exchange. He and the dinner companion still talk. She recommends Comrades: Almost a Love Story; he sends back Infernal Affairs. They trade Buddhist philosophy and cultural references across the Pacific, each conversation extending the experience past the trip that contained it. The bond didn't end when the plane took off. It changed form.
That is what the phrase means. The landmarks recede. The itinerary fades. But the people — if the connection is real — remain. And through them, so does everything else.
Unlike the work that came before it, this film doesn't end with a wound. It ends with a door left open.
