How might the world be different if women asked more questions?
What did the girl in you wonder about
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What did the girl in you wonder about ⁎
Co-founder. Siyi Chen
When I was a kid, my dream was to be a professional dancer.
I danced in my school troupe until third grade, when one day my teacher knelt in front of me. With a little sadness in her eyes, she told me I couldn’t dance with my friends anymore. I had grown too tall.
I had been looking forward to the next year’s dance, when we were all going to dress up as little birds.
She explained that the girls needed to be around the same height. That way, we would look more uniform and more beautiful.
I remember wondering: Why did all the birds need to be the same height onstage when, in nature, they came in all kinds of shapes and colors? Had my sudden growth spurt made me the strange one in the flock?
I lived in China until I was 22, then moved to New York to study documentary filmmaking. Now, at 34, I have built a career as a journalist and filmmaker.
Somehow, I kept finding myself drawn to people who seemed to be asking versions of that same childhood question: How do I belong without making myself smaller, or more like everyone else?
That became an important theme in my work: How do we find belonging without reducing ourselves or giving up the very things that make each of us singular?
Co-founder. Crystal Wong
Why aren’t we allowed to ask why?
I always felt that the society I grew up in—Hong Kong, was filled with too much noise. There were hidden rules everywhere, at school and in social settings. If I asked questions that were deemed stupid, my teacher would look at me with her brows furrowed. If I asked why, my mom would think I wasn’t behaving in a way that maintained harmony.
I turned to writing. I ran my little paradise with my friends and started an online publication to share essays and fiction every week. I wanted to become a professional writer.
One day, a teacher called me to her staff room with another student. She placed our essays side by side. “Your writing is too sentimental,” she said. She advised me to learn from my classmate, whose writing was more measured.
In the back of my mind, I wondered: How does self-expression become a sin? Why were we rewarded for answers rather than questions?
By accident, I encountered documentary filmmaking. The first time I set up a camera, I felt a simpler desire that I had been looking for all along: to ask questions. The more questions I asked, the more the world seemed to reveal itself differently.
For the past 9 years, I have drifted between Hong Kong and the U.S., moving between personal stories and societal struggles. As a journalist and filmmaker, I often return to the question that began with the girl in me:
Why aren’t we allowed to ask why?
How does HERo turn women’s questions into stories?
We bring together a global network of women and femme filmmakers and creatives to craft cinematic profiles of visionary women, the questions they dare to ask, the ideas they bring to life, and the worlds they’re reshaping.
What questions have been on your mind?
