The Girl Who Studied Drama and Film — Then Went Into Marketing for AI

The year of her gaokao, she missed the cutoff for the Beijing Film Academy by a single point. Repeating a year, grad-school exams, applying abroad — again and again she fell at the final step. Coming up just barely short was the script she knew best.

More than a decade later, she took an account with all of 20 followers and ran it up to 200,000 views. The question that had haunted her for ten years found its answer here: the gaokao is a one-shot deal — fall a little short and you’re out. But the algorithm isn’t. It doesn’t care how many times you’ve fallen; as long as one post breaks out, that’s enough.

What this era truly rewards isn’t intelligence. It’s resilience.

D told me about the year of her gaokao — China’s national college entrance exam — laughing the whole time. That year, she said, she missed the cutoff for the Beijing Film Academy by a single point. So she repeated a year and ended up at an art academy in a provincial capital. I looked it up later: second tier, nationally.

From that year on, one line kept turning in her head: if you’re not a genius, how on earth are you supposed to live in this world?

That was over a decade ago. The woman she is now took a no-name account with all of 20 followers and turned it into 200,000 views. But back then, she was just a repeat student pinned in place by a single point. Getting to the final step and falling at it — she’d been through that too many times.

D was in the directing program at the art academy: film, comedy, screenwriting. There’s one undergrad teacher she’s never forgotten — gentle, taking them through the classics every week. He once said, “We have to be around the very best people.” She believed it. But she knew, in her heart, that “the very best” was never meant to describe her. She was just an ordinary person who wanted to get a little closer to the best things.

To get closer to those best things, she first had to make peace with a problem of her own.

She’d been bad at math since childhood, and logic had always been her weak spot. Yet her head was crammed with too much. Strange thoughts surfaced by the dozens every day. Beautiful, but scattered, like strings of beads spilled across the floor, impossible to gather back up.

She needed a thread to string them together.

What first pushed her toward philosophy was, honestly, a petty reason: there was a classmate who was a formidable debater, and she lost to him every time. Too annoyed to let it go, she threw herself headlong into the history of philosophy, hoping to find a few handy weapons. It sounds a little funny, but she was dead serious.

But it helped with something else. What does a screenwriter fear most? She said: the worst is when readers can feel your emotion but can’t grasp the reason behind it. Emotion alone isn’t enough; you have to let people know why. Philosophy was the thread she was looking for back then.

In those years, the characters that fascinated her most were Macbeth, and Anna Karenina.

The two have something in common: both are breaking the rules, both walking step by step toward the abyss — broken, but beautiful. That was the kind of beauty she believed in then. She believed that truth is beauty, and truth doesn’t have to be perfect. Many of the art-house directors she loved worked the same vein, often criticized for warped values. She didn’t much care. In her aesthetic back then, as long as something was real enough and self-consistent enough, beauty could forgive a great deal.

Looking back now, that was a time when her spirit had run out ahead of her judgment. She vaguely sensed that rules could be broken, but couldn’t yet say which ones could be, and which couldn’t.

The year she graduated, she didn’t get a recommended grad spot, so she sat the exam for the literature department at the university next door, hoping to drill the logic of storytelling more solidly. She placed third on the subject exam, but came up three or four points short on English, and didn’t make it. The next year she sat for the Communication University of China, and again fell a few points short. The doors of reality closed in her face, one after another. Every time, just barely short — that was the script she knew best.

But a window of reality opened.

By a fluke, she applied to a documentary program at a UK university with a respectable QS ranking. The problem was, there was no time left: she’d prepared for all of one month, and had no portfolio. The agency told her you normally need half a year to a year to prepare short films, and a portfolio runs, on average, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yuan, as much as you care to spend. With no films, even the safety-net university the agency lined up rejected her.

But there was one path almost no one took: telling a story with photographs, in place of a short film.

Those 15 photographs came from the three gap years she’d spent on grad-school attempts, during which she’d starred in a few niche films — films that picked up a handful of small awards and made it into some festivals. She chose some frames shot between takes, montaged them into a wistful, melancholy story, and sent it in.

She actually got in. The agency said that in all their years in the business, they’d never seen anyone admitted like this.

At the end of September 2022, she arrived in London. But staying on through this degree would be hard. So she started taking whatever work she could: editing videos for small influencers for free, selling products, doing marketing. Later, on an influencer’s recommendation, she landed an internship at a traditional media company, running three accounts single-handedly. At the same time, she was waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant.

Because the way she saw it, if she couldn’t survive in the UK on her own, then staying would just be self-indulgence.

In March 2023, she paid her rent for the first time with money she’d earned herself. In that moment, it was like setting down a load she’d been carrying.

Whatever she did, she put in 120%. Friends called her foolish — why knock yourself out this hard working for a boss? She didn’t see it that way. To her, all of it was building herself up, and who could say what the future held?

The payoff came from the most unexpected place. The traditional media company had a partner, a medical-aesthetics firm, whose boss had long noticed this girl who worked so relentlessly. But the layers between them meant he couldn’t so much as get her contact details. Then one day, eating at the Chinese restaurant, he ran right into her, waiting tables. On the spot he said: “Come work for me, I’ll sort out your work visa.” That was July 2023.

Her leap into the AI industry, too, was a fluke. A client at the clinic got talking about running accounts — he was from an AI-education startup that was scouring for people to help push their product, casting a wide net to see who could break out.

She helped out for free for three months. As it turned out, she was the one who broke out.

Using her own no-name account, she studied paid traffic, studied the platform’s rules, and produced a minor hit on one platform: 200,000 views. She passed the same playbook to the influencer friends around her, rallying them to post along; one of them gained 60,000 followers from a single video. That AI product took in 10,000 registered users that day, and brought in revenue beyond expectations.

The gaokao had cost her by one point. A one-shot deal: fall a little short, and you’re out.

But the algorithm isn’t a one-shot deal. It doesn’t care how many times you’ve fallen. You can try one post after another, get it wrong and go again — as long as one breaks out, that’s enough.

The question that had haunted her for ten years found, here, an answer she probably hadn’t expected: what this era truly rewards isn’t intelligence, it’s resilience. As Jensen Huang said at Stanford:

“One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. People with very high expectations have very low resilience, and unfortunately, resilience matters in success.”

Back then she read philosophy to find a thread to string her scattered beads together. Whether she’s found it, she doesn’t know, but she’s learned that between one industry and another, between one person and another, there always needs to be a “translator”: someone who studies the rules, makes things clear, lets people know why.

Of course, that AI company didn’t ultimately make it — customer acquisition and API costs ran too high. But that no longer mattered: she was already inside the AI industry. It was just a matter of switching companies.

What had changed wasn’t only her life, but her eyes, too.

Bring up Macbeth to her now, and she’ll say: wrong is wrong. It can be beautiful, but wrong is still wrong. The conscience inside a person knows right from wrong. Same story, same broken beauty you can’t tear your eyes from — she just no longer uses that beauty to excuse something that’s wrong.

When I met her, she was taking a weekly class in Buddhist studies. She said that she used to always feel others were in the wrong, yet couldn’t say what was actually right; now, through setbacks, she’s understood that the fastest self-redemption isn’t seeking outward, it’s seeking inward — just focus on honing your own sword.

The thought of “how is someone who isn’t a genius supposed to live” has faded, too.

I asked her how she’d describe where she is now. She thought for a moment, and said: ardent, but calm.

She’s always remembered something her teacher told her: whatever kind of film it is, what matters is that you express yourself honestly and tell the story clearly; everything else is just method.

All these years, her work has been making other people’s things understood and seen by more people. Yet the films that were truly her own, no one has ever seen those.

In the end, I never did get her to tell me what they were called.