Aspergers in China

[geraldc]

There's a film out at the moment called X+Y it's loosely based around the experiences of a young boy with Aspergers syndrome who is a maths genius. He felt out of place in the UK, so he went to China after encountering the Chinese team at a Maths Olympiad. What was interesting was that he found it easier to fit in in China, than he did in the UK. The story interested me so I did a little digging.

 

The story also says a lot about interest and motivation, he took 8 years of French and can't say a word. He learnt to read, write and speak Chinese in 4 months.

 

The original article

https://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/394147/Autistic-genius-finds-true-love-Daniel-Lightwing-Mental-Health.html

"After changing schools more than five times, he decided to take a gap year before university and travel to China.

And in just four months he had taught himself to read, write and speak Mandarin fluently."

“I was interested in China because they are the only country out of all the International Mathematical Olympiad teams to enter where each of the six members wins a gold medal. They have a totally different attitude to learning and achievement so I thought I had a good chance of fitting in there – and I did.

“When I am out and about in England I feel like I stand out. In China I thought that if I did come across weird they’d just put it down to me being a foreigner."

 

 

[oceancalligraphy]

I got a bit confused because I remember seeing pictures of X+Y being filmed in Taiwan, and pictures of Asa Butterfield at night markets. In case anyone is similarly confused, the training camp for the International Math Olympiad is in Taipei, and is where the main character meets a member of the team from China. 

 

Based on this article, it looks like the inspiration for the movie, Daniel Lightwing, is now back in the UK.

 

I also found this article, where it looks like the director wanted to take some creative license for location shoots:

Morgan Matthews: I think we all fell in love with Taipei a little bit. We were going to, at one point, shoot Taipei as China and set that part of the film in China. Then I visited Taipei, myself and the producer, and we just fell in love with it. It’s a very beautiful city and it has a very distinct identity – an identity that I didn’t want to pretend was somewhere else. I didn’t want to be restricted in terms of where we could shoot because I wanted to show the city. So we re-wrote it and we set it in Taipei!

 

Also, the actress, Jo Yang, who plays the team member from China, is quite interesting. Based on her IMDB, she was raised in the UK, but has been in Chinese productions. X+Y is her first English role. In this clip it sounds like she has a bit of a Chinese accent in her English (she also says a little Chinese at 1:18): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-R1bthDKOE There's also an interview with her at Sohu.

[gato]

A bit more about him.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/film/article4388310.ece

Lightwing had always been fascinated by China and after his A levels went to Shanghai for six months to teach English. He struggled with the teaching because he was very shy, but learnt the language from a group of Chinese people he felt comfortable with. He found China no more alien than Britain. “Chinese culture and western culture are equally weird to me.”

He began a relationship with a Chinese girl who worked as a receptionist and when he returned to Britain to take up a place at Cambridge she came too. They married when he was 18. After reading maths at Cambridge, he went to Beijing on a scholarship to study computational linguistics but lasted only a year of the masters course before concluding that two more years wouldn’t teach him anything of use and returning to Britain.

On his first day in a job at Google he returned home to find a note from his wife saying she had left. “She couldn’t stand living away from home any more. I think there was a lot of pressure for her to marry someone rich. She went back to China and I was very upset. After six months she came back but we just agreed that it wasn’t going to work and got divorced.” They had been together seven years.

Six months after the divorce he began a relationship with another Chinese girl, a philosophy student in London. “It’s a lot better than my previous relationship. She can speak English very well and studies philosophy, so I can talk to her about lots of things.” Most of his friends are Chinese.

He spent two years at Google, then moved to a gambling company which he left recently. Both jobs became an ordeal because of his difficulties working with other people. He has trouble approaching colleagues about technical suggestions and gets “over-scared” and embarrassed about speaking in social situations. He has a tendency to say things without considering the views and values of others, or will spread a rumour to the wrong people “because I don’t have the sense to know better”. “I feel very embarrassed, then I won’t perform well. I’ll feel more and more depressed, even though other people don’t care. They’ve forgotten about it, I’ll be thinking about it every day. It’s not worth the stress.”

Shortly after our interview he secured a new job at a start-up sports betting company. He emails with the news and sounds positive. It is a more important role and he feels his career could be on a more stable footing.