The story of a pair of sunglasses

There is a women’s sunglasses box in the drawer in my home. It was the souvenir of my first step in professional journalism, with a very realistic meaning.

This pair of sunglasses has somethings to do with my first internship. It was a gift I accepted from a publicity campaign which I was assigned to report for the first time.

It was in the winter of 2012, I was a sophomore in the university and got the internship in the supplement of Beijing Youth Daily. I got it together with three other journalism schoolmates whom I worked with at our campus magazine called “News Horizon”. The opportunity was given by our school counselor Chen Yifei, a young man only a few years older than us, and we called him “Brother Fei”. He gave our names to a lady who were looking for some university students to write for the daily then.

The lady, Zhang Yanhan, was the editor in charge of the daily’s supplement. I have never seen Ms. Zhang in person at the time or now, because we communicated only via E-mail and SMS.

My first task was to attend a new book launching conference by Aya, the Taiwanese TV star, and to write an article on the topic that the book mentioned. In the book Aya told about how she kept her daily life healthy under the guidance of a so-called Taiwanese health expert, who was actually the author of the book and the man behind this publicity campaign.

That was where the pair of sunglasses in my home came from. There was another intern who I was assigned to team up with, we arrived at the hotel where the conference was held, and made the “media registration”, it was my first time ever, which was to get a mysterious paper bag from the organizer. When I opened the bag, I found a box of a pair of new sunglasses, and an envelope where a banknote of 100 yuan was seen.

We sent a text message to Ms. Zhang, asking if we should take those stuff. And we were told not to accept the money but okay to keep the gifts.

So we returned the envelope to the staff, but kept the paper bag and the sunglasses, and entered the ball room, listening to Aya talking about her book on the stage. It was naive of me that I made a full record of such speech, both with my pen and my digital recorder. Those records turned out to be of little use in my writing, because what I need was just a story and some quotes that I could get in the first 10 minutes of her story-telling.

After the one-hour long launching conference, we were invited to interview Aya and her health advisor. I was lack of interviewing experience, so what I asked was just some perfunctory questions without much thinking. But it made me feel good that I didn’t have the desire to take a photo with the star.

The another intern and I wrote the article together afterwards, by each of us writing a part, and I combining them. The article was published in the paper, but it is not able to see it now, because the Beijing Youth Daily closed its online data of past years to the public. I don’t know when or why it closed but it comforts me that I have bought and kept the paper version at home.