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If you had a chance to prepare dinner for your mother, would you choose to make it right now or some day in the future?

Watch the video Paradise Dinner by Liu Xiaoyu, a junior at Shijiazhuang-based Hebei Institute of Communications, and you will find a right answer.

Recently, the six-minute film won great acclaim on the Internet. It depicts the story of a son who made a big lunch for his mother, but he can only send the dinner to paradise, because his mother has passed away.

“If you do not show your filial piety to your mother right now, you might never have the opportunity in the future, because your mother is growing older and older by the day – this is the main theme of my film,” said the 21-year-old Liu.

Creative Inspiration

Liu’s story began during his first year of university in 2008, when he decided to set up a filmmaking team with several classmates.

Since the team members were just as new to filmmaking as Liu was, they experienced numerous difficulties at first. For example, when they were shooting footage in the street, many onlookers would interrupt their shooting process; when they were shooting in restaurants, the shop owners would drive them away.

Artist and adventurer Zhai Mo takes as his model the intrepid heroes of the martial arts of Louis Cha, and he takes it a lot farther than most people. The 42-year-old has even sailed off into the sunset, becoming the first man in China to circumnavigate the globe in a small, motorless sailboat in a voyage from January 6, 2007, to August 26, 2009.

From artist to voyager

Before being addicted to navigation, Zhai was an artist who specialized in impressionist oil paintings. He is interested in various cultures and has held exhibitions around the world.

At an exhibition in New Zealand in 2000, Zhai had his first experience with a sailboat. An old Norwegian artist showed him his sailboat and told him about how he’d circumnavigated the globe one and a half times in it.

“If you buy a boat, you are the captain. You can go any place you want to go,” the Norwegian artist told to Zhai.

That kind of free lifestyle attracted Zhai, and he made up his mind to become a voyager on the sea. He spent his savings of about 400,000 yuan ($60,775) to buy a secondhand sailboat on an island near Auckland, New Zealand. He asked the seller to sail the boat back to Auckland with him, and in that five-hour voyage Zhai learned how to steer a sailboat for the first time.

Zhai’s first trip was to Tahiti, and it was not a lucky voyage. He encountered a class-11 gale, drifted at sea for 28 days, and finally arrived at Fiji in the South Pacific Ocean.

“While I was drifting at sea, I thought that no matter which island I got to, I would open a Chinese restaurant there and no longer voyage,” Zhai said.

Raising pigs, in many Chinese minds, is dirty and back-breaking work only done by poorly-educated farmers. One university professor, however, has broken this stereotype by becoming a part-time pig farmer.

Chen Guogan, 48, is an associate professor of mathematics at Yandu TV University in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province. Born to a long line of career veterinarians – five generations, to be exact – Chen is no stranger to domestic animals, especially pigs. But when he decided to start a pig farm in 2004, his decision to add such an uncertain element to his stable academic life wasn’t looked too highly upon by his family and friends. Even his wife, Yu Xiaoqu, couldn’t quite understand his motivation.

“When he told me, I was extremely embarrassed,” Yu told the Global Times during a telephone interview. “I thought raising pigs was low-level manual work. In addition, I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to earn back our initial investment.”

Starting with seed money of 200,000 yuan ($30,504) – most of it borrowed – to buy 30 piglets and necessary equipment to start his enterprise, Chen opened his pig farm in Yancheng’s Dagang township in 2004. He mainly specializes in foreign lean meat-type pigs, including British Yorkshire and American Landrace, making sure to vary their feeding choices based on their specific stage of growth.

Cai Kaiyuan had long dreamed of taking of a bicycle tour to Tibet to mark the end of his three-year college education. But he never expected that the tour would be a death-defying trip that veritably changed his life.

Cai, 21, is an electrical engineering junior at Hunan Railway Professional Technology College in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province.

Enchanted by images of Tibet from TV and the media throughout his teenage years, in October, Cai decided that he would spend his winter holiday embarking on a bike tour to this legendary land.

“I figured that visiting Tibet on a bicycle would allow me to enjoy the scenery along the road and stop where I like,” Cai told the Global Times.

The Sichuan-Tibet motorway connects Chengdu, Sichuan Province and Lhasa and is about 2,150 kilometers’ long, snaking across 12 mountains and several major rivers and reaching an altitude of over 4,000 meters. It is known for its splendid views of snow-capped mountains, unspoiled forests, glaciers, valleys and gorges.

To prepare for the journey, Cai underwent an intensive training regimen from October to January. Almost every day, he went running in the morning and riding in the evening – about 50 kilometers per session, which still paled in comparison to his weekend jaunts, during which he would ride about 200 kilometers. Over National Holidays in October, Cai spent three days on his bike visiting Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, a 500 kilometers’ ride away from his home in Zhuzhou – an excursion that gave him confidence to undertake his far more extensive Tibetan ride.

It may sound appealing to lose yourself in frenetic night of live rock or pop gig after a week’s hard work, but if you’re looking for a more cozy, intimate night to spend with your lover or close friend, Australian folk duo Agnes Kain, who kick off their first-ever China tour tonight, is a band you should – and probably will – love.

Born in suburban Sydney, Chanelle Afford and Stefan Simunic grew up on the same street, having known each other since the age of four, and are now not only band mates but lovers who share practically everything together – including a career.

Knowing each other so long has given them a high level of intimacy and friendship that reflects in their music, with songs like “Keep Walking or I’ll Kill You” and “My Brother Told Me,” which are light-heartened, warm and joyful.

Invited by Pocket Records, their label in China, Agnes Kain will perform in 13 Chinese cities this month, including Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenzhen after the gig in Beijing’s Bo House Venue.

“This is our first visit to China, so we are very much looking forward to this tour,” Afford told the Global Times. “It will be just the two of us, so our shows will be really intimate, which we hope people will enjoy.”

Afford describes their music as “folk and a little bit pop” with her singing and boyfriend Simunic on the accompaniment.

Their mostly narrative songs use acoustic instruments and Afford’s warm vocals to create their sound.

“Our songs are more about stories, so we like to keep the vocals very raw,” said Simunic. “The main instruments we use are guitar, piano, mandolin, glockenspiel and lots of different types of percussion.”

“We’re both self-taught musicians and tend to just mess around with whatever we can get our hands on and come up with sounds that we like,” he added.

In the upcoming shows, Afford and Simunic will play familiar songs from their first album, Keep Walking or I’ll Kill You, as well as staging fresh material from their new album Across the Ocean Grey, inspired by their recent adventures traveling around the world.

“We have been exploring, hunting, gathering, listening and remembering,” said Afford. “We climbed to the top of a mountain, we took a forty-hour bus ride, we saw a spider bigger than our hands, we walked through a sacred valley and danced with locals.”

Despite this, Afford feels their songs are less indulgent than they sound and are mellower than on their debut album.

Like many indie artists, Agnes Kain recorded both Across the Ocean Grey and Keep Walking or I’ll Kill You at home, the first in Sydney and the second in an apartment in London. They like to keep their music plain and simple, without excessive production, while still being able to strike nostalgic chords in people’s hearts with their old-fashioned storytelling manner.

“It’s a little too cute and kind of strange, so we like to let people know that we used to hide on our driveways until the other walked past, so we wouldn’t have to walk to school together,” said Afford, referring to the pair’s seemingly perfect coupledom.

The first song they wrote was called “Off with the Faeries,” which they used for a competition for songwriters. They never heard back.

“But we’re happy, as we don’t really like the idea of competitions anyway,” she said. “We later re-recorded it for Keep Walking or I’ll Kill You and still love playing it live.”