dear
I suppose because you are in a sort of tv & film school, the beginning part of your story or novel should be opened with an establishing shot from a high angle, perhaps the bank of QINGhuai river, maybe under the credits,panning tiny scenes far below of the eastern city nearby shanghai and the old capital.Close up--- your campus...
Then, in a series of close shots we become aware that of the people we are seeing, reading are the freshmen in the university.Far from their hometown,native land--wuhan, beijing ,daqing ,shandong,anhui,ningbo,their flavor changes ever so slightly as they absorb the new knowledge perfumes.
Some closeups of individual freshmen.
The cast of characters
There are, also,certain ghosts of Wu jingzhi,LI Xiangjun, Sun wen......
all of you here for something you could not find back home,
possessed of an idea about mordern west culture, technic and their intellectual heritage,conscious of a connection to the end of an dynasty and the sweet or bitter colony time in the land .
(you are the generation---greatly affected by the 流行文化: pop movie & tv culture from the west )
in the year which is the 60th of Nanking Massacre , you went there for your college...-------
BACKGROUND & MATERIALS:
Plenty will be written and broadcast about the 60th anniversary today of the start of the Nanking massacre,
during which victorious Japanese troops killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, raped tens of thousands of women and girls and basically destroyed most of the city.
I have little to add except to say that of all the offerings out there, a number of them fictional,
Nanking, a documentary directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman seems to me one that bears watching.
And when I say "bears," I mean that: it is very hard to sit through, a catlog of unbelievable burtality that went on for months.
The movie does at least give us some hope for the human spirit amidst such horror,
focusing on the extraordinary bravery of the small group of foreigners (lead by the top Nazi official John Rabe, just to confound preconceptions), whose efforts saved several hundred thousand.

yours