Hi there!
My name is Christian J. Lee (the J. stands for my birth name: Joel, say that fast with my last name and see why a New York talent agent had me switch). I’m from a small university town called Davis, which is just outside of S.F. in California. After living in S.F. during the original internet boom, I moved to NYC to study acting, then I struck out East to Asia where I had the thrill of living in Hong Kong, Beijing and Singapore where I’m currently based.
Having been around the block a few times, I believe the one thing that keeps me young at heart and pretty much always optimistic and motivated is learning new stuff. One intent I have for this blog is to share what I learn, and have a few laughs a long the way. Learn and teach the ABCs so to speak. It’s also an acronym for American Born Chinese, one defining fact that has molded me into who I am.
Although I have a great deal of ABCs to share in terms of acting, voiceover work, TV/film producing, cooking, poker, learning Mandarin and Portuguese from scratch, living in Beijing, Rio and London, I’ll focus mostly on my current learning of digital media ABCs here in Singapore (a soon to be completely wired country/city/state).
I have two digital enterprises that I’m learning from:
One is BananaMana.com, which is an online directory specific to Singapore that I started up with 3 friends. It was born out of the problem of us having a hard time looking for things in Singapore online, and that the current directories here frustrated the hell out of us (BananaMana means “where’s the banana?” in the Malay language, which gives the whole site a fun but useful feel, and it’s localized). The best reason for our little venture is that we absolutely are fuel by helping people find what they’re looking for, and helping small businesses easily use the web to connect with people looking for them. The most exciting part is getting to use all my TV/film production experience and my MAC, to create HD web videos that are content centric for our directory.
Second is my new position as senior business development manager for Httpool, a full service online advertising agency. It’s a fancy title which broken down means: “senior”: I’m old enough that all my friends are CEOs and MDs (when you build an acting career for 10 years, your friends build their business careers), “business development”: be a pro-active socialite! (something click for me in this area when my best friend persuaded me to audition for our 7th grade play and I got the role of Earth Quake Magoon in Lil’Abner, it was a turning point from shy kid with bad grades Cs and Ds, to a boisterous chorus/drama nerd with average grades Cs and Bs), “manager”: I better manage my time well (cause there is just too much to do and learn, I can’t sleep at night sometimes). Joking aside, I have a digital mentor MD from NYC (now based in Singapore) who is super sharp and down to earth, and Httpool is a global company on the cutting edge.
All of the opinions expressed on this site are mostly my own, nothing I say should be considered completely reflective of the enterprises I work for, but you’re of course always entitled to your own opinion. This is the internet after all;-).
This site is about the ABCs of learning and discovering digital culture/the social application of technology (quote from David Gillespie), and how it applies to business in a useful practical way. I have a lot I want to learn, and seems like just yesterday I was playing Star Trek Commander on my best friend’s dad’s Radio Shack TRS80.
If you’re interested in my current film producing project (Asian WWII Zombie Film), I’m going to be blogging about that on Alive Not Dead (the HK based online community dedicated to helping artists.) There’s actually quite a lot of actors called Christian J. Lee and Christian Lee out there, so imdb.com conveniently gave me the roman numeral V after my name. I was forced to incorporate that into my username. If my post at times becomes sporadic my apologies in advance, just spending time with my biggest passion, my beautiful wife.
Enjoy, and thanks for giving me the time of day to share.
Kindest Regards,
Christian
