Lifestyle

The internet loves this L.A. Chinese herb shop. Can its ancient prescriptions really improve your health?

Published

1 year ago

September 3, 2024

The internet loves this L.A. Chinese herb shop. Can its ancient prescriptions really improve your health?

Based on the number of local L.A. content creators that have visited Tian Xiang — a small, nondescript herbal medicine shop in Los Angeles’ Chinatown — you might think it’s the single best Chinese pharmacy in Los Angeles. Its TikTok star, in particular, is rising. You can find more than two dozen videos on the platform of customers touring the business and documenting their alternative healthcare journeys.

One TikTok user, who goes by mooneyegoddess, traveled 2½ hours by train to L.A.’s Union Station in May, then walked several blocks to Chinatown to see the herbal doctor at Tian Xiang. Why?

“After being frustrated with modern doctors not listening to me when I go in, I decided to go to what my spirit connected best with, an herbal doctor,” the caption for her video read.

“And I’m telling you guys, I feel amazing!” she raved in the video.

Another customer gushed over the customization of the herbal prescriptions.

“Oh, you can’t find this in the store, uh-uh, not this, baby!” the user actressamira voiced over a TikTok video of raw herbs being sorted.

Huang at his desk inside the clinic.

From top, left: Dry herbs, roots, and spices inside Tian Xiang.

The appeal is clear. Tian Xiang’s shelves are packed with dried herbs, roots and flowers that make a prism of colors and textures. A wall of wooden drawers stores loose herbs; bulk bins contain varieties of ginseng, goji berries and medicinal spices such as cinnamon and dried turmeric; a display behind the checkout counter showcases bottles of pre-made herbal supplements for nearly every imaginable condition: digestive issues, allergies, immune support, menopause, liver, heart and lung function among them.

What sets the store apart from other retail outlets, though, is the tiny clinic, jammed in a back corner beside a stack of unpacked boxes, barely larger than a walk-in closet. There, a man who goes by Dr. Huang — wearing a plastic surgical glove and medical mask — sits at a small desk behind a protective divider. (He did not go to medical school but has practiced traditional Chinese medicine, he says, for more than 50 years.)

There’s no weeks-long wait to see him, as is so often the case with, say, the U.S. healthcare system. Customers simply drop by, sans appointment, and pay $15 for a few minutes for Huang to assess their condition and prescribe them a customized, herbal remedy. It runs, on average, about $80-$95 for 10 days of daily use. The pharmacy will mix the herbs right there and send customers home with directions for how to prepare the loose tea.

There are more than 50 Chinese herbal apothecaries in the Los Angeles area, according to Willie So, sales director of Chinatown-based Solstice Medicine, a leading distributor of traditional Chinese medicine products since 1979. (He said Solstice Medicine has been providing inventory to Tian Xiang since the store opened.) And while Tian Xiang is a well-stocked and conveniently located one, its social media success is a mystery — even to the people who work there.

David He, the store’s manager, says Tian Xiang began seeing an uptick in business in 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic, that has become amplified on social media over the last two years.

Store Manager, David He.

A container of dried fruit at Tian Xiang.

“Many Asian people from China and Cambodia and Vietnam came to get medicine for COVID because they believe more in traditional herbs to boost the immune system,” he said through a translator. “And at that time there was no vaccine. The customers felt good, and they posted about it, and then more people started coming. So it’s word of mouth.”

The type of wellness that Tian Xiang was peddling at the time was ripe for TikTok, says Freddy Tran Nager, a digital media professor at USC.

“A lot of alternative wellness trends do exceptionally well on social media, especially since the pandemic, as people look for new ways to be healthy,” he says. “And Asian culture, in particular, has been gaining more popularity online, whether that’s boba drinks or K-pop music — and Asian wellness goes along with it.”

That Tian Xiang is situated on Broadway, a main thoroughfare in Chinatown, didn’t hurt, he adds.

I was intrigued and decided to check out Tian Xiang for myself. I’m currently nursing a gym injury and open to anything that might help ease the pain in my neck and shoulder.

Tian Xiang's location on Broadway, a main thoroughfare in Chinatown, provides it visibility to the curious wellness seeker.

Tian Xiang has been in the neighborhood for more than 40 years, though it has changed ownership multiple times. It’s a lively place, with a steady stream of customers — “mostly older, mostly repeat visitors and mostly Asian and Hispanic,” He says. They come regularly to treat everything from colds and the flu to infertility and back pain. The late-August afternoon I visited, I saw customers perusing the aisles and consulting with He, who frequently steps out from behind the counter, rubbing his belly or tapping his chest to demonstrate how the herbs might aid their ailments.

Nearby, two employees prepared a prescription for a customer, moving with assembly line-like efficiency in a precise but fluid dance: one ground herbs with a mortar and pestle while the other measured slabs of marbled ginseng on a traditional handheld gram scale. They alternately layered scoops of one ingredient or a sprinkle of another onto pieces of pink paper laid out on the counter top. Side by side, the piles of mixed herbs were like still-life paintings, each sparking with texture. Finally, a third employee packaged the herbs, sealing them in plastic bags.

“The doctor’s ready for you,” He told me, interrupting the mesmerizing show.

Our consultation was quick and to-the-point. Huang had me fill out my name and age on a small sheet of paper. Then he took my pulse. As he cradled my wrist, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. Then he tapped the keyboard on his phone for several minutes, writing into the Google Translate app, before pushing the phone toward me: “Poor blood circulation, weak spleen and stomach, disordered hormones, and a bit,” read the screen.

Huang inside the clinic.

Huang takes reporter Deborah Vankin’s pulse.

Huang hands over his prescription.

Dry herbs, roots, and spices for Deborah Vankin’s customized medicinal tea.

How did he know all this without examining me? He didn’t even look at my tongue, which is typical of a traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM, “tongue and pulse consultation,” I learned from a doctor at UCLA’s Center for East-West Medicine, while researching this piece.

“Experience,” he says through a translator. Huang has been working at Tian Xiang for more than 20 years. Before that, he practiced traditional Chinese medicine for 30 years in the city of Taishan in the Guangdong province of China. He’s a third-generation TCM doctor.

My neck stiffness, he says, is from poor blood circulation — he can tell that by listening to the rhythm and patterns of my pulse on each wrist, not just the number of beats per minute.

Herbal remedies in traditional Chinese medicine have been around for thousands of years, though their efficacy is debatable. Some, such as Dr. KaKit Hui, director of UCLA’s Center for East-West Medicine, say the right combination of herbs for the appropriate ailment can “save lives,” though he stresses the importance of practitioners being properly educated.

“Many conditions — coughing and upper respiratory infections or GI problems — can be helped,” Hui says. “They use herbs for lupus and cancer in China. But you don’t want to use herbs to replace necessary medications or [receive treatment] from someone who doesn’t know what can be mixed with what — herbs can interact with medications — you need someone who knows how to monitor it.”

Others, such as Dr. Craig Hopp of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, which researches medical approaches outside the Western mainstream, note that Chinese herbs, like supplements, are not FDA regulated and there can be concerns about the purity of the plants and their provenance.

“It can sometimes get a little murky as to where [the herbs] come from,” Hopp says. “Lots of plants look alike and are called similar things, so the taxonomy and the nomenclature can be confusing. Unless you have a very well-trained botanist who knows what they’re looking for, you could be getting something else by the time it gets to an apothecary.”

My prescription — which came in three large plastic bags for six days worth of tea — was $63. It included 16 ingredients, Indian mulberry, golden eye-grass, the deciduous perennial Asian lizard’s tail and the carrot-like plant Szechuan Lovage among them.

The interior of Tian Xiang, a Chinese herbal remedy shop.

He wouldn’t say where, exactly, the herbs come from, just that the store gets them from distributors in Monterey Park and Alhambra, who source them mostly from China, with some coming from Korea, Vietnam and Japan. He did say the herbs are “high quality.”

“My father, he’s 80 and he just had gallbladder surgery and the herbs seem to help,” one customer, Dericia Witalina, said while awaiting herbs her dad was prescribed. Her family lives in the San Fernando Valley and despite the drive, “if we need something, we come here,” she said.

Most, however, visit because it makes them feel healthier, He says.

“Many customers come here not to kill this germ or kill this virus, but it’s more about boosting the general body function.”

No matter how much better TikTok users claim to sleep or feel after drinking their prescribed herbal tea, the consensus on its taste seems to be less enthusiastic. One patron, who goes by 123aram5 on TikTok, summed up their review in two words: “Uh-uh — nope!” Others complained about the woodsy, pungent flavor.

I proceeded with caution, simmering the herbs for about an hour, per the store’s instructions, until they were mushy and the tea was a deep, murky brown. My home smelled like a forest after the rain, which was actually kind of pleasant and soothing.

The taste, however, was rank, nearly impossible to get down. I made a note to next time use a dollop of the honey and yuzu mixture, sold at the store. If there would be a next time.

That night I slept especially deeply. Was it the herbs? A placebo effect? The hot yoga I’d done earlier? Who’s to say. But I’ll take whatever I can get.

Grace Xue contributed reporting for this article, including translating interviews.

Lifestyle

A glimpse of Iran, through the eyes of its artists and journalists

Published

9 hours ago

March 3, 2026

Press Room

A glimpse of Iran, through the eyes of its artists and journalists

Understanding one of the world’s oldest civilizations can’t be achieved through a single film or book. But recent works of literature, journalism, music and film by Iranians are a powerful starting point. Clockwise from top left: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, For The Sun After Long Nights, Cutting Through Rocks, It Was Just an Accident, Martyr!, and Kayhan Kalhor.

NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR

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NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR

Few Americans have had the opportunity to visit or explore Iran, an ethnically diverse nation of over 90 million people which has been effectively shut off from the United States since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Now, with a U.S. and Israeli-led war on Iran underway, the ideas, feelings and opinions of Iranians may feel less accessible. However, some recent books, films and music made by artists and journalists in Iran and from the Iranian diaspora can help illuminate this ancient culture and its contemporary politics.

These suggestions are just a starting point, of course — with an emphasis on recent works made by Iranians themselves, rather than by outsiders looking in.

Books

For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy

There are quite a few excellent titles that deconstruct the history of Iran from ancient times through the rule of the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Iranian Revolution. But there are far fewer books that help us understand the Iran of 2026 and the people who live there now. One standout is the National Book Award-nominated For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising by journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, which chronicles — almost in real time — the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, during which Jamalpour was working secretly as a journalist in Tehran. In 2024-25, Jamalpour (who is now living in exile in the U.S.) and I spent a year together at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace fellowship for journalists; her insights into contemporary Iran are among the best.

Gold, by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori

If Americans are familiar with Persian poetry at all, it may well be through popular “translations” of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi done by the late American poet Coleman Barks, who neither read nor spoke the Persian language and detached the works of Molana (“our master”), as Iranians call him, of references to Islam. (Instead, Barks “interpreted” preexisting English translations.)

In 2022, Iranian-American poet, performance artist and singer Haleh Liza Gafori offered the first volume of a corrective, in the form of fresh Rumi translations that are at once accessible, deeply contemplative and immediate. A second volume, Water, followed last year.

Martyr!: A Novel, by Kaveh Akbar

This 2024 debut novel by Kaveh Akbar, the poetry editor at The Nation, is an unflinching tour-de-force bursting with wit and insight into the complications of diaspora, the nature of identity in a post-War on Terror world and the inter-generational impact of the 1979 Revolution on Iranians. The protagonist, the Iran-born but American-raised Cyrus Shams, has struggled with addiction, depression and insomnia his whole life, and is trying his best to make sense of a world at the “intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness.” As with so many other of the titles here, fiction and fact are woven together: the story centers around the true story of the U.S. downing an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.

The Stationery Shop: A Novel, by Marjan Kamali

Marjan Kamali’s 2019 love story is the wistful tale of a young woman named Roya and an idealistic activist named Bahman, who meet cute in a Tehran store in the 1950s, but whose planned marriage falls apart due to turmoil both familial and political, as Iran’s democratically elected government falls in a U.S.-British lead coup that ends with the installation of the Shah. Roya flees to the U.S. for a fresh start, but the two reunite in 2013, wondering: what if life had spun out in a different direction?

Movies

Coup 53

This 2019 documentary directed by Iranian film maker Taghi Amirani and co-written by Walter Murch recounts Operation Ajax, in which the CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered the removal of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and installed a friendly ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place. (The Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution.) As Fresh Air critic John Powers noted in his review, “What emerges first is the backstory of the coup, which like so much in the modern Middle East is predicated on oil. Shortly after the black gold was discovered in early 20th century Iran, a British oil company now known as BP locked up a sweetheart deal for its exploitation. Iran not only got a mere 16% of the oil money before British taxes, but the books were kept by the British — and the Iranians weren’t allowed to see them.”

YouTube

Cutting Through Rocks

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s film Cutting Through Rocks is up for an Oscar this season after premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. This inspiring documentary follows Sara Shahverdi — a divorced, childless motorcyclist — as she campaigns to become the first woman elected to the city council of her remote village, and who dreams of teaching girls to ride and to end child marriage.

YouTube

It Was Just an Accident

The latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi — who has officially been banned from making films in Iran — is 2025’s It Was Just an Accident. Panahi, who has been jailed multiple times for his work and was recently sentenced again in absentia, has said in interviews that his inspiration for this brutal – and shockingly funny – thriller was people he met while in prison: an auto mechanic named Vahid finds himself face-to-face with the man who he is fairly certain was his torturer in jail, and eventually assembles other victims to try to confirm his suspicions. Fresh Air critic Justin Chang called It Was Just an Accident “a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage.”

YouTube

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

This 2024 thriller — shot in secret by director Mohammad Rasoulof — centers on a family whose father, Iman, is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. But it soon becomes clear that his job has nothing to do with actually investigating. Iman, his wife, and two daughters come to suspect each other in our age of mass surveillance, as the city streets below erupt into the real-life Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

YouTube

Music

Kayhan Kalhor

One of the primary ambassadors of Persian classical music has been the composer and kamancheh (an Iranian bowed-instrument) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. Although music, like poetry, has been central to Iranian culture for centuries, all kinds of music were initially banned after the 1979 revolution. Since then, however, Iranian classical musicians have ridden many looping cycles of official condemnation, grudging tolerance, censorship and attempts at co-option by the regime.

Despite those difficulties, Kalhor has built a thriving career both inside Iran and abroad, including winning a Grammy Award as part of the Silkroad Ensemble and earning three nominations as a solo artist. Back in 2012, I invited him to our Tiny Desk to perform solo. “Didn’t know I could have goosebumps for 12 minutes straight,” a YouTube commenter recently wrote; I couldn’t put it any better.

YouTube

Saeid Shanbehzadeh

Among Iran’s 92 million people, about 40% of come from various ethnic minorities, including Azeris, Kurds and Armenians among many others. One of the most fascinating communities is the Afro-Iranians in the Iranian south, many of whose ancestors were brought to Iran as enslaved people from east Africa. Multi-instrumentalist and dancer Saeid Shanbehzadeh, who traces his ancestry to Zanzibar, celebrates that heritage with his band, and specializes in the Iranian bagpipe and percussion.

YouTube

The underground metal scene

Despite ongoing restrictions on music — including the continued ban on female singers performing in mixed-gender public settings — Iran is home to a thriving underground scene for metal and punk. Though it’s fictional, Farbod Ardebelli’s 2020 short drama Forbidden to See Us Scream in Tehran — which was secretly filmed in Tehran, with the director giving instructions remotely from the U.S. via WhatsApp — gives a flavor of that real-life scene and the dangers those artists face.

YouTube

Lifestyle

Sen. Thom Tillis Rips Kristi Noem, Compares ICE Killings To Dog She Killed

Published

10 hours ago

March 3, 2026

Press Room

Sen. Thom Tillis Rips Kristi Noem, Compares ICE Killings To Dog She Killed

Sen. Tillis To Kristi Noem
ICE Killings Are Like Dog You Killed

Published
March 3, 2026
6:20 PM PST

Fireworks on Capitol Hill … Sen. Thom Tillis ripped into DHS Secretary Kristi Noem during a congressional hearing … comparing American citizens killed by immigration agents to a dog she killed.

Check out the video … the Republican Senator from North Carolina says Noem has shown terrible leadership and decision-making as Trump‘s DHS Secretary.

012426_minneapolis_shooting_across_street_cnn_kal_v2

Tillis says the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE and Border Patrol remind him of a passage from Noem’s book … where she recalls killing a dog she brought on a hunting trip.

Noem said the 14-month-old dog, Cricket, was misbehaving … so she led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her.

X/@DHSgov

Sen. Tillis told her straight up … “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. Not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”

Lifestyle

For filmmaker Chloé Zhao, creative life was never linear

Published

21 hours ago

March 3, 2026

Press Room

For filmmaker Chloé Zhao, creative life was never linear

In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.

Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.

Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.

Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.

Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes in Hamnet.

Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.

She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”

Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.

Director Chloé Zhao at the Waldorf-Astoria in Beverly Hills.

Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.

Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.

“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”

“No way!” she gasped.

It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.

I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.

“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”

“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”

“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”

Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.

Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.

Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.

Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”

The Real 'Hamnet' Died Centuries Ago, But This Novel Is Timeless

Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.

She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.

“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.

Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare's wife in Hamnet.

Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”

Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”

That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”

Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.

Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR

That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.

“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”

Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.

“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”

As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.

In 'Nomadland,' Discover The Joy And Sorrow Of The Road Less Traveled

Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”

I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.