Interview with Dianna Lee: On Creating Media and Teaching Mandarin
Dianna Lee is an ex-banker turned vlogger, who shares some tips on teaching math, art, and Mandarin with Smart Kid Mag.
When Dianna Lee is not busy on mom duty with her 2 boys, she’s holding her phone out and filming. Her recent work includes profiling a friend, as well as regular vlogs about the life of her family. When she’s alone, she has other adventures like getting her teeth whitened or sharing her fitness secrets.
Now that she’s passed the infant stage of motherhood with her kids at 18 months old and 4 years old, she’s finding time to work on her video projects and through that lens is sharing her views on happiness through the pursuit of it for herself.
In this interview, we explore the process of creating art with children, using YouTube as a repetitive teacher, and what it takes to maintain a bilingual household.
Smart Kid Mag: How did you teach your 4-year-old son how to create large canvas oil paintings?
Dianna Lee: I started painting a few years ago because one of my friends in Beijing was an artist, and she had a huge art studio. So I would just go there and we would paint on big canvases.
Now, I purchase large canvases in bulk. So I always have it ready to go. One mistake people make when painting with kids is they use small canvases and limited painting materials. So it's very hard to get it to a point where it looks like an actual piece of art.
If you have the proper canvas and the proper paint, then it all comes out that way. And then, also, if you have a lot of supplies, you never feel like any single canvas needs to be a perfect piece.
Nowadays, I always paint with my son Sebastian. So he's actually gotten to the point where he's very good about just not feeling anxious about what to paint.
I think a lot of adults feel [anxiety] because we think we need to have a topic or have some vision of where it's going. But I think kids are much better about just staying in the moment. They're not worried about if it is going to turn out to be ugly, they just put paint on the canvas, and then see where it leads. So I think it works really well for labstract art, which is what we do.
Smart Kid Mag: How has doing art helped influenced him?
Dianna Lee: I was very adamant about not sending him to some of the art classes around because depending on the teacher, if you start teaching a technique too young, you know, they get very fixed into a certain way of drawing and looking at the world. So I think from the time we started, which is right before COVID to now, he's painted over 20 pieces. As he progresses, you can really tell he is more comfortable with the paint choices that he makes. Now he can do whole pieces by himself. One piece may take him maybe two hours.
Smart Kid Mag: What kind of paint do you use?
Dianna Lee: We use acrylic paint that artists use. We don’t use the kid paint because the palettes are limited usually to primary colors. It’s nice to use neons and gold and silver. As a parent, if there's a certain palette that you like for your house, you can choose those so the product will end up being a similar tone.
Smart Kid Mag: Do you speak English or Mandarin at home?
Dianna Lee: We speak Mandarin to him at home. In Singapore, we mostly speak English outside the home. He was born in Beijing. And when we were in Beijing, we spoke English to him. I just balance out whatever the environment is lacking.
Sebastian is in a bilingual program at school. When he first enrolled, he barely spoke English when he was 3-years-old. His English has gone from 10 percent to maybe 60-70 percent. So I think school has been okay for him. But honestly, I think he learned the most from watching shows on YouTube.
Smart Kid Mag: What are his favorite YouTube shows?
Dianna Lee: He is obsessed with Number Blocks, so we watch that non-stop to the point where we’ve memorize all the episodes. I think kids find comfort in things that they know. They like the repetition.
We actually spent a lot of time watching YouTube together. For example, we watch videos on dinosaurs. Every kid loves dinosaurs, but then from dinosaurs, you can get really advanced with it, right? You can learn the different names of the dinosaurs and what period they lived in. And then from there, we talk about being on a planet part of the solar system. And then play the StoryBots solar system song that we were also really into. So then it branches out into astronomy, and all these other things.
After they are 3-years-old, they are able to digest a lot of information. You can guide them through the learning process.
He also loves watching comparison videos. For instance, there are comparisons of the largest dinosaurs ever. There’s another video of all the planets in the solar system that ranks them by size.
Smart Kid Mag: What are the Habbi Habbi Mandarin books you talked about on Instagram?
Dianna Lee: One of my friends created these bilingual audio books. It is either in Mandarin and English, or English and Spanish. They are picture books that work with an audio wand. When the wand is pointed at any part of the book, it automatically speaks out the story or object in two languages.
Smart Kid Mag: What other advice do you have for parents?
Dianna Lee: Raising kids is such a learning process, right? Nobody is born a parent.
You just figure things out. And a lot of it just depends on observing what your child likes. What works for Sebastian might not work for your child.
Smart Kid Mag: In your free time as a mom, you also make videos about your kids and your friends. What have you learned from that?
Dianna Lee: I wanted to do like vlog style content when YouTube started. But back then it was a lot harder because it required proper camera equipment and editing software.
But now I do everything on the phone. Getting the Xiaomi 10 ultra dramatically changed my process. I’ve been working on the vlog for the past 3 months. I’m on a few platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and this Chinese platform called xiaohongshu小红书 (RED).
xiaohongshu小红书（RED) is the Chinese version of Pinterest plus Instagram plus YouTube but for a women audience, so it's actually a highly monetizable platform because women have a lot of purchasing power. Chinese women are very interested to know about what it's like to live outside of China. Bilingualism is a big thing and so is education. But Chinese women are also interested in exploring topics such as what is happiness?
Smart Kid Mag: What's the difference between the Chinese version of happiness versus what you are seeing in Singapore?
Dianna Lee: China is still quite materialistic. We forget how far China has come. Just 30 years ago, most of China was still living under the poverty line, and now it’s already one of the world’s largest economies. I think every society goes through “materialistic phase” of wealth accumulation. Now the Chinese audience is developing to the next part where they're realizing there’s more to life than being rich. All these things that we traditionally think of as successful doesn’t necessarily make them happy. What makes people happy is how comfortable you are with yourself. And your life choices which doesn't necessarily need to be the same as what society tells you. So like something along those lines like and I think some people find it inspiring to listen to that.
Smart Kid Mag: What did you do before becoming a mom?
Dianna Lee: I studied economics at UC Berkeley. When I graduated, I did investment banking in Hong Kong. And then I went back to Silicon Valley, and I joined a startup, which failed spectacularly as an online advertising startup. Then around age 25, I had a bit of a quarterlife crisis. So I decided to apply to Parsons in New York so that I went to New York, studied fashion design and worked as a fashion designer for one or two years before moving to Beijing and then had my kids. And now, I want to pursue vlogging full time.
Smart Kid Mag: Your last video about your friend Lily Yuan had a unique angle. What inspired you?
Dianna Lee: I find her to be very inspiring. I feel like I rarely find someone on so many levels that is doing it better than me. We have a lot of similar life experiences. But I find it so interesting that she's a mom of four. And she manages to still put a lot of time into creating and supporting other women.
We had fun singing at the end of the video, as you can see.
I’m trying to find my style. More recently, I’ve done cinematic visual vlogs, which I really enjoy because it combines my sense of aesthetics with storytelling with my perspective of the world. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while because I've never felt like any particular job fully suited me. With being a content creator, you get to choose whatever it is that you want to do and what is it that you want to share with the world. I want to show myself in the videos with as much authenticity as I can.