She may have garnered inspiration in Cole’s classroom, but Hsia reports that she learned and thrived most in Harvard’s “non-academic world.”

Or perhaps because she was studying what she loved, Hsia simply forgot where the line between work and play was drawn. After all, when talking about her “non-academic” involvement, Hsia frequently notes, “Okay, that was for class, but it didn’t feel like work.”

Hsia even managed to integrate an explorative quest into her senior thesis film project, following a seven-year-old growing up in the Hare Krishna religious sect, which claims to base its way of life on ancient Indian scriptures.

For the film, Hsia and her small crew lived on a Hare Krishna farm, while disciples made no secret of their wish to proselytize the intruding film crew.

Hsia says of the on-the-road filming sessions, “it was an odd experience, but the [film itself featured] a lot of parallels to the kind of work I supervise and enjoy watching today.” From the experience, Hsia says, she learned the technical elements that need to be considered when taping compelling stories about people, which require that filmmakers help to “put our world into context.”

AN UNEXPECTED ENTERPRISE

Now an executive tucked away in the upper floors of a sky-scraping plush office, Hsia reports that she misses being a filmmaker and field producer, a position that allowed her to move “from war zone to rainforest to other major historic events.”

“But,” she concedes, “I guess there’s a time for everything.”

For Hsia, who was born and raised in Illinois, the time for her own self-discovery came soon after her college graduation.

She calls the 1980 Michael Rockefeller Fellowship that allowed her to initiate a documentary film about her heritage and family in China “one of Harvard’s greatest gifts to me.”

The fruit of her fledgling efforts as a novice documentary filmmaker, “Made in China: A Search for Roots,” led Hsia to a nine-year career of making films independently and for PBS, in lieu of a career at major networks.

Without family or classmate connections at the major networks—“My media connections when I moved to New York consisted of two names pulled from the [Office of Career Services] files,” she remembers—the always-resilient Hsia survived on “a pure love of filmmaking and the necessity to pay the rent.”

But while it may have seemed that she had fallen short of luck, Hsia, who is Chinese-American, was actually unwittingly cultivating a valuable expertise about her heritage.

“I tried a little of everything. I made films about the exploding economies in Asia, about the greatest collection of Chinese art in the world,” wrote Hsia, who met her future husband, Jeffrey Victor, on a shoot in Taiwan. “I even produced two independent feature films—including the first co-production of a feature film between the U.S. and mainland China....Before I knew it, I had a little niche specialty on films in mainland China at a time that the country was just opening up to the world.”

In fact, people came to increasingly value Hsia’s opinion about all things Chinese.