At first, Zhao told Filmmaker magazine, she leaned towards politics and history as a way of detangling her own complicated upbringing. "It goes back to when I was a teenager in China, being in a place where there are lies everywhere," she said. "You felt like you were never going to be able to get out. A lot of info I received when I was younger was not true, and I became very rebellious toward my family and my background. I went to England suddenly and relearned my history. Studying political science in a liberal arts college was a way for me to figure out what is real. Arm yourself with information, and then challenge that too."
When she began working a bartender, though, all that changed. She became "turned off by politics" and realised, instead, she liked "meeting people and learning about their histories." From there, she enrolled in the graduate film program at New York University's famed Tisch School of the Arts, and the rest is history!