Everything in life is connected.

Sheila Allen-Weiss has had a few careers. She once raised chickens, pheasants, sheep and a goat in her back yard in Granada Hills. She moved the family menagerie to the mountains above Ojai and majored in agribusiness at Ventura College. She transferred to Cal State Northridge where she is finishing work toward a bachelor’s degree this summer. It was a semester in China that gave her studies a new direction and a plan for the future. Allen-Weiss and her husband, Paul, live in Santa Paula.

I’m British. I was born in Canton, England. I came here in 1970 to work on a movie. While I was working at the studio in the late ‘70s as a production secretary, I found that I had a talent for story analysis. I’d spent enough years not realizing any potential. I gave myself a three-year plan. I was going to get promoted from secretarial level to lower management level by my 40th birthday or I was going to leave. A friend of an executive got the job. I was out of the studio by the 10th of November, 1980.

I went into business for myself in Ventura. I had a kite shop called Nomad. I put my pension fund into my shop. It was fascinating being in business. It did very well over a couple of years, and then the economy started going down. It failed after three years. It was an extremely distressing experience.

I had started going back to school in 1976. It took me something like eight years to get my A.A. Finally I got to a point where I could go to Northridge. My major is journalism plus Asian studies.

I put my name down for the semester in China as soon as I heard about it. I didn’t care what I had to do. We took a loan on our house in the Valley to get the money because I couldn’t come up with the $2,800. I just needed to be on the plane and going.

I don’t have any trepidation about jumping into strange areas, or doing different things. Most people are not willing to risk their peace of mind, their house or disapproval from their friends or peers. I think that if more people tried to realize their wishes, they would finally get them.

I had already taken Chinese geography before I went over there so they allowed me to do three units of independent study. It had to be a cultural geographic paper. We’d gone on a trip to the museum in Xi’an where they have the key collection of steles, which are vertical stone tablets that were raised for many different reasons all over China.

I was just so taken with these things. It was like I found a key to my research. So I spent two days a week, after class, down at the museum researching steles as a cultural symbol. And that was my 100-page research paper.

I stood up to China very well. I was pretty healthy there, and I was able to come out way ahead of the game. I lost 30 pounds without dieting. In China you don’t get this vast range of goodies that are available to us here, and we had small plates. I think having that smaller plate, and not going back for seconds and thirds, works very well.

We had tremendous amounts of exercise. Our dorm, classroom and cafeteria were at three different points of the campus. On the field trips, when you’ve hiked up to some of these tombs just to see a plaque, it’s a regular healthy experience.

To me it’s just been a personal triumph to survive the Third World culture for an extended period of time. I needed to find a direction in my studies, and I did that by gaining this interest in the steles. It has directed me into Chinese art history. In the fall, I’m going into Chinese art history for a master’s.

Everything in life is connected. Agriculture gives me an understanding of the Asian culture, which is maybe 90% agricultural life style. Writing gives me the ability to formulate my research into written material. Working in the motion picture industry gave me management skills. So everything I’ve done has built me up to be what I am now, going in the direction I’m going.

There’s nothing that hasn’t been of use in my life.