I’m writing two theses this year, I liked to boast during senior year. An academic one, and a creative one. By the time I graduated college, that claim had become somewhat of a catchphrase, which my friends used jokingly whenever I had to cancel lunch plans or stay awake writing. But the fact that there were two had always been important to me beyond the value of a brag: though my theses discussed separate social issues through separate methods, I could never think of them as separately as I would’ve liked. My theses shared everything from literature reviews to beta readers, and I often transferred methodologies I’d learned or knowledges I’d gleaned from one to the other. This was often a source of insecurity: could I call myself a true academic when I refused to—could not—elevate the sociological above the creative?

Now, as I prepare to undertake another long-term academic project (my Master’s thesis), I find myself at a crossroads. My undergraduate theses had forced me to confront my relationship to knowledge: my academic and artistic roles as recipient, distorter, and producer. My creative thesis, in particular, forced me to recognize my resistance against mainstream academia, and my instinctive delight in subverting it. I spent the last year reveling in my ability to use academic language for my own ends, to irrefutably legitimize the truth of my intuition. By the end of senior spring, my theses felt more like proof of life than an innovation of any kind: angry, triumphant declarations of my own existence. They didn’t have any direction, because they were always meant to turn back towards me.

Even the “new” knowledge that I produced in senior year never felt like an end. One of my TA’s told me that research in the social sciences can never yield a specific answer, can only point us in directions. But I’ve always been okay with that. It’s okay to wander in circles. In fact, that’s all I seem to be doing in Beijing. These days, I meander through old hutong’s and art districts, under Beijing’s gingko trees and haunted palaces, inhaling a sky that cracks my lips and skin with its dryness. Always, inevitably, I wander into the cramped studios of artists, whom I listen to for hours with no personal or academic agenda. This is a simpler, humbler (more resigned, too?) form of scholarship: I have no desire to excavate any deeper meaning from our conversations. It feels disrespectful to be listening with anything but a commitment to centering the speaker, to be making a spectacle out of stories that have nothing to do with me—for research in all the forms I know it to be is a spectacle. There’s the drama and disruption of announcing a new finding. There’s the loud rebuttal of scholars who came before, the equally loud insistence that your work not only belongs in these bodies of literature, but will redefine what that body is, that you will bridge these literatures in a way that no one has ever seen before. It’s a relief to return to a mode of scholarship that only demands I listen, and not create. I learn, and I am silent. There is the lull of the artist’s voice. The whir of a fan. The hum of mosquitos.

I feel very defanged. Part of this is my loneliness—I’ve resorted to thinking and writing about my life in the U.S. to reforge some connection to my queerness and to queer art, which feel so absent in my self-imposed isolation (I always spend my first few weeks in a new home alone, wandering to figure out my own relationship to the space). Part of this is my powerlessness—a confrontation with the speed and scale of modern China, which I’ve already written about at length. I dread that everything worth studying about China has already been studied and packaged for Western academic consumption, that the world has settled into a mold beyond the reach of art, that even the urgent, angry inquisitiveness that drove me to write so much during college has no room here. I fear I’ll be reduced to moralist preaching without ever doing anything. I sometimes dream about friends from middle school, who gather in a conference room in suit jackets and pants, and tell me to stop being such a disaster. The dream always ends with me writing a very strongly-worded email, to which I never receive a reply.

It’s fitting that I have also been—very slowly—accepting my own aesexuality (or something like it? Demisexuality, perhaps?) for the first time since I suspected it. Everything was so limned in desire while I was in college—proof of lesbianism found in the messes I made, in how beautifully I could translate them into art. There is more I could write about the spectacle of queerness (so many spectacles), my desperate ascriptions of morality to all the hurtful things I’ve said and done, the panicked defensiveness I’ve always felt and forced down when engaging with the romantic or sexual, or when the platonic crossed definitively into the romantic. In my rush to prove my queerness, to live for the plot while I still could (before I left all the queer spaces I found in college), I’ve never paused to consider that what I truly want might lie outside the rapid collision of bodies and the even faster generation of ideas that became my creative work and academic research. Here, in China, there is no real desire in me—or, at least, no desire in the narrow American/Stanford/white sense of the word. I feel no desire to be first, to disrupt something with the promise of novelty, to own a person or an idea. There’s a longing to be homed, as always—it’s what’s compelled me to seek out old things and art. But beyond that? I don’t know.

My scholarship has always been a project in home-making. One of my friends once quoted my own thesis back at me, when I professed my fear of being queer in China. Diasporic impressions of homeland are often lagging and romanticized, she’d lectured me, grinning as I buried my head in my arms in embarrassment. Didn’t you hear about “Diasporic Lag in Memory-Making,” the thesis written by Stanford senior Ana Chen? When I revisit my academic and creative work, I realize that my younger self has left me gifts: reminders of queerness, reassurances that it’ll be okay, confirmations of my intuition. I’ve never stopped making homes for myself, anticipating all the aches my future selves might feel. Maybe that is all I can ever do—to keep making these homes, to hope that others may find a home in my art, too.

But I don’t know how this home-making aligns with the mainstream institution of academia. The spaces that I occupied at Stanford—carefully cultivated to be interdisciplinary and experimental—were already so hard to find. I was surprised at how seriously the Institute for the Arts took my novel, because I’d thought my queerness and adolescent angst antithetical to everything academia stood for. I’ve always been slightly ashamed of my pursuit of fantasy and sci-fi, but this shame taints more than just my artmaking: I and my sensitivities don’t belong in circles of finance and policymaking and money. Everything that I am feels flimsy. Everything that I do feels like an attempt to absolve myself.

Where do I go from here? I’m not sure. I have no real aspirations. I’ve applied for nothing, letting a dozen Ph.D. and job applications slip past their deadlines. I don’t feel burned out, as I did immediately after undergrad—but neither do I feel any drive towards academic excellence, which I’d thought was the state opposite burn-out. It’s nice to exist like this. Maybe I’ll go raise chickens with my grandmother in Dongguan, which I seriously considered doing during my senior year. There is a home to be found there, I think.