love poem 1

smoggy today. it is march, but the world smells like autumn, like the cough of smoker gods, like the teeth of portals. in the morning, i bike over the fourth ring bridge and wish for a thaw. 

before you board your plane, i tell you to bring face masks, because my head is swimming with the stink of space heaters. then i laugh and marvel. how mundane. this time last year, we were too afraid to speak in anything but the profound. i send you theory. you reply with rumi: no strength but yours. soul of my soul of a hundred universes. this is when i tell my friends, i am in love, and my friends tell me, tell her. but i don’t tell you. instead, when i see you, i say, i’m not very good at this. it is the best kind of truth, because it is meant to spare you. 

you kiss me anyways.   

tonight, your plane will blink over russian airspace, because it is a chinese airline. it is the brightest thing, so i will see it easily. i will reach into the blue gauze of the sky and pull you down, matching birthmark pressed to matching birthmark. you were the one to notice them, twin petals curled on our thumbs. 

last autumn, a real autumn, i downed a bottle of plum wine and shouted cantonese karaoke at a chongqing sky. all of them love songs that my mother had loved. you were laughing, and i was on the verge of tears, because how would you ever know? how would i ever tell you?

you know the lyrics now. of course, i had confessed. of course, you had confessed right back. 

in the evening, i bike back over the fourth ring bridge and almost crash into a taxi. it is one of the many things that can go wrong before i see you again. that will leave one of us standing alone at the airport, dropping whatever is in our hands—roses, suitcase—to an earth that should carry us both. i choose not to worry. i will see you tomorrow. together in my apartment, we will turn on my space heater, and we will wait out the smoker gods. and i will tell you, and i will tell you, and i will tell you.

for asha, march 2025

naming the monster, as i turn 22

I’m in Zhangjiajie, I write. I’m here to understand how to live. I’m here to understand how to grieve. Research question: how may I continue living?

I am sitting in the roots of a big tree. It is the morning of my first day in Hunan, and the sky is a dark brooding blue. I’ve come here during the Tombsweeping Weekend, when everyone has journeyed home to tend to their dead. After I return to Beijing, I will listen to my friends’ stories of communing with deceased grandparents and parents, of what they heard as they cleaned their families’ graves. But right now, I am more alone than I have been in a year. There is no dead to tend to, but there is something to be grieved.

What do I have to grieve? I’m not sure. Everything, seems to be the answer. I have a difficult time vocalizing it. I don’t want to admit to how existential my grief has become, how I’ve spent the past year realizing that I’m always partially in grief, even if I can’t put my finger on what exactly I’m grieving. I’ve also realized that every form of grief is to be welcomed, and that grief may eventually show its true form, if I am patient and curious enough. That after I grieve, things become lighter.

How did I end up here? I walk myself through the facts. Things had reached a head in March, when I’d gone alone to Shanghai for a research trip. I’d ended up crying on the train back to Beijing. Something awful was coming loose in me, and while I may have named the causes for its unraveling (I met an uncanny number of ex-ballerinas in the galleries, I saw pictures of myself at age fourteen and had been repulsed at the sight of myself, my friends asked me to tell my life story and I ended up omitting my entire childhood), I’m also aware that the why of my grief is less important than the how. My body knows that it is time to grieve. I must do it, even if I don’t wish to, even if I don’t know why.

The last week had been the hardest of them all. Things had worsened when I’d returned to Beijing. My chest ached, as if filled with water. I passed my days in a stupor, reluctant to eat or talk, snapping at those who tried to pry conversation out of me. I cried erratically: in the yoga room at midnight. In my bedroom before breakfast. In the dining hall, between lunch and dinner, when I was sure no one would intrude. I chased my grief with the furtive delight of one who keeps pressing their bruises, watching as my flesh bloomed into odd bloody colors. I chased it all the way to its beginnings: back through college, high school, childhood. I unearthed pictures of myself from that time—ages fourteen and fifteen and sixteen—and I sat with my horror. There was something fascinatingly wrong with that girl. What about her was so wrong, such that the sight of her body filled me with nausea? Why couldn’t I meet her eyes?

I need to know the truth of what happened, I wrote in my journal. I’d begun journaling obsessively after returning from Shanghai, filling at least twenty pages every time I sat down at my desk. I need to know why I left home. I’ve been grieving home for a long time. My lack of home. My longing for home. My distrust of the homes that offer themselves to me. But there is a home I chose to leave, when I was sixteen, and I don’t think I can understand my grief without understanding that home, that first departure. It’s strange. I’m almost twenty-two. Why has it never occurred to me to look back at Bellevue? To ask myself, why did I leave? No—really—why did I leave? I might’ve brushed up against some answers. But I’ve never had the courage to accept them as truth.

So, I chase my grief to my last year in Bellevue. I begin again with the facts. They are simple: I began my undergraduate degree at age sixteen. I had enrolled in Stanford’s summer quarter as a high school sophomore, where I’d taken three entry-level courses in International Relations and English. I’d worked as a research assistant for a postgraduate fellow in the political science department. And it’d been the end of that summer—when I was sixteen, sitting in my dorm room—that I’d realized that this was the happiest I’d felt in years. That this might be a way out. I could go to college, I’d thought. And I could do it now.

In the summer of 2018, I wrote two-hundred pages of college application essays. I submitted them to forty-one colleges. Though I’d secretly hoped for a Stanford acceptance—it was my only reference point for what college might be—I would’ve accepted any offer. But when I tried to tell my best friends that I was graduating early, I could not speak. I would spend that entire year keeping my applications a secret. My choices had made perfect sense to me. Why bother telling anyone? Why burden someone else with such a secret? I imagined myself explaining to my friends why I needed to leave, detailing everything that was wrong with my situation, and I was filled with such panic that I’d immediately banished the thought from my mind. It was enough that I knew it was bad, even if I hadn’t yet grasped the full picture. What was important was that I had a way out: that after this year, I would never need to think about Bellevue again.

But my departure didn’t happen very cleanly. Over the next few months, I asked the same questions to each of my friends—Will you be okay without me? Do you think you’d still be the same person if we’d never met? What is my importance to you?—until one of my friends got scared and demanded to know whether I was suicidal. And I hadn’t known how to tell her that no, I was the exact opposite of suicidal: I wanted my life so badly, I wanted the life I knew I could have—and I would’ve given up anything for it. I would’ve ripped it from the earth with my own bloody hands. Even if I couldn’t articulate it then, I knew I was going to live. I would not stop until I finally lived.

Now, the horror of it threatens to drown me. A sixteen-year-old girl had cut off her entire support system in a harebrained plan to leave home. She had signed away her senior year—agreeing not to come back to the Bellevue School District, forfeiting any second chance at the college application process—because she’d thought her only option was to leave, and to leave now. She had lied to everyone she loved for a year. What would make a child do that?

I am not a child anymore. I haven’t been a child in a while. And my adulthood is marked by an increasing horror towards my younger self, who now feels so alien to me. I can no longer understand sixteen-year-old Ana. Her circumstances and her choices are utterly incomprehensible to me—and while this may be a good sign (I have moved on! I live in a healthy environment! I’ve become a well-adjusted adult! Yay!), it also comes with a nauseating dissonance. I’ve spent so much of my time in college defining a self opposite to my younger self. She is the one was hurt. I am the one who is whole, and normal, and good. She is the one who was alone. I am the one who is surrounded by friends, with parties to host and cool outfits to wear and academic conferences to attend.

Sometime after I turned nineteen, I started speaking of sixteen-year-old-Ana in the third-person, as if she were indeed an entirely different person. Those things happened to a different body, I tell an invisible audience, pleading my case to a faceless jury. No—really—it was an entirely different body. Look at the facts: this body has tattoos. That body underwent six hours of training every day. This body has a long wolf cut and cool outfits. That body had lost two-thirds of her hair, and had no control over what she wore. This body has a period—finally, she started bleeding normally when she was twenty-one. That body had no period. She’d been ordered to starve it away when she was thirteen. This body knows how to laugh with friends. That body never spent time with her friends. This body will never, ever be hit or struck again—I vowed it. That body had been beaten, and she did not know how to fight back. This body has just learned how to rest. That body only knew how to run.

But this dissonance can’t last. Now, fresh out of college, my future once again uncertain, I am closer to my teenage selves than I’ve ever been. I think about Bellevue, and for the first time in my life, I’m filled with a longing so powerful that I can hardly breathe. And I find myself regretting my choice to leave. Why, why, why in the world had I run? Why couldn’t I have stayed? Once, I imagined myself as a girl who had done just that: a girl who had stayed, smiling on the day of her senior prom, dressed in a black gown. A boyfriend on her arm. She would’ve attended the University of Washington, barely half an hour away from her parents’ house. She would’ve never left the United States, except to visit her family in China. In the week before college, she would’ve kept her long hair, instead of hacking it off with a pair of scissors. And she would’ve been a straight woman—because I could not bear to imagine her queer, a girl who had had the chance to learn about her queerness when she was in high school, who had found happiness in her queer identities and communities years before I had. A girl who had embraced herself so wholeheartedly that she’d never thought to think herself a monster.

The first time I imagined this girl, a day after I’d returned from Shanghai, I was so overwhelmed that I’d burst into tears. I curled onto my side on the floor, where I cried and cried, my sobs breaking from me like the keening of a wounded animal. I would give it all up to be her, I begged. Please, there’s nothing I wouldn’t give. Moscow. Shenzhen. Oxford. Berlin. Beijing. Stanford. San Francisco. My writing. Ballet. Chinatown. My friends. My accolades. Everyone who loves me. Everyone I love. My reputation as a hometown legend, whatever that is supposed to mean. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it. Give this life to someone else, and give me her life instead. I deserve her happiness. I deserve her innocence. I deserve at least that much. I’ve tried so, so hard to deserve that much.

Why did I leave home? The answer is breathtakingly simple: I was hurt.

Occasionally, a high school student emails me, asking how they might replicate what I did. I never know how to respond. Why, why, why in the world would you want this? I’d scream silently at them: students from Texas, California, New Jersey, who already have LinkedIns and CV’s. Don’t you know what this cost me? Don’t you know how monstrous I feel for what I’ve done? Stay in high school. Stay with your friends. Go get boba with them after school. Go to all your school dances. Go to your football games, even if your team sucks. Have a normal first romance—learn how to fall in love, learn how to have your heart broken. Waste time after school. Try on makeup. Try on personalities. Rebel against your parents. Eat whatever you want. Complain about your period. Drive around your hometown, and learn to love it. Drive around with your friends, and learn to love them. Graduate. Graduate with your friends. Celebrate your graduation. Learn how to say goodbye to your hometown. I never got to have these things. I will never, ever have these things.

But it always amazes me: the drive for what we think is better. The fight in us. It had burned in me throughout my childhood, when I’d naively thought that happiness and safety would come with a new school, a new state, and a new set of friends. That there would always be a way out—and more importantly, a way up. The only time I’d been suicidal—had actively wanted to and sought out ways to end my life—was when I was twenty, when I realized that this might not be true. I’d gone to therapy for the first time, and I’d walked away feeling so mangled and hopeless that I’d snuck a razor into the shower. My therapist had asked me about my childhood. To my great embarrassment, I’d only been able to respond with a stuttering series of I don’t know’s, rocking back and forth on the couch, as my chest had threatened to split in two. Isn’t it supposed to be over by now? I’d later raged, weeping with the humiliation of it. This pain. This grief. I went to college. I went to China. I went to Europe. How much further do I need to go? Haven’t I done enough? At what point does my life become mine? Why do I still have to spend my years—my free years, my good years, my own years—processing and unpacking and unlearning, reliving and reliving and reliving? How is this fair?! How much longer will this take?! What is the worth of surviving—of running—if this is all my life will be from now on?

It was the first time I’d confronted it: the awful, choking realization that my acceptance of a trauma would be a thousand times harder than my survival of it. That the act of healing might be the thing that broke me. I would have to relive everything that had happened, again and again, this time with the horrible knowledge of its wrongness. I would have to relive it, again and again, this time with the wearied, doglike terror of someone who had already endured it once. I would have to relive it, again and again, this time knowing that there would be no simple way out: no year-early college application, no study abroad, no research grants to foreign places. Just me, rocking back and forth on a therapist’s couch, or lying alone in my bedroom. I knew I would have to spend the next few years—and perhaps the rest of my life—doing this.

Do you see a future for yourself? my therapist had asked me. Tell me one where you are happy. Just a single one.

I burst into tears.

/

Zhangjiajie is the land of exiles. Two-thousand years ago, during the reign of Qin Shihuang, scholars had come here to hide their books. Dynasties’ worth of disgraced politicians have come here to hide, or else to die. Countless poets have made the mountains their muse, and countless more have come here for a glimpse of the clouds, imploring them for some wisdom. Now, the forests have been made into a national park. Search up Hunan, and you’ll find thousands of pictures of its sandstone pillars.

The forests are cold and quiet in the morning. The clouds have descended over the summits, and I imagine that they have gathered here to watch me. I do not return their gaze, but walk deeper into the woods, listening for a river. I know there is one nearby, and once I will find it, I will follow it to its end. I didn’t bring a very big water bottle, and I’d read somewhere that the water here is drinkable.

I hear a river. I walk towards it. As I walk, I try to think back. Under close examination, all my younger selves blur into a single thrashing entity. I would only begin to pick them apart after I turned twenty, narrating my childhood in halting, uncertain measures. The first time I’d confided in a friend: a rooftop in Berlin. The second time: a hotpot restaurant in Boston. The third time: beneath my bed in Kairos, curled up in a den of pillows and blankets. Only three times, I realize now. Only three times in my life have I tried to make sense of things—have felt safe enough to try and piece together a narrative—have spoken childhood into truth. And each time, it has been incomplete. I could only process a part of the whole: six months, or a year, or a single moment of hurt. I could never answer the question at the core of it: why did I leave home?

That is the compromise I have made with my life, and with my past: I don’t think about it too much. We leave each other alone. I trust the happiness that comes to me now. I build a life that is colorful and directionless and full of wonder. I gain weight, and I cut my hair, and I get tattoos. In return, my younger selves spare me of their judgement. They had been proud and angry. They had been taught to take pride in their self-destruction, to scorn people who did not do the same—people who were not bone-thin from exhaustion, people who had tattoos and unruly bodies, people who were joyful and lazy and who dared to rest. They would hate my pity towards them, but they would revel in my horror of them, because they loved knowing that they were exceptional enough to be the object of horror and fascination. They’d thought themselves above the understanding of mere mortals—and what have I become in the last few years, if not mortal? My younger selves would refuse the truth that I’ve come to know and grieve: not that they were in pain, because they’d always known themselves to be in pain, but that they shouldn’t have been in pain. And over the last few weeks, as I’ve forced myself closer and closer to my younger selves, I’ve lost myself in their loathing. Your tattoos are disgusting, my younger selves had sneered. Look at you, the shape of your arms and thighs. Your need to sleep and eat so much. Your need for friends, for company, for other people to hold you as you cry. Look at what you’ve become. Soft, and weak, and disgusting. They are a pack of beasts guarding their young: the closer I come, the longer I dare to look, the fiercer they bite and scratch. I try to ward them off, but it’s useless: my skin is soft.

I reach the river. The water is clear and blue. I crouch down at the riverbank and fill my bottle.

How may I continue living? I think, staring at the river. How may I continue living, when half of me knows the wrongness, and the other half refuses to see it for what it is? When accepting the wrongness means deconstructing everything my younger self had held dear, means rewriting the narrative she had built up in her head? Wouldn’t that mean destroying her? What gives me the right to destroy her? But—am I framing this in the wrong way? There must be more to her: I see her as something to be feared, a creature bent on self-destruction. But that can’t be all she was, right? She must have held other narratives. She must have, at the very least, been confused. She is the beast guarding the young, but she is also the young being guarded. What—who—is being guarded so fiercely? And why do they see me as a threat? Is it because I see myself as a threat—a destroyer—because I believe there must be an enemy and a hero, a thing to be destroyed?

/

Ana—

I recognize that there has been a lot of pain. I have spent the last six years recognizing it, and that’s strange to say, because I’m not sure whether that number is meant to feel large or small. I am about to turn 22. Even now, it feels impossible. Every year, on my birthday, I feel furtive, like I’m stealing time, and I wonder what you would think of me now. Every year, the conclusion is the same: you wouldn’t really like me, me who has conquered neither myself nor the world by adulthood. I’ve become your antithesis—I’ve betrayed you. Look—everyone has betrayed you, even your older self. She has tattoos and falls in love with women. She hasn’t danced for over a year. She’s muscular, and has a period, and has breasts, despite all your attempts to stop these things from happening. Did you know that the first time I grew out my toenails—let them spill out over the edge of my toes—I panicked? I hadn’t realized my body could do that. My feet had looked so weird to me—so alien—that I’d immediately pared it all down, then had refused to look at my feet for three days. Imagine how I felt about getting my period back. Growing breasts. Seeing new muscle.

So—I’ve betrayed you in many ways. And in perhaps the worst betrayal of them all, I’m scared of you. I saw a video of you—me—myself—walking, neck so long and thin, dressed in a camisole leotard. Body barely bones and so, so small—so childlike—and I could not accept that that body had been mine. Was still mine. I could not accept that you—me—had lived through it all. I had a panic attack. I thought I was going to throw up. That video kept looping, you walking endlessly down the hallway. Why, why, why on earth did a child go through that? Were you even a child? I can’t think of you as a child, because those things don’t happen to children. Those things shouldn’t happen to children. But you were not an adult, either, so what were you? Monster, is the immediate answer. That girl is a monster. You were vicious. You were vicious to the entire world, and to yourself.

Now, I’m bitter, and I’m angry. All that viciousness, and for what? So you could end up alone? So you could cut everyone off at sixteen? I keep returning to that memory now. I couldn’t bring myself to think about it in the last six years. I never really thought twice about my choice to leave, after I went to college. I thought it was a right and natural thing to do—an obvious thing to do—because no one had expressed their horror to me. No one had told me, stop! Why are you doing this? Why do you think this is your only choice? But what you did was not normal, wasn’t it? I know what a therapist would say—that you kept me alive, whatever—but I can’t even bring myself to appreciate that, because my mind is blank with horror. Because I am filled with rage, and grief, and I am sick and tired of it, and I wish more than anything that circumstances had been different. That I wouldn’t be left writing angsty autofictions—each one discussing how I coped with the mess without touching upon the mess itself, because I can never fictionalize your suffering, I can only write my way around your pain, and what use are my words if I am—you are—still hurting through it all? There is so much rage in me. I am so, so angry: at what happened to you. At how I’d never thought to grieve until now, when it is far too late. I didn’t even remember much of what happened until this year. Isn’t that wrong? That’s so, so wrong. You will never have a normal childhood. You will always be, in part, the girl who ran away from her hometown. And there is nothing I can do to save you, except to rage silently from years away, and to try not to fear you.

And god, I’m scared of you. I am scared of your destructiveness. I am scared of your judgement. I am scared of becoming like you again, should the world be cruel to me in the same way. In this fear of you, I can’t accept you. The very thought of touching you—of embracing you—repulses me. I can’t touch your bruised skin and bone-thin body. I can’t touch you, dressed in ballet clothes and reeking of hairspray. I can’t even look at you. I deleted that video from my laptop. I am sorry. I am trying. I really am.

—Ana

/

When I was seventeen, my body would freeze for several minutes at a time, and I would lie paralyzed in bed while my roommate did her homework. The terror of it—of a body that refused all commands—was so overwhelming that my mind would go blank.

Everything had fallen apart in my freshman year, a reality I’d tried to navigate by writing cheery blog post after cheery blog post. The escape I’d fantasized about had not come to pass: Stanford was brutal, and nothing I did ever seemed quite enough. I couldn’t bring myself to finish my essays, or to continue my research job. I couldn’t bring myself to engage in small talk, even with the people and professors who were nice to me. I couldn’t go to parties without panicking at the smell of alcohol. And I could barely sleep without waking up in a cold sweat, having dreamt of strange dark figures with knives for fingers, of being chased through endless ballet studios and backstage corridors, my entire world alight with the blue glow of a bathroom scale.

I would receive my PTSD and C-PTSD diagnoses when I was twenty. It was September, and Stanford was sticky with heat. I was about to start my senior year. Calmly, I’d torn up my therapist’s letter. I’d tossed the shreds into the trash. Then I sat very still, not daring to breathe, grief quivering in my chest. It was quiet. I’d moved to campus early to begin my honors theses, and my dorm room was bare. There was no one else in the building.

At this point, I was twenty. It’d been four years since I’d been sixteen. I had outlived every single force that had shaped me in childhood. And somehow, I was still alone.

Now I am almost twenty-two, I think wearily. I stop and peer at the mountainside. There seems to be a set of stairs carved into the stone, half-hidden with moss. I’m alone again.

I peer up through the canopy, squinting against the darkness. I can’t see the end of the stairs, but I begin to climb. My body, blessedly, becomes warmer. Let’s come back to the facts. What are the facts of your thought patterns? Here is one: I think I am monstrous for being alone. What, exactly, is monstrosity? What is my monstrosity? Why have I chosen to use that word, the word of childhood and nightmares and fantasy? Monstrosity is existential. It’s not a monster—a living, breathing creature who might be touched and tamed—it’s the essence of a monster, a horribly unalive and immutable thing. It is something that stands beyond words—it is the mess I write around, the years of my life that my fiction can never touch. It is the belief that I am corrupted, that there is a dark poisonous substance lining the inside of my skin, corrosive to all who come too close. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel monstrous—so perhaps this existentialism is a matter of time, and will therefore fade with time. Time I cannot control. I can control the unspeakability of it, though: I can choose to name the monstrosity, to approach it with curiosity instead of fear. To see the beasts, and to see what they are protecting, too.

Do you want to talk about this? my therapist had asked me, when I’d been twenty. And I’d looked away, because I did not want to talk about it. Don’t you know that there is power in naming things? I’d wanted to say. That there is a terrible magic in a name? Names give things teeth and claws. Names give them life and will. What if I name the monstrosity, and I realize it is far bigger than what I thought it’d be, far bigger than what I can control? I can’t name it. I can hardly look at it. At twenty, I was becoming aware of my limitations. My body tired much more easily. I needed to sleep longer and eat more than most of my classmates. I couldn’t even write as quickly as I had in high school—my brain felt slower, stripped of its sharp edges. Privately, I didn’t think I was in any state to fight or name a monstrosity—that even looking at it would be too much. I thought of my arsenal of unhinged inner children: the teenage me’s, who were all very big haters and believed themselves invincible, and I thought that they would be much better equipped to handle this.

Now, two years later, I think it is time to name the monstrosity. I think I might look it in the eye. So I stop—halfway up a flight of stairs, the trees still dark and dense above me—and I close my eyes. I look. For the first time in my life, it comes to me as a site: an endless cavern, with a high endless roof. Waters murmuring beneath me, black and viscous. I do not see a way out. I can barely see. The lake is very deep, and there are creatures inside. If I fall in, I will not come out. I am standing on a small rowboat, which shudders and moans. I dip my fingers beneath the surface, and I pull something monstrous from the depths: the thrashing limbs of a beast, its teethed organs convulsing in my bloodied hands. Is this the monstrosity? I wonder, clutching the monster even as it struggles against me. The creatures? The water? The cavern, which is somewhere in my body—which might be my body itself?

The rowboat does not go anywhere. The sails are limp, for there is no wind. I try to imagine a tunnel somewhere in the cavern—a source of light—but I feel so silly that I laugh. A light at the end of the tunnel? Really? It is impossible to imagine a light, or a tunnel, or even a shore—but it may be possible to imagine a wind. To imagine my sails filling—to imagine the rowboat being pushed somewhere, anywhere. That is reasonable. That I can do. The boat creaks wearily. It trudges through the darkness, and I am glad, even if it is only heading towards more darkness. I stand up, and I continue walking.

There are fewer trees at this altitude. There are fewer monkeys. There are fewer living beings who might offer me advice. I turn to the clouds instead, which snake moodily around the sandstone pillars. I’m named for you, I think. I am you. Tell me, how may I continue living?

On Tumblr, user @minotaurmutual posted, “forever and always insane about the fact that haunting means ‘heimsuchen’ in german which literally translates to ‘homeseeking.’ a haunting is a search for a home you can never return to.’ I think about this now, and I squint against the sun. “Are you a haunting?” I ask the clouds. “What do you haunt? Do you haunt the mountains?” My calligraphy master had told me that clouds come from the mountains—a statement I had not understood until I’d seen the clouds of Zhangjiajie, had witnessed their terrifying weight and majesty. Do we always haunt the thing we come from? Do I haunt my hometown? I certainly think I am haunting it now, hovering over a version of me who had stayed. I am a ghost bent on stealing her body and her life.

Hike Zhangjiajie on a cloudy day, someone had told me—I can’t remember who. Zhangjiajie is only itself when it has its clouds. In late afternoon, when the clouds clear, I will recognize the truth in their words: Zhangjiajie’s beauty lies in its own obstruction. I may only see so much of the mountains at one time, leaving the rest for guesswork. For the first few hours of my hike, an instinctive fear arose in me whenever I faced these clouds: what couldn’t I see? What if the clouds were hiding something awful, something monstrous? Sometimes, I could only see a few steps in front of me, whenever a cloud chose to descend over my path. I’d found myself at their mercy, inching along a cliffside that they’d made milky-white.

But clouds mark the transition between humidities, I would later realize, journaling beneath a cliff on Huangshizhai. They find homes in morph and in transition. They are morph and transition. They might be a haunting thing, but they are comfortable in the seams, and why should it be otherwise? Why must they be other? Why must they be an obstruction to sight—to the real thing to see, the mountains? Aren’t they real, too? I am still seeing—I am seeing them. Perhaps my refusal to name the monstrous is in itself a name. By refusing to look at the monstrous, I can begin to understand what I can’t look at. I have labeled it as unspeakable, and so I know that speaking would be the way to approach it. I have called it un-seeable, and so I know that seeing would be the way forward. There is sight in no-sight.

“Huh,” I say aloud. I bow to the clouds. “I did not know that. Thank you for teaching me.”

/

That night, when I return to my hostel, I write down everything: the sorrowful and profound, yes, but also the mundane and joyful. I got to see monkeys. Briefly—there were only two of them, swinging overhead—but I still got to see them. But I didn’t get to see any colorful birds, which is disappointing—perhaps I will tomorrow. And I did get to see the peaks of Yuanjiajie, after climbing all day. I got lost twice, because I kept following random stairs which led nowhere, and I was getting increasingly frustrated and angry (with myself and the mountains and how foolish I felt for coming here on a whim)—until all of a sudden, I reached the top. And I’d begun to cry, because it’d felt like such an impossibility, and because I was just so tired. I felt kinda childish, crying on the summit, but I couldn’t help it. And I think I was crying out of awe, too. Yuanjiajie was completely, utterly beautiful: I don’t think I’ve ever seen such beauty in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such true, sorrowful blue: I can’t even describe that color, the color of the waters here. The trees themselves are a bit bluish, a bit ghostly. This blue feels like an older blue, one that comes from a before, one that is the color of exiles and ghosts and forest. I think it is the oldest blue I have ever seen. I think it is the oldest color I have ever seen. And the clouds—I’ve never seen clouds like that. I’ve never been scared of clouds before—but I was scared of these clouds. I was scared of it all—perhaps because I was alone, lost in old forests and older waters. But it was a good fear. And it was beautiful: in the end, yes, but along the way, too. I learned some things from the clouds. I hope I will learn more tomorrow.

The next day, I awaken at dawn. I don a new set of clothes and braid my hair in silence. I pack my bag: journal, pen, water bottle, a knitted poncho that I’d bought from an auntie. Downstairs, the innkeeper has prepared a bowl of rice noodles, hot with peppers and sour with pickled vegetables. Two duck eggs on the side. I eat it all. Then I head back into the forest. The sandstone shimmers with the sun. The clouds have decided to leave.

/

Does writing help you process stuff? one of my friends had asked me when we were nineteen. It that why you write so much?

Yes, I’d told him. Well, kinda. I’ve romanticized much of my college experience via autofiction: namely, my junior and senior years, when I first began to explore my queerness. It’s no secret that my autofiction is my attempt to build a self through fiction, to set a narrative in stone. I’m far more concerned with how I’ve made a life for myself after I’d emerged from the mess, after I’d begun to ask myself what I wanted and to act on the answers, because those years are as precious as they are still-uncertain. But I’ve written relatively little about my life before age 19: my freshman year, interrupted by COVID, and my sophomore year, spent in Shenzhen. And I’ve written nothing about my life before college. Try as I might, I can’t bring myself to make fiction out of my childhood.

There are very real reasons for this. The first time I went into therapy, I realized that swaths of my memory were simply missing: I couldn’t recall much of what happened between ages fourteen and seventeen. Whenever I begin to write about it, I think—someone might see. Someone might be peering over my shoulder, staring in horror at my laptop—and my hands can’t move.

My writing has sometimes led me astray, amplifying the dissonance in my mind, making me grieve things that weren’t mine to grieve. I’m very scornful of the teen writing and college admission complexes: complexes which encourage teenagers from marginalized backgrounds to sell their pain as trauma porn, and which relegate us to specific narratives of suffering. I’ve stayed with a genre that I’ve enjoyed since childhood: fantasy. Despite the obvious limitations and dangers of translating real issues into metaphor, I still find it a genre in which I can explore questions of many different scales, with a great degree of flexibility and comfort.

But my adolescence still worked its way into my more recent work. In August of 2022, when I submitted a draft of my book for evaluation, I’d been surprised by my mentor’s response. “This book of how we may recover after surviving great pain,” she’d said. “It’s brave of you to write this. I’m excited to see where it goes.”

What in the world are you talking about? I remembered thinking, frowning at her comments. No—this book is about the dangers of tech-driven modernity. It’s about necropolitics and geopolitics and everything-politics. Where does ‘surviving great pain’ come into the equation?

Of course, there were passages like this:

She wanted to tell her everything, then: how the girl she loved didn’t love her back. How she didn’t know what to do with this mess of a heart, now that it had been dragged into the light. How half of her still wanted to leap out of the car and run far away—to the end of the world, or maybe even further, because part of her knew that no place would ever be far enough. How she wanted to love—I want a first love, I want a first love so badly—why couldn’t I have a first love? How she suspected it was too late for her to find magic and love and all that silly stuff—how she really didn’t need it, not logically—but she wanted it anyways, she wanted it so badly, she would do anything for it—bloody her hands and tear apart the entire world for a love where she could rest without fear—a love where she would never ever again be hurt—a love that was good and hers—but maybe she didn’t want love, she just wanted redemption, even though she didn’t really need that, either—maybe all she wanted was to rest—to just rest—god, I am so tired—I am so, so tired—

that I’d written before I’d planned any of the major plot beats of the book, and which I now recognize as the manifestation of things I’d been unable to confront in real life. That is what fantasy and fiction are to me: Medusa in a bronze mirror. A holding pattern, a repository of things I cannot process now, but will bring myself to face later. And as I’ve gotten better at confronting myself, I’ve leaned less on fictionalization. I haven’t touched my book in almost a year, and have instead been journaling my way back through my adolescence, chronicling the things that happened in Bellevue. It is bitter work. Sometimes, I think I should’ve chosen—or been born with—a different medium of art, a less cutting means of reflection. Words aren’t very abstract. There’s not a lot of room to maneuver. I write—I was hurt. I was hurt so badly that I ran away from home—and the condemnation is final. The horror is absolute.

/

Today, the mountains are friendlier to me. I follow my trail to Huangshizhai—this one has guideposts and maps—and climb up until I reach the Star-Picking Summit. I come to an empty observation platform, where I take off my backpack to use as a pillow. I lie down, curled on my side so that I may see the valley below. Birds circle their way around the cliffs. Trees grow at impossible angles from the mountainsides. Some of them are in bloom: red pink white amidst the green. How do you continue to live? I wonder, marveling at the flowers. Why did you decide to live, a seed facing an impossible cliff? I wait for a response—but there is nothing. Maybe I am listening in the wrong language. If the trees know and speak in a language, if they even have a language, it is certainly none of the ones I know. Any attempt to learn from them, and then to convey what I have learned, would be an act of translation. I start thinking of translation theory. I think of my friends who work in translation. I wonder what they’d say.

And all of a sudden, my longing spills into grief, and then into anger. Stop, I snap at myself. Stop thinking of translation theories, and languages, and useless philosophies. Why are you always escaping into the abstract? You came here to grieve, not to wax poetic. The trees aren’t trying to teach you abstractions. They don’t run—they can’t. You want to learn from them? Sit down. Stay. Face your wound. Your pretty words won’t make it any easier. Your words have already failed you: you left Beijing for Zhangjiajie because you had written yourself into a dead-end. Because you panicked, once you realized that language is only an approximation—that it is neither the pain nor the salve, but a road that curves around them both. Let go of your words, your dearest and most familiar weapons. Hear them clatter like knives as they fall from your hands. You are in search of something beyond yourself and your words. What have you found? Clouds. Old blue. Tired feet. No words. Let them go.

I take a breath, I empty my mind. Finally, when I am ready, I face my wound. Take each memory, one by one. Hold each one in silence. Refuse adornment or explanation. Refuse all logic. See it for what it was: something that came without reason. Something that cannot be altered, not even by words.

The rowboat shatters beneath me. Dark waters rise up, coiling warm and viscous in my lungs. I drown in silence.

/

That night, I write: I finally saw the monkeys. I think I saw a family, or maybe several. I saw them after I fell asleep on Star-Picking Summit—I was exhausted from the hike, and from my meditation, during which I relived many things for the first time, without romanticization or justification. It was grotesque work. I can’t really write about it. I’ll write about the monkeys instead. When I woke up, there were seven or eight monkeys around me. I watched them for hours while they groomed each other. I was too numb and tired to move. I might’ve been crying, but I can’t really remember. And it was really calming to watch the monkeys. Their instinct for care: when they find themselves doing nothing, they walk towards each other and begin to groom. They do it with a care and insistence that feels like human fussiness. I saw a mother swoop down and scoop a baby to her chest—faster than the blink of an eye—and that instinct to protect was so beautiful, I almost cried.

I felt like an intruder. I think I’ve spent much of my adolescence feeling that way—an outsider watching monkeys groom each other. I could not understand it, the concept of hanging out with friends after school, the idea that we could spend time around each other simply because we wanted to. Even in college, that was the strangest thing to me: friends. I learned how to be a friend only in college. They, in turn, taught me to live.

I ask, how may I continue living? And I think the question is wrong. Maybe it should be, how may we continue living? There was no way for me to live without other people. I see this in the trees, and the monkeys, and the birds. Honestly, when I think about it—who among my friends has ever turned away from me, when I decided to open up to them? Everyone has trusted me. Everyone has offered me kindness. I am the last person to accept myself. I am the only person to call myself monstrous. Even now, it lingers like disease. Maybe I’ll learn to let go of it tomorrow. I do have one day left in Zhangjiajie.

Before I go to bed—I want to talk about this tree I saw. It grew at such a strange angle out of the cliffside, bent at a bunch of ninety-degree angles. All of the trees here grow at such angles, under such impossible conditions. It’s almost ridiculous, how impossible it is. Do you think they know how impossible it is? Do you think they know how much of a miracle they are to me? Or do they just grow?

I set down my pen and close my eyes. I’m in a different hostel, this one closer to Tianmen Mountain. I’ve left the forest for the town of Wulingyuan, and so the night is filled with the honking of car horns and the shouting of pedestrians. The innkeeper made me duck eggs and bamboo shoots for dinner, and a pot of apple tea for altitude sickness. I had a nice conversation with her—about our families, about what I’m doing alone in Zhangjiajie—and we shared a laugh over the monkeys. I’m only here for one night. Tomorrow, I leave for Beijing. But there is still more to learn, I think. I need more time—more time to see myself—more time to see past my monstrosity. I know I can. “Monstrosity” is just a word, after all, the first one I assigned to myself when I began to think. But my past happened without words. The narration only came later. So there must be a way to live without thinking myself monstrous—I just don’t know how. I need more time.

But I do not have more time. The morning comes. And, for the last time, I head to the mountains. It’s a slow and painful hike: my feet hurt, and my lungs ache. Years ago, a friend had told me that altitude sickness will affect me more than most people. You’re an athlete, he’d said, so you have a higher concentration of oxygen in your blood. It’ll be more difficult for you to adjust to environments with thinner air. You can’t be overconfident. I’d brushed off his words when I’d first heard them. But by early afternoon, I am so dizzy that I have to give up on my mission of circling the mountaintop. I lie down beneath the trees, shielding my face from the sun, and try my hardest to breathe as birds flutter and squawk overhead. You can leave, I tell myself. You can return to the hostel and go straight to the airport. No one is making you stay. You’ve already learned so much. You have the rest of your life to heal.

But a stronger, fiercer voice: no! You’ve come all this way! Why leave, when you know you are still dissatisfied, when there is still something tattered and aching inside you? You haven’t answered your question. Why would you leave without answering your question? You have been given this moment to grieve. Who knows when you will next be able to undertake something like this? The next time your heart will be so open?

I count down from one-hundred, count down again. The dizziness passes. When I’m steady enough to sit up, I make myself drink and eat something. Then I trace a path to the temple of Guanyin Bodhisettva, the goddess of compassion. The temple is half an hour of hiking, mostly on flat ground. I begin to walk, one hand gripping the railing. My left foot hurts. An old wound. I taste blood. I’m weak, I think—not with derision, nor with surprise. I’m weaker than I’ve been in weeks, months, maybe even years. I can’t be firm with myself when I am tired, so images slip through the cracks of my mind. I see the girl who had stayed in Bellevue. Black prom dress, boyfriend, long straight hair. Friends. Boba after school. Bright pretty smile. I’d been overwhelmed with grief when I’d first conjured her. But now, I am too weary to muster anything beyond a nod of acknowledgement. Hello, I think. Hello, not-me. You are not me. I know there is beauty in your life. I know I was jealous of it. But look: there has been beauty in my life, too. I stop, gazing out over Tianmen Mountain. I am standing in a sea of clouds. The sky is a brilliant, blinding blue. I can’t see the ground. Like pain, the beauty has come without reason or precedence. But it has come. It has come in the last two years, when I could begin to call my life my own. Yes, two years are brief. They are tragically brief, next to the rest of my life. But they still matter. They matter, right?

That is what I have learned to tell myself when I sink into grief and wish to pull myself out. I say, the last two years do matter. The last two years do matter. I repeat it like a mantra: the last two years do matter. The last two years do matter. I recite the names of everyone I love (the last two years do matter), of all the places I’ve called home (the last two years do matter). I summon the joy of it (the last two years do matter). The wind and hills of San Francisco (the last two years do matter), the hutongs of Beijing (the last two years do matter), the lush green of Stanford (the last two years do matter), the mountains of Shenzhen (the last two years do matter), the graffiti and street art of Berlin (the last two years do matter), the golden glow of Oxford’s cobblestones (the last two years do matter). The laughter of my friends. Their forgiveness and compassion, when I could not give it to myself. Eight courses made for a house of fifty. A thrift shop in Berkeley. The weight of a girl’s hand in mine, her palm like a bird about to take flight. There has been so much beauty in my life. Has there been as much beauty as there has been sorrow? Is the beauty an apology for the pain—and is it an adequate one? I’m not sure. I don’t think I can bear to know.

At sunset, I arrive at the Buddhist temple on Tianmen Mountain. Save for a few monks, I am the only one there. I stop outside the main gates, take a deep breath, ready myself for prayer. These days, before I enter a space of worship, I ask myself, why am I here? Almost always, the answer is the same: I wish for my compassion. I wish to recommit myself to it.

Inside the temple, I find a statue of Guanyin, light incense, and bow three times. I ask her to protect everyone I love, going through a list of names so long that I can’t make heads or tails of its order. I ask her to help me keep my heart open. In the days before I left for Zhangjiajie, I’d begun to snap at those closest to me, too filled with resentment to hold an open conversation. And then I ask her the same question I’ve asked everyone else: how may I continue living? I have some answers, but would it be selfish to ask for more? Please tell me, Guanyin. I have climbed for days and days. I have climbed for years and years. I am tired. I can no longer deny my exhaustion.

Guanyin is silent. I open my eyes. My heart does not feel lighter, and I’m surprised. It is the first time in over a year that prayer has not been able to clear my mind. I wander outside. I explore the rest of the temples. I bow to each of the Buddhas. The sky is a clear, rich blue: soon, before it gets too dark, I will need to head down the mountain. I will need to leave Zhangjiajie. Is this it? I wonder. Perhaps this is all I will carry back. Perhaps I must wait to learn more. Perhaps I am not yet ready to learn more. Perhaps I will need to wait a little longer, as unbearable as it seems.

Finally, when there is nowhere else to go, I stop beneath a magnolia tree. My legs crumple beneath me, and I collapse against the trunk. I watch the sky. I watch the birds. And then I begin to cry: first in small weeping stutters, and then in big ugly wails, my chest heaving with exhaustion and grief. I am too tired to put words to my sadness, to pose a question to the trees. I cry without abandon, barely able to breathe for the force of it. I cry like a child. I cry for the child I might’ve been, the child I will never be. I cry for the child I am trying so desperately to be right now. I cry for the life I’ve assembled for myself, a life that still trembles beneath my feet, like a building made of spare parts. I cry for the horror of it, for the dark waters and their creatures, which I could only just begin to look at, six years after I left home, a decade after I first stepped onto that rowboat in the dark. I cry for the beasts that have no choice but to fight, and for the young that they guard. I cry for the unfairness of it, for all my failed, useless bargaining. I cry for how weak I have become, stripped of even my words, a final sacrifice on some strange god’s altar. I cry for the irrevocability of my life, for choices that had never been mine, for how it is too late, too late, too late. I cry until the sun dips down the horizon, until the taste of blood floods my mouth. I cry until I’m immobile, my face pressed against the dirt-filled crevices of the tree’s trunk. There I lay, too stunned to move.

I was hurt. I left home because I was hurt. Nothing will ever change that.

The realization—the finality of it—clears the breath from my lungs. Evening bells toll above me. Their echoes are tidal in the empty temple. Birds take flight. I realize I am staring at a cut in the trunk. I can see four or five rings in the wood. When I’m steady enough to move, I raise a hand to the cut. Slowly, I trace each ring. How old are you? I ask the tree. My thoughts ring hollow. How do you live, and how do you grieve? How have you continued living despite it all?

The tree does not respond. I keep tracing the rings. And I imagine my younger selves: fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and seventeen. Scrawny bodies. Wary eyes. They circle me—but they do not attack. They know I’m no longer a threat, I think numbly. I’m not much of a threat to anyone. Not anymore. I raise my head, and I meet their gaze. My younger selves did not think too much about the trees. About flowers. About love. They would not be lying here now, on the summit of a strange mountain, their sunburned cheeks stinging from tears. They would not have run so far—alone for their entire journey—for the hope of something better.

Or, I think, would they?

I had lived alone in Russia when I was fourteen. I had applied and enrolled in college when I was sixteen. Am I not doing the exact same thing now, determinedly climbing the slopes of a foreign land, seeking for both the answers and the questions? I haven’t changed, I think, and I laugh unexpectedly. I have always been me.

I have grieved my younger selves as if they’d died. As if they had never gotten to grow up. But that is wrong, isn’t it?

You did get to grow up, I think. You grew up into me. I am the same as you. The shock of the realization is as seismic as cold water. This body is the same body that had lived through it all. This body had lived through it all. This body had lived despite it all. I am the future of my younger self—I am now inevitable to her. She would scorn me: we have spent years rejecting each other in equal measure, alien and unspeakable to the other. But that may change, I realize. I don’t dare breathe, for fear of disrupting my realization, which glows like an ember in my chest. I can choose to extend a hand to you. I can do it even if you can’t return the gesture. Even if you can’t imagine a future, I am here. And I will wait for you, as patient as this tree.

I continue tracing the rings of the magnolia. My tears sharpen my vision, so that I can see every crack, every seam, every insect that wanders over the wood. You are me, I think to my younger selves. But you are not all of me. You are a ring, but you are not the entirety of the trunk. I am the entirety of the trunk, and the branches, and the flowers too. And I begin, finally, to recognize the ways in which I am the same as her. The same dogged determination, guided by a volatile idealism. The same stubborn conviction, the same competitiveness. The same short temper, the same desire to know, the same inclination toward the written word. The same bravery. Some of my friends have called me kind, and I like to think I was always like that, too, except I can’t be sure. But I am sure that I’ve always tried to live with grace and humor. That I have always tried, as hard as I could, to be good. Maybe I was never monstrous—or maybe, I was the same monster all along. And that might be enough.

I begin to cry again. These are different tears: euphoric with awe, with deep rapture and gratitude for my life. You survived, I think. You survived, you survived, you survived. You came here, hauling all of us up this mountain—you have grown up messily, you have grown up in such odd aching ways—but you have grown up, and you are here. You are here, you are here, you are here. I close myself around you, a tree with its rings. I close myself around each of you, ring by ring by ring. I see you, all of you: I see images of you that only a week prior, I could not bear to hold in my mind. You in high school. You in a ballet studio. You in college. You with long hair. You with short hair. You with thin hair. You wearing only ballet clothes. You wearing sweatpants and sweatshirts. You trying on clothes that might be fashionable, building your own wardrobe for the first time as a college freshman. You, a child. You were a child. You were just a child. Your name was Ana. Your name is still Ana. I was never meant to destroy you. I was meant to see you, and to hold you. I can see you now, and I do not look away.

I hold myself, and I cry with gratitude. I thank everything, over and over again: the temple, Guanyin, the magnolia tree. My younger selves, each of them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I am sorry. I am sorry for the last six years, in which I was unable to look. I am looking now. I am looking as hard as I can. And I’ve found you. And I see you. And you are beautiful.

/

I head down the mountain, and my chest is light. I am still weak, but my breathing has become easier. I take in big lungfuls of air, savoring the sweetness of each breath. I had come to Zhangjiajie with something: dark waters, a rowboat, things to be grieved. I do not think I have lost any of these things. I do think I have learned to carry them in new ways, such that they are easier on my back.

Finally, I come to the river. I am back among the trees, and I am filled with relief: that I am the smallest thing again, close to the roots. I did not like walking between the summits, so close to sky and sun. My lungs had ached with the height, and my skin had burned from exposure. Had I known the pain of it, I would not have climbed at all, not even for the view. I would’ve stayed with the river. I would’ve kept my head bowed to the trees. But it is too late to choose differently. And I am here now, am I not? That must count for something. That might count for everything.

When I dip my hands in the river and cleanse my sunburned face, the waters are clear and sweet. When I collapse in the roots of a great tree and curl up to sleep, the canopy murmurs like a mother. And I think, marveling, they have never asked for permission to live. The trees. The river. The monkeys, and the birds, and the flowers. The rocks around me and the cliffs above me. The clouds. Even my younger selves—my brave and raging selves—they did not wait for permission to live. I ask the world, how may I continue living? And it tells me, mu. Unask the question, for its very framework is incorrect: a Buddhist concept that I learned five years ago and am only now beginning to understand. We do not need permission to live. We never have. We grow like the trees: at odd angles, on impossible heights. We live, and we continue to live. The last two years were mine—and so were the rest. This was my life. This has always been my life.

I will rest at this river, beneath these trees, until night falls. Then I will return to Beijing, and I will turn twenty-two.

All these years, I have never needed permission to live. I will not ask permission in the next year, either.

/

Ana—

Today I’m 22! I’m at the Summer Palace, where I’ve found a place between some rocks to journal. The lake is quite beautiful—the waters gold and blue, the willows bright babyish green, the flowers drooping from their branches as if they were fruit. I am wearing a white dress and a black coat (I always wear white or black to the temples and on important days—I don’t know why). I was here three years ago, in 2021, when I was 18. I’d been very determined to walk all the way around the lake, but I’d failed—I hadn’t realized that I needed to take a boat across part of the way. What was I doing in Beijing? One research project or another, most likely. Anyways—I didn’t make it all the way around the lake this time, either. I wasn’t trying to. I have prayed at Guanyin’s statue, though, which I did not do at 18. I thanked her for the lessons she gave me at Zhangjiajie, when I was last at a temple of hers. I’d been so altitude-sick and delirious then. I can say that it’s very poetic, a transformation of a mind coming with an upheaval of the body, but the real lesson to be learned is that I need to hike more carefully. I hope you are not so reckless anymore.

I have one page left in this journal. Before I go, I want to ask you: will we be okay? I looked at my journal entries from last year, from when I was about to turn 21, and I was a bit of a disaster. No time for self-reflection—much time for drinking and crying (I even went to rehearsals drunk)—though I remember I’d felt extremely sexy. Things have slowed down a bit since then. I am a calmer person. I am a softer person. I don’t drink, unless it is at the bar owned by my friend Eugene, who makes cocktails into art. I laugh very easily—at the world, at myself—because I am easily delighted. I have met kind teachers in the visual arts, though I’m still not very good—I’ve been embracing beginnership, though, and it’s been surprising and wonderful at every turn. I have found a compassion I did not know lived within me, and I have learned to see the trees and flowers with great gratitude. I walk much more slowly. And most recently, I’ve written pages upon pages upon pages—I’ve spent my entire birthday writing, in between the celebrations that my friends have organized for me—letters to my loved ones, letters to myself, a long rambling blog post (it’s becoming a bit insufferable), a bit of my book. I’d promised myself I’d let myself write whatever I wanted to write on my birthday. No thesis or essays. It’s been a great gift. I think I’ll make it a tradition. If you are reading this on your birthday—remember to write whatever you want. That is my gift to you.

The question I asked—will we be okay?—I don’t want you to answer in terms of career, or money, or whatever success. I want you to tell me that you have continued holding me—that you have continued holding all of us. Our younger selves. I know I might seem strange to you. Monstrous, even. I am here to tell you that I am not a monster. Our younger selves are not. You are not, too, just in case you’ve slipped back into thinking that way. For now, I’ve learned to hold all our selves very gently and to tend to them as a mother does. I hope you will do the same. And that if you can’t, for whatever reason, you will come again to a point where you can. Things come and go, after all. I’m under no illusions that I’ll stay like this forever. That life will always be so good. That I will always feel so certain, and so happy. That I will always feel so beautiful—because I do feel beautiful right now, more beautiful than I have ever been. I’m not so foolish to think that these things are forever. After all, I know you—us—as people who have always wanted more. Restless to our bones. But let me tell you—on this day, I am utterly at peace. I want for nothing, and so I love everything.

—Ana

Stanford, Senior Year

Stanford is a terrible place to spend autumn. It’s too hot; it’s too dry; the leaves fall before they can change color. The most painful seasons are the ones that come without their furbishing, but this is especially true for autumn, which slides into a constant reminder of death and decay without some sort of foliage-based/pumpkin-flavored fanfare. And Stanford, despite all its summertime glory, has nothing to show for its autumns.

But even in years past, when I spent my autumns in my appropriately adorned hometown of Seattle, I still felt uneasy. August and September have always been marked with the stresses of a new school year, with a quickening of pace that stands in harsh contrast to the shortening days and the natural cycles of hibernation adopted by most other creatures.

But this autumn feels very different. After leaving Berlin, I spent only a week at home before coming to campus for the Bing Honors College, a three-week intensive before the start of fall quarter. The Stanford I returned to was largely deserted. I came to terms with a campus I’d once taken great measures to avoid (including biking to overpriced coffee shops in Palo Alto on the daily), and I instead began to enjoy all its proffered lushness. I realized that the pressure that I’d anticipated from September wasn’t going to come: honors college was spent writing lazily on various balconies, wandering through the stacks of Green Library, and chatting with my mentors about their recent reads. Fall quarter began at the end of September, and I came into it with twenty completed pages of one thesis, and two-hundred completed pages of the other.

Autumn is a time of slowing, and my pace of life has become slower, too. The only reading/writing classes I have are for my theses, and I get to dictate the pace and content of my syllabi. I’m taking two science classes to fulfill graduation requirements (geochemistry and planetary health), and I’m entering my last year with Cardinal Ballet Company. Ballet feels slower, too. I’ve settled comfortably into the role of senior-on-the-verge-of-retirement-and-really-can’t-bring-herself-to-care-about-her-hair-and-clothes, and my realization that I no longer love the art form has helped me create a more sustainable way of practicing it.

This change of pace is very nice. I spent my spring and summer running from country to country, chasing whimsy (and women). In Oxford and Berlin, everything and everyone became my teacher; at times, it seemed that revelations lurked around every corner, eager and ready to deal me existential right-hooks. Even in Berlin, when I worked full-time at a think tank and spent most of my free time hunched over grad school applications and thesis work, I was restless. I took trains to Switzerland and Amsterdam; I hiked an Alp; I found myself on the streets of East Berlin at 3 AM, clinging to a stranger’s back as she biked me through the city. I am no stranger to hedonism—in the fall quarter of my junior year, fresh out of an abusive relationship, I spent every weekend hooking up with strangers at Row parties—but somehow, my time in Germany carried none of the self-destructiveness for which my hedonism had been a vessel. I had figured out how to be porous with the world without letting it hurt me, to carry wonder through everything I saw. And I have Oxford to thank for that. It was a city that met my every violence with gentleness, and which led me into a spring and summer defined by wandering and curiosity.

I’ve told all my friends: if Oxford showed me all that I could be and all that I could have, Berlin showed me all the beauty in not having anything at all, in passing through the world and letting the world pass through me, in emerging dispossessed and fulfilled from my travels. I spent much of junior year concerned with abundance (do I have this? How much of this do I have?), but what I treasure now is less a matter of possession than one of stability. This is embodied in how I live: the spaces I occupy and the ways in which I occupy them have changed radically. While I loved my old room in Ng House, it was very cluttered by the end of winter quarter, crammed full of knick-knacks from SF Chinatown and free campus events and thrift shops. Now, in my co-op, I have barely any decorations. My shelves are still half-empty, but the negative space is comforting. Living in a co-op has also brought me so much closer to those who cook and clean with me—and it’s a house. It is so comforting to have a living room and a kitchen.

Autumn is a time of turning inwards for safety and kinship, of putting down roots and settling into place. Things, somehow, feel right. I’m not starting any new projects, and I seldom travel outside my circuit of co-op/studio/classroom.

On the note of projects, here are (at long last) descriptions of my theses:

• Child 1 with the International Relations department: an original survey study of Chinese American sentiment towards Chinese history, specifically Japanese atrocities committed during WWII—I noticed that Chinese Americans seem to be angrier about these atrocities than their mainland Chinese counterparts, and I’m trying to learn why. I’m really interested in understanding how diaspora constructs historiographies of their homelands, and this thesis brings together my background in international relations with my longtime (but often disregarded) love affair with diaspora studies. But because this thesis draws from 234123124 different literatures, I’ve been cycling through the rabbit holes of French philosophy, Chinese political thought, and diaspora theory at a dizzying pace—it’s been a challenge to figure out how to synthesize everything I’m reading.

• Child 2 with the Honors in the Arts program: a fantasy novel! It’s based off my year in Shenzhen, examines consumerism/historical memory/nationalism through the metaphor of ghosts, and proposes queerness as a solution to everything. While at Oxford, I received a grant from Magdalen College for my writing, and I made good use of it during my summer.

• Child 3(?): I dropped into an urban studies class in Week 1, and I was immediately fascinated by the use of art/aesthetic to project power and identity over a population. I’m working on some independent research on Shenzhen’s government-funded creator spaces (think the OCT-Loft), and how they co-opt the aesthetics of grassroots artists’ districts in Beijing and Shanghai. This will definitely constitute a substantial research project when I have more time on my hands.

I’m looking into grad schools right now, and I’m hoping to do one or two Master’s before I apply for a PhD—I’m not sure where I’d want to go and who I’d want to work with for a PhD, so I’ll spend the next few years narrowing down my research interests (and hopefully spending more time in China, given how my stay in 2021 was chaotic and didn’t allow much room for me to think about it all—there’s a reason why I’m writing about it through a fantasy novel, and not a thesis). We’ll see where the future goes! For now, the present is good.

Oxford, Junior Year

I suppose it’s time to write about Oxford—which sounds a little ironic, because I’ve been doing nothing but writing since touching down at London Heathrow. It’s just been very hard to collect my thoughts about spring quarter on Punderings, because without the benefit of retrospect, there seemed to be no linear narrative to spring quarter.  

Oxford felt less like a physical location than a happening: I know that when I reminisce, it won’t just be about the glow of the lamplight on the cobblestones after a midnight rain, or the vaulted dome of the Radcliffe Camera, or an oar cutting into a river made blue with dawn. It’ll be about the continuous revelations and confrontations with myself. Oxford was a time of the hardest truths and the gentlest comforts. I started therapy, came out to my mother, set boundaries with my family. I cried and cried and cried, for all sorts of reasons. What became of the rawness of it all was a startling growth of myself into a softer, more sincere person. A person who learned how to make a home for herself and in herself, who could anchor her body to more than just its fears, and whose first instinct was no longer to flee. 

Oxford was a time of limitlessness. I’d unknowingly gone through much of my life believing that it was too late: too late for me to choose or experience a path outside the confines of high achievement and dance, too late for me to have a good romance after a comically terrible romantic history, too late for me to define a self separate from traumas and hurts and wounds. All of this was proven wrong. For the first time in a decade, I took an intentional break from ballet and joined the Magdalen College Boat Crew (my fat ass broke a boat during our last race in the Oriel Regattas, but that’s a story for another time), spending my mornings on the green skein of the river. I took a class on political theory, and the vocabulary I gained from it enabled me to write about gender violence for the first time since surviving sexual assault in 2018. I started therapy, and after breaking down into tears when my therapist asked me about my relationship to myself, I slowly began to dismantle my belief that there was something inherently wrong about me, a process reaffirmed by a romantic relationship that was brief but ever so gentle and good. I stopped performing my personality to compensate for how invisible I’d felt in my own life before 2022, and suddenly, all my relationships felt imbued with magic and meaning. I felt so present, guided to the edge of myself by the sheer brilliance and love of the people around me, and then past those edges into personalities and pursuits I could’ve never imagined myself undertaking a mere quarter ago.

I was no longer being tossed every which way by the world and its expectations—at Oxford, for the first time, I took a step back and constructed a life on my own terms, with an agency that was both bewildering and beautiful. The experiences of my pre-Oxford life, including my survival instincts and coping mechanisms, were no longer adequate frameworks or tools with which I could approach my Oxford life. Nothing—not even my year in Shenzhen, which felt less like a revelationary new way of living than a linear progression of the standard Asian American narrative (the Prolonged Return to Homeland, And Its Necessary Dissonances and Disillusions)—could’ve prepared me for how thoroughly I stepped out of my preordained life. I felt unmoored to all but my dearest and most instinctive pursuit: writing. 

And words flowed from me. In terms of sheer word count, only my freshman winter—when I deluded myself into thinking I needed to produce at least ten-thousand words per day—could compare. I wrote about everything: flowery descriptions of campus, unsparing appraisals of my Stanford House and Magdalen classmates, my own wandering and contradictory thoughts regarding therapy sessions and romance and the future. I spent hours on the second-floor balcony of RadCam, hammering away at my gay novel beneath the stern gaze of Johannes Radcliffe. I saw my tutorial papers clearly before they took form, my arguments and wordplay bending to my whim with an ease I’d struggled to find at Stanford.

During my last weekend at Oxford, I bought three notebooks at Scriptum, a stationary store that’d become my post-RadCam-study-session haunt, and had been surprised when the cashier took out the gift-wrap. “Those are all for me,” I said. And then, more smugly, “I’ll probably finish them by the end of the summer.” It was the kind of brag to which I’d wanted so badly to lay claim when I was younger. I’ve always known what it felt like to be carried away by my words, to be compelled to write—but this was the first time I took control of that compulsion, channeled all my creative energy into challenging myself and my world through the written word. Not a single page of my journals was wasted—everything brought me something new. I felt like I was burning, blazing, with intent, despite the seeming directionlessness of living such a different life at Oxford.

I was trying to get to the bottom of myself, and I soon realized that this search was the bottom of myself. I entertained the idea of calling this search my soul: one’s soul is one’s search for themselves, including the evidence and methods of that search. This definition is still a work in progress, especially as I’ve been playing around with another concept: 混, the Chinese character used in “primordial chaos,” “anarchy,” and “mess.” 混 implies a deep unknowability at both the personal and existential levels, a certain unformedness that can’t be shaped into a personality, chain of events, or linear narrative—and while it stands in opposition to my definition of a soul, it is also part of us (and a part of myself that my self-curating and controlling tendencies were loathe to accept). The oldest Chinese texts do claim that a person’s soul has two parts (hun and po), though, so maybe my idea isn’t entirely unfounded: the search to know oneself and the utter unknowability of the self are two most basic qualities of the human soul, and they sustain each other. If my time at Oxford brought me closer to both my search and my unknowability, it brought me closer to my soul. 

My newfound agency extended beyond my creative writing and to my academic pursuits. In true ADHD fashion, I took full charge of my tutorial. My tutor, Dr. Nie, gave me free rein over what to study and what to write, and in the name of interdisciplinary studies, I bounced through a dizzying array of subjects: Chiang Kai-shek’s narration of the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, the 1980’s documentary River Elegy as an analytical framework for Zha Jianying’s China Pop, the similarities in Russian and Chinese memorializations of war, the cultural phenomena of Iris Chang’s and R.F. Kuang’s The Rape of Nanjing and The Poppy War in Chinese America, the combination of Rana Mitter’s moralist interpretation of WWII geopolitics with Shelley Chan’s model of “diasporic moments” to study global diasporic activism. I produced weekly essays, which we discussed and debated in two-hour sessions over tea.

Dr. Nie was a Chinese woman—and it was only with her guidance, which at times reached aunty-level care as we talked about our days and worries and families in Chinese—that I felt comfortable with such a wide range of topics. International relations and Chinese politics had always felt intimidating at Stanford, especially as almost all classes are taught by conservative white faculty; there was no footing for my budding interests in diaspora theory and ideology at a school so dominated by empirical and quantitative political science. Dr. Nie’s tutorial felt distinctly human, meant to build and reshape the frameworks through which I viewed the world: for the first time, I confessed to my hatred for studying war and violence at a dehumanizingly quantitative school (Stanford). I told her that creative writing had become the means through which I asked and answered the world—then, on a whim, sent her the first five chapters of my book. I know now that I want to continue with tutorial-style studies when I return to the States, perhaps with a directed reading.

Which brings me to senior year. In September, I’ll have my last first day of school, and I’ll start my two honors theses: a quantitative and theory-based project with the International Relations department on diaspora politics, and a novel with the Program in the Arts. Senior year will be the first year I don’t do research for a professor, and it’ll be my last year dancing in a semi-semi-semi-professional capacity. I’ll apply for grad schools. I’ll graduate. I’ll be deeply thankful to leave the Bay Area. And the rest of my life will be there to catch me. I had a taste of what that rest of my life might feel like at Oxford—a life that was under my control, that was so utterly different from everything that had come before.

At times, it felt like I was escaping into a life that couldn’t possibly be mine, like I was stealing moments from a parallel universe Ana: an Ana who had stayed for her last year in high school and was now a second-year student at Magdalen. An Ana who spent her mornings rowing with MCBC and bused to the China Centre for her tutorials in her afternoons, an Ana who lived off Sainsbury’s green smoothies and long evenings in the RadCam and picnics in the Christ Church meadows. An Ana who was gentler and unhurt, and who glowed with possibility. It took me a long time to understand that what I was experiencing was not a parallel universe or a temporary deviation from normalcy, but qualities of myself I’d long thought dead. I’d flung myself so completely into Oxford, had given myself the space to lay roots into grounds I’d thought could never be mine. I’d never fully understood the implications of them being mine until they were. 

“I don’t want to leave,” I told my therapist during our last session. I’d been so full of dread during my last days at Oxford that I’d hardly been able to muster any excitement for my summer in Berlin. “If I leave, I’m gonna go back to my old self—all my old coping mechanisms, my old fears, my traumas. I’m gonna lose this life and the opportunity to be someone better. Someone more.” 

My therapist had shaken her head. “No,” she said. “Don’t you realize? This isn’t some sort of parallel life, or someone else’s life. This is your life. Oxford might have reflected back at you all the possibilities within you, gave room for you to grow, but it was all you. And if you want to come back—”

“I do.” 

“—it’ll still be here. It’s been here for so long, for better or for worse, and it’ll be here for you when you return.” 

Huh, I thought. It was all me. And she was right. I’m in Berlin right now, in a cafe called Hallesches Haus, which I suspect will become my weekday summer haunt by virtue of its hanging plants and sunlit spaciousness and good food and casually queer staff. I am alone, away from Oxford’s cobblestones and secret libraries, away from all my friends and tutors, away from the only place in which I’d thought I could live as this version of me. Yet still I feel calm and at home in myself, and still the words flow so readily from me, and still the world stretches wide before me, ready to catch me with all its possibility. There is so much magic, I could cry.  

Shenzhen, Sophomore Year

I couldn’t write much about Shenzhen because all my months were blurring together. By February, I was familiar enough with Shenzhen that I could give directions to other people. I attacked the streets with the cockiness of someone privileged enough to be living in Houhai without working full-time. I had friends, and my Chinese improved to the extent that I could make them laugh. But by March, I was burned-out from living here (and from the fiasco that was winter quarter), and almost desperate to get out. Shenzhen had blurred before me: a never-changing, never-ceasing stream of VC’s and tech and pretty buildings and mosquitos. One month later, having used every possible excuse to avoid Shenzhen, and having completed a whirlwind of a tour around China, I think I can sit down and write about it.

Shenzhen has imprinted on me in very subtle ways. I’ve bought a new pair of aviator-inspired glasses. I’ve started using reddish eyeshadow. I wear long, loose black pants, and finish my WeChat messages with ~. I’ve perfected a disdainful face for the high-end malls, and I’ve created a maximum-efficiency routine for getting through subway security. I could’ve written about these personal developments (could you even call them developments? I think they’re just adaptations), but what I wanted to write about was Shenzhen itself: the city that’d become progressively more suffocating over the last few months, but which I still find too immense to put into words. Only now have I realized that it’s very hard to write about a city. I’ve tried, anyways.

Shenzhen was created for economic gain, and it’s very good at what it does. It’s not a city meant to be walked through, at least not for leisure or sightseeing. It’s Silicon Valley dialed up to one-hundred, if Silicon Valley received both the full funding and protection of the government, alongside immense FDI (foreign direct investment) and the privilege of housing a considerable portion of the country’s financial power. Its skyline, already intimidating in its endless slew of glass buildings, is made indomitable by its mountains and seas. There is nothing more exhilarating than driving past the lightshow of the Luohu skyline at night, and there is nothing more exhausting than walking through Futian’s tech finance hub during the day. Prior to 2021, I’d never stayed in Shenzhen for longer than month—giddily, I’d thought I could never get enough of its modernity. Shenzhen makes a cold beauty out of pragmatism. It’s glamorous in a calculated moderation—a calculation that works to stunning effect—and I still can’t say that about any other city.

Yet here I am, five months later, with a distinct feeling of defeat: this city, for all its glory, considers itself secondary to its function. There’s not much more to see or experience, but there’s a lot I’m expected to do. Everyone lugs a suitcase through the shopping malls, financial districts, and subway stations—people rush here to work, rush back to a more temperate home once they’re done. Everyone stares at their phone. People talk loudly about weight-loss pants and skin-whitening products, and nobody’s ever enough for anything. The malls are devastatingly expensive and flawlessly air-conditioned, and no shop here feels like a shop (they’re fancy hallways filled with Instagrammable props and empty, edgy pseudo-art exhibitions).

Shenzhen’s too beautiful. Of the natives and migrants I’ve talked to, none of them feel that the city is truly accessible: they can come to a mutually-satisfactory agreement with it, can come to enjoy or thrive under its backbreaking pace, but there’s nothing underlying the city’s function that they can grasp: no sense of group identity or culture. Shenzhen’s too young to have many natives (my family is the rare exception). It can’t fall back on a history. Tourism might comprise a massive part of its economy—indeed, the streets are replete with white tourists who don’t wear masks—but it’s not like Beijing or Chengdu or Shanghai, one of those cities overflowing with history. I could spend an entire day walking through any of these cities, without any destination in mind, and emerge exhilarated and triumphant. In Shenzhen, without a destination, I’ll just end up slumped over a coffee or boba as I wait out the afternoon humidity. Everything’s too far away when I’m walking—nothing ever seems to be getting closer—yet everything presses down on me when I’m sitting still.

Everyone tires of a city. I have friends from Beijing who insist that Beijing is a very boring city, friends from San Francisco and Seattle who say the same. But never has a city tired me out like Shenzhen has—although this may have to do with how Shenzhen is, indisputably, the city that marked my transition into adult life. Having to fend for myself in an urban center on a different continent has been a power trip at best, and a complete mess at worst.

So, where do I—both literally and metaphorically—go from here? I know I won’t be able to live in Shenzhen in the future. I also know that this city has played an immense role in shaping my sophomore year: I’m genuinely thankful for all that I’ve learned, and all the opportunities I’ve been afforded. Interestingly, my creative writing has also improved—albeit only after I’d returned from traveling. There’s just too much dissonance in this city. How could someone possibly process it all without poetry? Some cities turn their noses up at romanticization, but Shenzhen hasn’t—and I’ll take full advantage of that.

Then again, perhaps I’m asking too much from this city. There’s always a pressure on a diasporic kid to rake up as much of the motherland as possible when they visit: yes, modernity, but also history, language, culture, belonging, as if we’re trying to compensate for the perceived inadequacy of growing up in such detached environments. For Asian American Heritage Month, I’m closer to my heritage than I’ve ever been, yet it’s jarring to think that Shenzhen is my heritage, too: the VC’s and thirty-story apartment buildings, the business dinners and decanted red wine. For Asian Americans, heritage is not only a means of connecting to the past, but a hypothetical. What could we have been? What could we be more of?

But here’s the thing: at the end of the day, I think I belong. I can hold my own at work, at dance, while shopping. I can stride through the streets like a native. I know enough ways to overcome someone going against me—with a look of scorn, with a certain kind of laugh, with a subtle brag—and I know how to hold back, in that particular Shenzhen way, before I act. And that’s at once scary and exciting: that I can move at the same pace as everyone else, at a pace so fast that I can only see what comes next.