desire at world’s end
Finally, we can want.
Most of my friends, those who graduated in the last two-years-ish, operate under the same assumption: once we become adult, we will do what we want. We will know what we want. And if we don’t know what we want, we will have the time and freedom to figure it out. I thought that my own adulthood would begin with such a recalibration of desire, and in many ways, it has been just that. I get to make art and live (more or less) on my own terms. Better yet, I get to write obnoxious blog posts about it.
Even still, sovereign over my time and craft, I can’t shake the feeling that the world didn’t uphold its end of the deal. None of my friends—the disoriented twenty-somethings who stumbled out of COVID with four-year college degrees—really know what’s going on. They take to Substack, Instagram, or a sporadic blog like this one to write about it: what do they really want? Why can’t they just be happy? No one, including me, ever seems to reach an answer. Some of us acknowledge that there’s something selfish, if not morally repugnant, about wanting things for ourselves in the midst of genocide and climate catastrophe. Most of us believe that the world ended before we even got a chance to set feet on it. Few of us know where to look for guidance.
I know a little bit of that loneliness, having lived away from the U.S. for the last two years. I watched the 2024 election results in a daka cafe, surrounded by beautiful giggling Chinese students. As Georgia went to Trump, I looked up flights back to San Francisco. I needed to return to Chinatown, where I first learned the shape of myself. I needed someone to fight, and someone to fight with. I could not afford the tickets.
But after a few months and three million executive orders, I would learn to live with that loneliness. A few of my Chinese American friends passed through Beijing after the election. They reassured me that our communities were strong, stronger than ever in the face of the administration, but I could not see it for myself. I struggled to write, increasingly furious at myself for choosing such a trivial project—a fantasy novel—at the end of the world. I had just begun to want as an adult. To admit to my intellectual and artistic ambitions, and act to on them. Selfishly, I did not want the fulfillment of my desire to be tainted, much less delayed, by a burning world.
The people who finally got through to me were my Chinese friends, many of whom had been studying in the U.S. when COVID first hit. They witnessed the pandemic unfold from an ocean away. You keep expecting it to hit you, one of them told me. You wish it would hit you, so that you’d feel less alone. She continued her art degree, anyways.
My parents graduated from Beijing University of Technology in 1998. They arrived in Los Angeles in 1999 to pursue their Masters in Engineering, riding the wave of graduate scholarships for college-educated Chinese immigrants. My dad was 23, the same age that I am now. My mom was 24. They had a ball in Los Angeles, crashing Halloween parties and sneaking into communions (they wanted the wafers). And then, they had me. I spent the first three years of my life in Los Angeles Chinatown, before my dad found a job at Microsoft. We moved to Bellevue, and I would not return to L.A. until I was twenty-one.
My parents did not face a broken world upon adulthood: in fact, they were buoyed by the prospect of China entering the so-called global community. Their chosen profession coincided perfectly with the U.S. demand for Chinese talent. They were not born in the generation that had come of age during Tiananmen: by the time they entered college, China had already settled, more or less, into its current political infrastructure. Nor did they suffer the famine and violence of their parents’ generation. My parents were in their early 30s when they faced their first significant global meltdown—the 2008 financial crisis—but they survived. When I was fourteen, my dad found a position at an investment firm, and my family’s financial status improved swiftly. It was smooth sailing until COVID—and even then, they knew what to do. A year into the pandemic, they moved back to Shenzhen.
My parents—and therefore, I—had always lived on rising tides. My wants, which more often than not ran opposite to these tides, were foreign to them. From the very beginning, I ran fast and ate books—two behaviors I still occasionally enjoy. When I was eleven, I experienced my very first sapphic heartbreak (I did not know it was a sapphic heartbreak) and submitted a poem to a statewide writing competition. I won first place and $50. Upon hearing the news, my parents congratulated me with bewildered resignation. They knew by then that I wanted many things different from them. I wanted to write. I wanted a family that did not hurt each other and that did not hurt me. I wanted so much, and I did not understand why I could not have these things. I lashed out frequently. I withdrew into deep, punishing silences.
I became a teenager during several big movements: #MeToo, then Black Lives Matter. Trump took office for the first time when I was fourteen. I heard statistics about older Chinese immigrants voting for him, and I lashed out yet again. I was not politically minded by any means—I did not really begin developing my politics until I turned twenty—but I knew I was angry. I knew there was something wrong, many things wrong. I knew that I couldn’t define what was wrong, even with all the pretty words and writing awards that I’d begun to accrue. It drove me insane.
When I was sixteen, I had enough. Things with my family had reached a head. I had pulled off my own toenails. I wanted a different world, but my imagination was limited to a handful of prestigious colleges: key among them, Stanford. In the summer before my junior year, I wrote my application essays and emailed my high school counselor. A month before I turned seventeen, I received my acceptance letters. Three months later, I left Bellevue.
This is not an essay about my parents. Living in Beijing as a 23-year-old, the same age they were when they first moved to the U.S., has filled me with an unimaginable tenderness and love. I would also crash Halloween parties and communions, if I were them. Giggle and get drunk off American divinity. But my tenderness frequently veers into grief: they do not want the world I want. They do not really understand my queerness, even though they accept that I am a woman who loves another woman. I live in direct opposition to the many values that kept them safe in their young adulthood—personal safety and accumulation of wealth—and that has been hard for them to accept. Of course, it’s hard for them to accept. The world is terrifying, and they want me to be safe.
But they, too, recognize that something must change. My dad reads a lot of Maoist thought. We talk about Indonesia and Brazil, how the failure of these communist movements inspired increased militancy in 1960s China. In college, my classmates and I were taught to approach these Other theories and histories with ridicule. Now, I take them seriously. I tell my dad about one of the few Mark Fisher hypotheses I agree with: that the British and American cultural/artistic movements of the 1960s were often not synchronized with any organized political movement. It’s so easy for critical art to be flattened into an edgy aesthetic, I tell him. Or, people just let art do the hard work of critique—they escape into a fantasy scenario to validate their unhappiness—but don’t follow through with that criticism by living their lives any differently. Do you see why it’s so hard for me to figure out what kind of artist I want to be?
I don’t know, he tells me. I’m not an artist.
I try to expand imaginations with my work, I continue. That’s the only thing I have figured out—the most basic duty of a writer—that I need to push imaginations about what’s possible, about what can be desired. I never want my writing to lose its teeth.
Haha, he says. Dentures for your writing.
It seems that everyone is trying to define what is uniquely political or socially attuned about Gen Z. But that line of thinking quickly exhausts me. We are not the first to grow up witnessing a genocide. We are not the first to grow up bombarded with too much noise, all the time, from people and countries that exhaust us with their demands for compassion. We are not the first to realize the failings of our administration, and we are not the first to decide between action and silence. We are not the first to feel cheated out of our futures.
The fact that we think ourselves the first—our political loneliness and dispossession—speaks to several tragedies. My family could not serve as a reference point for my wanting-more, for my wanting-different. I did not have flesh-and-blood elders, people experienced in organizing and community survival, until I sought them out in college. For years, I felt this absence as a profound loneliness, a paranoia that I was insane and singular in my wanting-more/different. So, much like I did in Bellevue, I lashed out. (I apologize to anyone I messed with between the ages of seventeen and twenty. I was out of my mind.)
But elders weren’t my only lack. I, like most young people in America, was severed from a larger international movement, the kind that inspired the Third World Liberation Front of the 60s and 70s. Many of us did not engage with global politics until Israel’s current genocide of Palestine. Many of us diasporic children continue to turn away from the state violence committed by our homelands, a hypothesis I confirmed with my undergraduate research. Still, we’ve begun to witness attempts to grasp some kind of global solidarity. Absurd and kind of funny: that wave of self-proclaimed Xiaohongshu refugees from TikTok. Earthshattering in its scale and implications: the Global Sumud Flotilla.
This year, I’ve kept asking myself: Where do we find elders? Community? Solidarity? All the other catchphrases? When I was a baby gay, finding community meant finding people who wanted the same things that I did: pussy. (Also, the dignity and safety to love openly, to speak our minds, etc.) We built our homes and our lives around the fulfillment of imagination and desire. Sometimes, it was simple: the masc who kindly agreed to be my first wuh-luh-wuh kiss. The queer friends who lent me their wardrobes, so that I could explore my masculinity. But most of the time, it was more complex: we hosted workshops and sit-ins. We organized protests. We asked, how must the world change to accommodate us? How must we become kinder and braver, loving this world while building another? What do we not know, and what do we not know that we don’t know?
This essay is about my queerness, and how I am indebted to it. My queerness has made me brave and kind. It’s made me more capable of holding paradoxes. It’s made me realize I am beautiful. It’s made me believe that yes, we will win, because the people I hold dearest are living proof of it.
It takes courage to be queer. Some people just don’t have it. Let me phrase it with more generosity: some people aren’t ready, lack the material support, or simply do not want to be brave. But now, more than ever, queerness demands courage of us. It takes courage and honesty and humility to love the world, to love it so much that you are willing to slip beneath the cracks of institutions that are trying to kill us. Queerness is homemaking and worldbuilding outside—and in defiance—of what is prescribed by these institutions. It is nothing less.
This is why I believe some people are gay but not queer. (I am not above engaging in petty internet discourse.) This is also why I’m impatient whenever successful 20-somethings-who-graduated-from-prestigious-universities vent to me about the corporate job that they just don’t like that much, about the straight white boyfriend that they just don’t like that much (I should just date a girl, they say, as if that’s so much easier). They can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. When I feel cruel, I want to tell them that yes, the world is burning, and no, you are not brave enough to want anything different. I want to ask, have you ever held the entire weight of your want? Have you looked that monstrous thing in the eye? I firmly believe that anyone who has actually looked upon their desire—who has grasped the full extent of it—cannot then suppress it. But I don’t say these things. Most of the time, I tell them what they want to hear: protect your mental health. Give yourself space. Cope, and keep coping.
While writing this essay, I wondered what conditions were necessary for a person to become brave. To choose that yes, now, I will want something different. Some of my friends say that maybe, people must suffer until they can’t bear it anymore. Only then will they change. (For the record, I don’t agree with this carceral take.) Others believe that people must be loved enough, treated with enough kindness and dignity, to become brave active members of the world.
But everyone seems to agrees on one thing: things aren’t quite right. It’s not enough to just cope. Something has happened to make us look over our shoulders, terrified that we’ve missed an exit ramp. Night’s falling, we’re going 120 in a 60, and there are no more exit ramps ahead. By god—the god from whom my parents once took wafers, in an America they once believed in—drive off the road. Find elders in text and in flesh. Kiss a girl, hold her close, and let summer make sweet wine of your bodies. Give generously: time, money, heart. Fight for what you want. Learn to want. Beyond this lesson in want, there is nothing I can offer you.
I do, actually, have a few more tips to offer you:
Mutual aid organizations. You know your local situation better than I do, so you do the research. Be consistent and learn how to build networks of sovereignty. Learn where the resources are and how you can contribute.
Read!! As much as you can, however you can. Do not normalize anti-intellectualism: not in leftist spaces, not anywhere else. Intellectualism does not have to mean inaccessibility. Reading will help you refine the strategies you use to mobilize. It will give you lens through which you can better understand your identities, your angst, your conviction that you’re going insane. The books I read this summer are attached below.
Donate time and money to mutual aid campaigns. Divest from big evil corporations.
Learn how to mobilize with people you do not like, particularly if you have never held a job that you do not like. I say this because those kinds of jobs—where you clock in and out for a paycheck, hating what you’re doing and your bosses who make you do what you’re doing—teach you to work with your coworkers against the Real Evil. Learn to speak the language of people you don’t like, when convincing them to work with you. Love thy neighbor, for they probably share 50+% of your grievances.
There’s more to be said, but I’ll leave you with the books instead:
political education - any history, theory, fiction, personal essay, etc. that really helped develop my politics (summer 2025)
false nationalism, false internationalism: kae sera
blood in my eye: george l. jackson
sister outsider: audre lorde
black power and palestine: michael r. fischbach
the jakarta method: vincent bevin
if we burn: the mass protest decade and the missing revolution: vincent bevins
freedom is a constant struggle: angela y. davis
one day, everyone will have always been against this: omar el akkad
post-capitalist desire: the final lectures: mark fischer
former stripper, part-time visionary: ismatu gwendolyn
parable of the sower: octavia butler
duty art free: art in the age of planetary civil war: hito steryl
braiding sweetgrass: robin wall kimmerer (reread)
notes of a native son: james baldwin (reread)
these wilds beyond our fences: bayo akomolafe (reread)
on my list (haven’t read yet, to read before october):
representations of the intellectual: edward said
capitalist realism: mark fisher
on the eve of the cybercultural revolution: black power and capitalism in the 1960s: brian bartell
palo alto: malcolm harris
the fantasy and necessity of solidarity: sarah schulman
black on both sides: a racial history of trans identity: c. riley snorton
videos on youtube:
the norton lectures (6-part series): viet thanh nguyen at mahindra humanities centre
the tech billionaire to fascist pipeline: alexander avila
how corporations hijacked the anti-AI backlash: alexander avila
brat and the culture of addiction: alexander avila
ismatu gwendolyn: class traitor, or what do i owe the masses as an artist? ismatu gwendolyn
sammy obeid’s standup comedy sets
some fiction (& poetry) i’ve loved so far this year; i chose the titles that are at least somewhat related to what i said in this essay (dec 2024-july 2025)
martyr!: kaveh akbar
stay true: hua hsu
cinema love: jiaming tang
all fours: miranda july
cantoras: carolina de robertis
voyage of the sable venus: robin coste lewis
roses, in the mouth of a lion: bushra rehman
god help the child: toni morrison
the dream house: carmen maria machado
men we reaped: jesmyn ward