First off—it’s been a really long time since I’ve updated, and while part of that can be attributed to life events (graduation, thesis deadlines, moving to China, summer internship, a comical series of illnesses and injuries), I was also burned out beyond belief. Between April and June, I couldn’t bring myself to write anything that didn’t have to do with my theses, and between June and September, I couldn’t bring myself to write anything at all. There are entire months missing from my journals, and I can’t fully recall what was going through my head during graduation.

Still, my theses are now completed—150 pages on the inheritances of collective memory from homeland to diaspora, and 650 (double-spaced) pages of fantasy/horror—and I’m officially a college graduate. These milestones felt rather underwhelming, as I’m used to big physical transitions accompanying big life moments (I spent all year in California, instead of moving between different countries), but I suppose this feeling is fitting—I’ve always known that whatever I accomplished in senior year would be the beginning of my work, and not the end. Senior year was less of a culmination than a turning point—it brought to me a clarity of purpose and a sense of self that I’d been too afraid to receive sooner—and my current question is what to do with these gifts now that I’ve graduated.

After all, there are many ways to serve marginalized communities, and to assume academia to be my only means would be a disservice to myself and my non-academic work. After a summer spent in San Francisco Chinatown, during which I helped coordinate its first-ever Hungry Ghost Festival, learned how to de/re-install a contemporary art gallery, painted murals and helped repair infrastructure in its alleyways, and worked with its merchants and residents to boost its post-COVID economy, I’ve decided that I don’t want to pursue a Ph.D. after my year in Beijing—at least, not yet. After a school year spent largely in my head, my summer in Chinatown returned me to my hands and heart, and I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed it. In many ways, I felt that I’d done more over one summer than I had in several years of schooling. That in my post-Oxford commitment to academia, I’d traded a more visceral fulfillment (that found in community work) for the volatile high of achievement.

I’ve now begun my Master’s degree at the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University—and perhaps it’s my distance from the U.S., or my abrupt return to academia—but I feel my seclusion from my communities with a keenness I hadn’t anticipated. There is much to write about my return to China—the last time I was here was in 2021, a year which jolted me so deeply that I wrote two theses on it—but my most immediate reaction to Beijing is the realization that I’ve slipped back into a state of powerlessness. It’s a peculiar, paralyzing ache that arises whenever I face the immensity of contemporary China. The tens of thousands of bikes on the sidewalks, ready for rent. The art museums in 798 Art District, which are so densely packed that I still haven’t seen them all after two weeks. The incomprehensible wealth that surrounds me, in marble floors and Hermes leather seats. I realized over the summer that I treasure the small ways in which I can touch the world, that my compassion for small things is the key to resisting to the overwhelm and dehumanization of immensity, and that my love of small things becomes fiercer in the face of bigger immensities. It’s no surprise that my return to China that has dislodged my writer’s block so that I may write small things, brought me back to working out and dancing so that I may tend to my body in small ways. That my year in Shenzhen, spent in one of the biggest markets and production sites in the world, sparked a novel celebrating the small beauty of queer love and adolescence.

I know that I’ve written very little about graduation, and about my last few months in college—but without describing the freedom of my summer in Chinatown, I can’t describe the suffocation I felt in senior spring, and the suffocation that I fear will accompany my Master’s degree. I’ve realized that Stanford—and perhaps academia, too, for now?—is not the right environment for me, but I can still celebrate all that I found while I was an undergrad. I’ve met mentors, mostly grad students and younger professors in the humanities, who have modeled for me the kind of person I wish to be. I’ve realized that the first object of my scholarship is wisdom and liberation, and not necessarily the production of new knowledge. I’ve found the questions I wish to answer—the construction of our perceptions of self and world—a realization more valuable than the answers themselves. And above all, I’ve found the people I wish to serve.

Still, many of these realizations came at a slant: I didn’t find them within the institution of Stanford, but on its outskirts. I can’t help but wonder what I can realize—how these realizations may feel—when I am no longer part of an institution, but fully nested within a community. When my work is no longer a defiance (a shield) against what feels like a world that threatens to flatten me, but a part of a whole. For now, I sit at the beginning of a new year with no small amount of fear—but with no small amount of gratitude, either. There is much I’ve learned in college, and much to learn now. I’ll take it as it comes.