what i've learned

I like sinking my teeth into all of it, almost as much as I like keeping track of what I’ve bitten off. But my laptop crashed last week, and I lost the titles I’d hoarded like pearls in my Notes app: the list of the books, movies, music, lectures, essays, performances, podcasts, and art exhibits that I experienced in 2025. I therefore can’t Share My Statistics or Flex My Reading Prowess, but I still wish to write about the literature that shaped me this year. Many artists fed me well, and many friends lent me their library cards, and still others got me into exhibits, performances, and concerts that they knew I’d like. This one is for you guys! <3

This year, I gravitated toward a number of literary canons as if working through class syllabi: starting with American political theory and novels from the 60s and 70s, before shifting to writers and thinkers of the Third World Liberation Movement. I ended the year in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by the science fiction anthologies and fantasy series that I’d read in high school.

Despite reading canon-by-canon, I didn’t choose my reading list with more intention than I did in previous years. Comfort has always been the deciding factor in my taste, whether that comfort lies in the assurance of a shared/continued political struggle, a fictional found family, or a particularly beautiful phrase that reveals the writer’s love for the world. It’s why I can’t sit through a novel, no matter how Important It Is To The Canon, if it is not at least a little bit tender or humorous. There is so much love here in this world. How on earth do you write a whole book without at least including some of it?

If I had to characterize my reading list this year, articulate how my tastes have become simultaneously broader and more exacting, I might say that I’ve been chasing other worlds. 99% of the time, these worlds exist in the English language, or have otherwise been translated, subbed, or dubbed before they reached me. My Chinese reading comprehension has improved haphazardly—I think I peaked in June, when I very slowly analyzed and discussed 钱理群’s 论志愿者文化 with my mutual aid group—but I still don’t have the stamina to read for longer than an hour at a time.

In 2022, I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Translating Myself and Others, which introduced the idea of reading as physical act. She compares any impediments to reading, such as unfamiliarity with the language, as a sensation akin to wearing blinders or bumping into walls. Those metaphors have stuck with me. It really does feel like wearing blinders when I read Chinese, like I’m that bird chipping away at a diamond mountain with its beak. (I know that myth is from the Grimm Brothers, but I will always think of Peter Capaldi’s 12th Doctor, stuck in a time loop of grief, whenever anyone mentions it.)

I’ve now spent two years living in a city where I am perpetually learning a new language. I have become quieter, more observant, more capable of laughing at myself—and conversely, I cherish the only language that I do know all the more. My writing is now a counterweight to my half-fluency, a walking stick and a chiseling knife. It is homemaking as much as it is worldbuilding.

I’m glad I can now call my writing these things, because I didn’t always know what it was. This December, I returned to my hometown for the first time in three years. While pilfering my bedroom for things I might take back to Beijing, I found the poetry anthologies that had published my high school writing. I laughed in confusion as I read and reread them. What in the world were these poems? What had they aspired to, and what had they believed in? What had I aspired to, and what had I believed in?

My writing process had been little more than the tearing of flesh from different literatures. An attempt to sew that flesh, cold and limpid, into a body that might call itself new and beautiful. I’d wanted to write something that made me feel as my favorite writers made me feel: that I was stretching my own skin from the inside. I believed that if I deleted enough punctuation marks and used enough SAT words in enough unprecedented configurations, I’d uncover some new truth about the world. My creations lacked the bones to stand up and the guts to stand their own ground, but I still bid them breathe. (Less poetically: I didn’t know why I was writing. I just kept putting words down, far too many words and far too quickly, in aesthetic exercises that hoped to transcend themselves.)

It took a long time for me to learn how to write with intent, longer still to develop what might be called a voice. Between 2022 and 2023, I began to autofictionalize bits of my life—mostly gay drama—in a document entitled junior & senior year master document. I also started working on my book. In 2024, that year-long drought of creative deadlines, I excavated my parents’ stories and wrote a whole saga about them. It is my proudest work to date, and it will never see an audience beyond my close friends story.

Did I regress as a writer in 2025? After all, I’d committed myself to finishing a novel that is ultimately commercial in nature, bound by the conventions of genre and marketability, even though I’ve been itching for years to stretch my language beyond that. I think often of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s treatise on minor literature, which he introduced in his January lecture series at the Harvard Mahindra Centre, and which he later put to paper in To Save and To Destroy. In it, he testifies to the slippery power of poetry, its inbuilt resistance to commodification. It is hard to package and feed it like candy to the consumer-masses. Maybe this is what I was seeking in my seventeen-year-old writing, in my word-splatters: something that could not be taken hostage and sold as something other than what it truly was in that moment. The problem was, even I didn’t know what it truly was in that moment.

Maybe it was a scream?

I remember the first time I felt situated in canon, when I realized that word-splatters and chaos could have a bite. In 2022, high on the twin novelties of my queerness and my adulthood, I sought out stories of depravity. The unhinged women of Otessa Moshfegh and Raven Leilani, the viscerality of Christina Quarles, Lee Bul, and Torrey Peters. My 2022-self would’ve devoured the music that came out of 2024/5—Charli XCX’s BRAT, ROSALÍA’s LUX—both of them overwhelming and theatrical, both of them confessing to the glory and depravity of want. Back then, I loved anything that shoved its way to the front and demanded more, anything that laid claim to more expansive and outrageous ways to be.

But this year, I’ve been drawn to something of the opposite. I’ve developed a taste for reverse-coming-of-ages, whether they be reverse-power-fantasies (power nightmares?) or portraits of stagnation. The sparing childlike prose of Weike Wang’s Chemistry. The maddening mundanity of Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon Genesis Evangelion, I Saw the TV Glow, 貘之歌, and Uzo Egonu’s paintings. The horror and relief when such mundanity is shattered by violence.

This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving Depraved Women Novels (I didn’t make up that term—the Waterstones in Oxford once had a whole shelf labeled as such). Rather, it speaks to the sudden placidity of my day-to-day Beijing life, the muted colors of a young adulthood that somehow manages to feel like sheltered adolescence and mid-life drudgery all at once. These stories are comforting: they teach me that I am not alone in glancing over my shoulder, wondering whether I chose the wrong life. Whether something sinister and beautiful lurks just beyond my stagnation, and I just wasn’t brave enough to take it.

I’ve also maintained my love for stories with a lot of noise. The multigenre multi-storyline overwhelm of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, the dizzying cosmic timeskips of Claire Jia-wen’s short stories, the six-act ??? of CHAINHAHA’s Beijing concert, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it production of Everything Everywhere All At Once (which I rewatched for the eighth time on my mother’s birthday). I love stories that are so much, too much, stories that can only be known in glimpses. Stories which are the noise, and yet beg to be heard through the noise, their heatbeats undeniable within all the confusion. There is such a comfort in knowing that I can’t understand everything that I see, that I don’t need to understand as long as I try to hear that heartbeat. It’s probably why I write the way I write, cluttering my sentences with 134509 references and 3asdflaEWjsodijFO, drifting my essays as close as possible to the hard shoulder of comprehensability. (Truly, writing these essays sometimes feels like drifting a car, though I have never drifted a car.) (I wonder what it’d be like to shatter an essay on that hard shoulder, sentences

spew!!ing

e VERY <—> where?

.)

(Maybe it’s time to start writing poetry again, though every poem I write nowadays is a happy poem—a love poem—they lie dozing in the meadows next to the highway, while my essays careen past them on smoking wheels. (Ha Jin’s prophecy come true!))

There are a few other works I want to discuss, and which I don’t know how to fit in this weird essay. I usually bracket out paragraphs that need work, but I guess I’m too impatient for [?? fill in] and have been learning to love my half-clothed drafts [transition needed here]

Infuriatingly, Edward Saïd’s Representations of the Intellectual has eluded me for the last few months—I can’t get a copy at any library. Natalie Díaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, which I read for the first time in my freshman year without having ever prayed to a river or braided the hair of a tree, was a homecoming when I revisited it this winter. I’ve learned that anthologies make for very nice bedtime readings—Facing the Mirror, Ashwini Sukthankar’s series of lesbian writings from India, and Walking The Clouds, Grace Dillon’s collection of Indigenous science fiction, top the pile of journals on my nightstand. And The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Isao Takahata’s magnum opus, cracked something open in me when I watched it for the first time. I think often of that moment when Kaguya stands with the moon-crown poised over her head, when she looks back at our world and is about to pronounce all the reasons why she still loves it despite-despite-despite. In that moment of confession lives the asking and answering of all my questions. Lives the heartbeat of the literature that found me this year. May we continue finding each other in the next.