Stanford has been, in my experience, a terrible place to spend autumn. It’s too hot; it’s too dry; the leaves fall before they can change color; biking through the rain is sheer misery. 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, as one of friends insisted I write). 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 alone in my Air Force Ones; 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! I mentioned it in an earlier post—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.