the illusion of “making it” as an “artist” (what i’ve been doing in beijing)

September 2023-April 2025

I want to be a writer. It is my dearest and oldest want, and therefore, it is the most childish thing about me. 

So, whenever someone asks me what I’m still doing in Beijing—what prestigious career must’ve followed a prestigious undergraduate degree and a prestigious postgraduate fellowship—I respond like a child. Doing whatever, I say. Or: a gap year. Or: taking time off. Rarely, and always with an embarrassed smile: writing. And never: trying to make it as a writer.

During college, I could barely disclose how badly I wanted to be a writer. I certainly couldn’t disclose it during my Master’s degree, when I sensed that I’d missed a crucial window of time: I hadn’t published a book during my four precious undergraduate years, hadn’t used that time to build a career I could slip into straight after graduation, and so I’d failed. Crucially, paradoxically, I’d never dared put my entire weight behind my writing. Even when I’d submitted my novel as a senior thesis, in a final bid to find mentorship and institutional support before I left Stanford, I’d considered it a secondary pursuit, an amusing little sibling to my quantitative research. 

I didn’t write in the summer after college. I barely wrote while at Tsinghua. Instead, I worked in San Francisco Chinatown to help develop a festival and curate an exhibit. Then, in Beijing, I churned out a confusing thesis about censorship within China’s visual arts world, which cited everything from my fellow classmates to Lenin. I read enough theory to formalize my instinctual understandings of the cultural industry—how it softens critique into aesthetic, how it beats artists into a state of ceaseless production—before deciding that I wanted nothing to do with the visual arts world. And then, a month before I graduated, I realized that I’d been spending my whole life distracting myself. I had job offers that I cared little for. I had no desire to pursue academia, consulting, social work, research, policy, venture capital, finance, marketing. What was left for me?

I decided to learn what I was capable of when I turned to writing as my primary means of sustenance: not financially, not yet, but intellectually and spiritually. What would happen if I gave myself the entire day—nine-to-five, minus the weekends that I went into my office for a tutoring job, and the occasional hours I spent freelancing as a journalist—to write? I would use this year to finish and publish my book. If that didn’t work out, I would’ve at least satiated my childhood what-if. Then, I’d sell out into some random consulting job, or else let the nonprofit industry eat me alive. 

I’m still young, I thought last July. I’d gone to college a year early, and now I would give myself that year back. I fantasized about writing this blog post after I’d finished and sold my book, with a six-figure deal that would’ve catapulted me into stardom. I wrote and wrote, propelled by a manic belief in myself and my talent. When I could wait no longer, I sent an excerpt of the book—still incomplete, with an ending that barely clung to its meandering plot—to my dream agent. A day later: a manuscript request. A week later: a very kind and detailed rejection. I burst into tears on the subway back home. I failed, I wept to Asha. I was stupid to think I could do this. All I did was waste six months I could’ve spent on anything else. I thought I was special. I really, really thought I was special. 

It was a childish thing to say, but I did warn you beforehand. You’ll forgive me for the outburst. 

It was March when I faced down my rejections, April when I forced myself to sit down and breathe. What did it mean to make it as an artist, when I already knew myself to be one? Were financial security and institutional recognition the only horizons I’d envisioned for my writing? After all, I’d spent the last year studying the cultural industry, learning how it defangs artists and audiences—so why was my biggest wish to become its next darling? 

April 2024-July 2024

During that frantic fall and winter, I didn’t realize that a far more important transformation was taking place. Unbeknownst to myself, I had begun an experiment in sovereignty: sovereignty over my time, my rest, my imagination, my crafts. What if I oriented myself toward dignity, as opposed to pride? What if I moved opposite to the premises I’d thought fundamental to my artmaking, and chose to approach it with curiosity and tenderness?  

I’d always understood that I could bend the rules by which I lived—go to college early without telling anyone, leave my ballet education without telling anyone—but only with the goals of personal safety and accelerated personal success. It’s easy to understand where these impulses come from. The classical arts, which I spent the first two-thirds of my life pursuing pre-professionally, are premised upon individual excellence. I worked very very very hard, as did everyone else like me. I developed a lot of control over myself, as did everyone else like me. Only now do I realize that control is not sovereignty. For seventeen years, I did not get to decide the why of my body or my craft, only how well I could obey.

What are the conditions necessary for true sovereignty? In June, I decided: space and ritual. I was living in my own apartment for the first time in my life, a remodeled love hotel with a loft bed and bathtub fit for four, and I had no idea what to do with so much space. I had also untethered myself from the endless chase of career and the equally endless accumulation of wealth—rituals that reinforced the significance and material power of capitalist systems while/by keeping us in a constant state of production—and I had no idea what to do with so much time. 

These days, I water my plants so that I am surrounded by bloom. I vacuum my corners so that I may lie down behind my bookshelf. I clean up after myself so that I no longer need to pick paths through my mess. My walls balloon like a full belly. I create more bravely, more honestly, because my rituals demonstrate that I am sovereign over my space and my home.  

I’ve realized that I enjoy shaping spaces, perhaps even more than I enjoy any one craft: a realization that began two years ago in San Francisco Chinatown, when I witnessed our festival bloom in Portsmouth Square. To me, these rituals feel like sowing the earth, creating conditions that may coax even more creation into being. fruityspace, my favorite bar in Beijing, hosted free documentary screenings and reading groups alongside spoken word sessions and record nights. Within its walls, we also shook ass thunderously. The bar closed in June, but I still dream about tending to a space like it. Somewhere where we may all be sovereign over ourselves. 

At the beginning of this year, I began to volunteer at the Dandelion School, a nonprofit for the children of rural-to-urban migrants. Diqing and I are responsible for turning a basement into a third space for the kids. We encourage them to do whatever they want in the space, particularly if it’s art-related, and we dig up the resources and funding to help them enact their visions. For many of these kids, it’s their first time planning an event or working with a team. They get annoyed, because they’re not used to it. I tell them that I get it. I also prefer working alone. But I do like a good plan and deadline. 

October 2024-July 2025

In some ways, I’ve been doing the work opposite to that of the kids. I no longer calculate my ideas into existence—years-long endeavors that received reliable institutional support but also stifled any desire to wander—and instead, I’ve relearned compulsion. I sew pages of my writing together, scribble on and with all sorts of things, open my home to others because I want to learn how they paint weave write dance. Every few weeks, Jiayu and I host art nights. When she is called to it, she dances, answering the whole world with her body. It is so beautiful to witness. I’m a very shy dancer despite (because of) all my years of training, and someday, I hope to heed my body’s call like she does hers. 

My whole life, my art has been seized and then packaged for consumption. No stage of my artmaking—brainstorm, class, drafting, rehearsal, revision, performance—was spared. My person wasn’t spared, either, as far as you can separate art from artist. Artist statements, artist panels, artist masterclasses—these were all asked (and sometimes required) of me, as part of my creative output. What else did I expect from an education in Silicon Valley? 

I’ve spent much of this year acting as if I were already a creative worker, aspiring to institutionalize my creative labor under the guise of “making it.” I’ve only just begun to acknowledge and to make full use of my freedom: I am not part of any cultural industry. I don’t ever have to be. I can choose compulsion and sovereignty, the dignity of time and rest. Artists like ismatu gwendolyn, whose writing on sovereignty inspired my own, have made this clear. I think back to Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, where she describes the liberatory potential that lies in questioning and then broadening one’s desires. She spoke of this in terms of the erotic—but Audre Lorde defines the erotic to include the creative, the artistic, the love of the world. 

This essay was shorter than I would’ve liked, considering how long it took to write. I haven’t updated Punderings in a year and a half, partially out of a newfound protectiveness over my work and my privacy, and partially out of shame that there was nothing in my life worth writing/reading about. On my twenty-third birthday, Cecil observed that I’ve begun to live with less self-consciousness and more clarity. That my introspection has become less ruthless but also less frequent. I’ve grown up, and my art has grown with me—has become slower and more precise—even as I continue working on the book I began at age nineteen. 

It feels like I should’ve outgrown this book by now, but it’s still here, changing in all sorts of tangled and twisting ways. I know that someday, whether in a library or at home, I will put it to rest. What a book, I will say. It has all the fury of my nineteen- and twenty-three-year-old selves. It has all my mad hope and love for the world. It was important enough that I dedicated the beginning of my adult life to its completion. For these reasons alone, it is the most special thing.