Fragments from Reading and Cross-Cultural Living
Sometimes when I look back, I feel a quiet kind of luck in having spent over two decades in school in China before moving to the U.S. But what I’m grateful for isn’t necessarily the education itself, or the big moments of transition — it’s the small things. The ordinary, forgettable bits of life in a small town that somehow stayed with me.
Take summer breaks, for example. My dad used to leave me at a bookstore downstairs owned by a friend of his. I would spend the whole day there. We didn’t really watch much TV at home, and I never found myself bored. The bookstore became a kind of silent agreement between us. It was a little dusty, but quiet. No one rushed me, no one watched over me. I’ve long forgotten what I actually read back then, but the feeling of reading — of having a space that was just mine — stayed.
Now, as an adult, I’m still learning new things. But the way I learn, and the reason I learn, have both shifted. More often than not, I’m consuming information — through audiobooks, podcasts, news feeds, or fast conversations with professionals. It’s not about immersion anymore. It’s about efficiency.
And in my work — whether it’s being a therapist, or managing a community facility — I’m constantly engaging. I give a lot of emotional energy, attention, empathy. I’m fully open when I need to be. But once I leave that space, it’s like I’ve run dry. I don’t want anything “deep” anymore. In those moments, it’s the light, repetitive, even meaningless content that helps me feel like I can breathe again.
That’s why I’ve come to appreciate how valuable my early sensitivity to language really was. It wasn’t just about writing — it became something I could fall back on. Even when I’m exhausted, I can still cut through noise to find the one sentence that reflects how I feel. Writing has never just been about expression for me. It’s also been a way of resisting numbness. And the speed at which I read, too — it’s stayed with me, even now.
That closeness with language, I think, is one of the ways I reconnect — with the world, and with myself.
Beyond this small, personal kind of tenderness, I often feel a broader kind of sorrow — for how limited we are, simply by being human. Each of us grows up in one language, one school system, one cultural syntax. We can’t grow up immersed in multiple worldviews at once. We can’t truly shift back and forth across civilizations. And language — language is only a tiny piece of what we call culture. Yet we often act like knowing a few words in another language means we’ve “understood the world.”
But really, we only ever see the parts of the world that our experience allows us to see.
I’m constantly amazed by knowledge from other disciplines — physics, neuroscience, the philosophy of language, spatial design. They each stand on their own, but all seem to brush up against the same question: how much can humans actually know? Where does our perception end? And in those edges, in those little in-between spaces, I’ve found so much curiosity, so many strange delights. They remind me that we’re not as rational as we think, and not as free as we’d like to believe.
Still, these thoughts get interrupted. They’re always pulled back by life.
Because I also think about other things. How to be a good partner. Whether it’s the right time to become a mother. Whether I’ll find someone who can offer lasting emotional fulfillment. How to retire early. How to make the most of the resources I have now. All of these questions — about survival, emotion, relationships, identity — they take up so much space in my mind.
And once you start asking yourself how to live better, it becomes almost impossible to ask questions like: what is the world, really? What is language? What lies beyond knowledge itself?
That’s the real tension of it all.
Ideals always seem to shimmer far away like a mirage.
But in the end, it’s still your own two feet
that have to carry you through uneven roads,
before you can turn that mirage into a city that actually stands.
