Remove a man from WILLIAM LOWE? Sounds like a tree (6)
2026-02-07
It made Plato uncomfortable, but, among other reasons, I love to write because when I am "finished" then I may finally start to forget.
2026-02-04
A few thoughts on Frankenstein.
The North Pole, as it appears in the beginning and end of the novel, functions as a spatial “future”; a place yet undiscovered, to “progress into” (if we are to borrow the Enlightenment concept of time, as progression, as discovery), and as such is filled with “distant inequalities of ice” and “darkness and distance” (25; 225) or a “dark, shapeless [substance]” (8) to pull from the introduction—it is indistinct, perhaps actually neither/both “future” and “past” (both symbolically and within the reader’s experience of the novel), something yet to be shaped into time. It is also the place where the frame narrator, remarkably similar in ambition to Frankenstein, eventually decides to turn south, or to reject “progression” in order to save his own and other human lives. Thus Frankenstein dies, and his monster dies with him, but they are really rather indistinguishable from one another, the implications of which I will explore in the third paragraph. (Of course, it is worth a note that we have not chosen to leave the North Pole untouched, both literally and metaphorically.)
Switzerland, too, provides an interesting setting: first, as a rare exception among modern nation states, where (as far as I understand) national identity does not require a single, unified language; where the “sublime” mountains (the past, as they have not changed from Frankenstein’s boyhood——and yet still reminiscent of the shapeless “future/past” embodied in the North Pole) stand in contrast to the changing cities, and as shown in the cottage family, to contain the “Orient,” the “west,” and a history as told through a book on empires. In other words, the setting is able to “Frankenstein” together several different “times”: Orient-West; nature-man; boyhood-adulthood; empire-nation; of “blasted trees” and “exploded systems” against modern scientism (and even the the ice age is referred to; the seasons were not always what they are), and these all unfold together, non-linearly, messily. The language is also worth a thought: Frankenstein speaks in a French accent, convincing enough that the blind De Lacey asks whether he is French——the “mother language,” as it is known in the west, contains a biological marker, a national marker, and yet here it fails, he learns his first language as a second language: another stitched together “appendage” on the monster (not at all an unfamiliar experience for many today, or for me).
Frankenstein’s monster draws obvious parallels to the creation of a novel (as a “novel” new written form which is characterized by cannibalizing other written forms, such as the letter, and the poem, to name a few; disparate lifeless material which is arranged in the form of life——that Frankenstein asks that his narrative would not be “mutilated” is rather telling, as the novel is by nature a series of mutilations, a Frankenstein's monster, creation-by-destruction), and Shelley certainly seems to delight in this point: “Invention […] does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself” (8). But Frankenstein's monster is also similar to the atomic bomb, generative AI, modern science, and most certainly to us (as I have hinted at, at least in the way of language): why stop at “man’s quest for knowledge” or “modern technology” when these also make “man”? In this fashion, Frankenstein refers to himself and his monster alternatively as murderer and the means of murder (and as master and slave, or insulter and revenger, or even, toward the end, pursuer and pursued)——and we ourselves do not distinguish in name between Frankenstein and his creature——as such, they are both at the same time, they are the dialectic of the enlightenment/endarkenment, and the boundary between man and monster-man grows less and less clear, and instead, it seems, they create each other.
2026-02-03
理论不是“越新越好”（参见《宅兹中国》）；我想，某种程度上，人们对新理论的狂热与追求，或许和现代学术规范有关，也就是对于“论点”的结构性要求。这样的学术规范，鼓励我们找到能以“论点”的形式清晰表述的创新点，或者“颠覆”前人的理论。可是，它很容易出现一个问题：如果不审视自己所回应的问题背后的理论框架是否成立或适用，就只能在已有的二元论中打转，甚至将错就错。如果打一个比喻，就是用同样的刀来切同一块，只是切法略有不同，但或许应该换一把刀，并找到全新的“切入点”。
（在此顺便提及，“知识不是用来理解的，而是用来切的”，是多么准确、多么令人心寒的一句话。不论一段历史叙述的延续性如何，抑或其完整性如何，它必然蕴藏着无数断裂，这是历史叙事乃至知识本身的本质。以葛兆光教授的论述来看，问题恰恰在于如何“切”。然而，不管怎么“切”，都不可避免地会产生“断裂”。）
2026-02-01
I do not understand people who try to talk about an idea in definitive terms without having read what other people have said about it. At least, trying to read. Or acknowledging that other people have probably thought about this before. Ah, am I the people whom I do not understand…? (It becomes oppressive.)
2026-01-29
A while ago, I replaced one of my lightbulbs with a red light; when I turn it on, all my red ink disappears, and the books become clean again. (I do not notice when the red ink stains the duvet cover.) I wonder how many other red lights I have forgotten about.
2026-01-28
A textbook entry on amoebas remains some of the most beautiful words I have ever read. (Recently, an algae bloom in my mind...)
2026-01-27
I am still searching for a way to say “it is all connected” without sounding insane. (Maybe it is just to send a “link” to the Laozi, or the Anaximander fragment, or both.)
I remember when my advisor smiled and said something like that to me, in a hall, in between events, at night——as if it were the cheapest, most worthless expression and yet the greatest joy——of course, that is what it is.
2026-01-26
It goes without saying that I have never died prior to this moment, but it seems I must say it; I have been pretty close to it, three times, when I went under anesthesia.
The first time, one hour, was not a very good death; that is, I woke up as the surgeon was still busy in my oral cavity, and I listened carefully as he instructed the assistant how to pull out teeth in black-and-white color. (You wiggle back and forth.) The middle time is not worth words. The last, the most recent, and the longest (five-and-a-half hours!)——well, that last one certainly finished something off, or someone off, or shaved off (my IQ——or my bones).
For months afterward, I possessed my body, or someone else’s body, my memories were mine but I knew that they truly belonged to someone else, and that she had blacked-out and died. Now, as two lines grow infinitely closer to each other, I have mostly forgotten the distinction.
2026-01-20
In Tokyo I entered into a frosted glass box (on wheels). A former classmate was the only conductor between me, the frosted glass, and the rest of the world, with a few exceptions: the pretty milk tea lady, who interrupted the conduction to explain the menu in a perfect American accent, better than his, and Yokohama Chinatown, where I became the conductor, although it was a choice, and not real frosted glass (maybe glass with frost).
“Japanese people...” he said, again and again, and I would never know if he was speaking about Japanese people or about himself and myself.
2026-01-19
We are both very selfish people, or so he says, but in my selfishness I would like to think I have great selflessness.
2026-01-14
到了上海，我竟然一直在想北京。因为我是第一次来上海，时间也就三天四夜，我好像有些怯于下笔，也就只能借着北京来写上海。
北京历经沧桑，北京处处都是过去式。你若坐在滴滴快车上，低头刷手机，偶尔抬起头看看窗外，也许会看到元大都城墙残存的小土丘、公路边雍和宫的画栋雕梁，或在长安街上，与毛主席对视，最后在光鲜亮丽的国贸下车。北京看重的是“城”，而不是“人”，它时时刻刻在提醒你，人的终点不过是尘土。而这一点，反倒是一种自由。
2026-01-12
“失联”的前提条件是原本有过联系，而且应该是长期的联系，仅仅一次见面自然不能算。但是，现在大不一样了：我们有电话，有网络，有微信，真正的“分离”很难实现，而正是因为没有“分离”，真正的“团圆”也在悄然消失，二者密不可分。也许正因为我渴求团圆，我才会如此喜欢分离。有一次，和那位如今早已失联的朋友告别了，我从北京飞回美国，以为分得干干净净，谁知他第二天竟给我发了微信。我那时为什么会感到失望？我想，他不应该这么做。我们本该“分离”。可我并不觉得那是“失联”。分离总是带着团圆的希望。所以，现代性失联也许就是，你明明有能力见到一个人，并且期望能够见到他，可怎么也见不到他。现在很少有真正毫无联系的人。
2026-01-11
“你是外国人还是中国人？” I never thought I would ever be asked this question, because I am blindingly white, although I suppose it is winter and my hair is darker than normal (“栗子色” I am told---at least, that is color people ask for when they go to dye their hair). But I have been asked this question (or some variation on it) repeatedly.
This question, or the questions which are implicated in this question, should probably be easy to answer, and I do answer it easily, but I always come away with a grab bag of uneasy questions.
The 新疆人, whom I do not know personally, lives freely in my mind, as a kind-of alternative me, someone which others might see or hear in my face and voice. I have an infinite amount of “alternative me” and I seem to make a new one with every interaction. I have not ever slipped into the habit of lies, but the border is a gradient, not a line. (As my friend YC, with a similar tendency, illustrates---he pretends to be over thirty so that others, older than him, will pour him alcohol.)
2026-01-10
Today I discovered the silliest duck, and also that red pandas walk like old arthritic cats.
2026-01-10
模仿，模仿，一切都是模仿。“It is all about accuracy.” (I don’t know who I am quoting or whether I read this sentence in English or Chinese or whether I actually thought this sentence, or dreamed this sentence, myself.)
Recently (that is, over a period of months or maybe years) it is the simple statements (those which I have probably heard before, which border on truisms) which have the profoundest effect on my mind. I believe that these statements are the hardest to understand. Maybe the complicated statements pave the way for the simplest.
2026-01-07
今天又一次被一个老太太问路，这次倒是帮上了忙（上次初来乍到，又赶时间，只能说“不知道”）。她恰好也要在朝阳门上车，我指着方向，说，您可以跟我走。她说，好的，谢谢你，你哪里人呐（我戴着口罩，她直直盯着我的眉头看），又叽叽喳喳说了几句我听不懂的方言，笑着走开了，可方向不对，我却没提醒。几秒后，我回头看了一眼，她已经又去向一个年轻女孩问路。哎呀，差点被拐卖了，幸好被我的高且挺的鼻子救了。
2026-01-06
我最近一直在写人。原因很多，比如北京处处都是故人的形影，比如我的汉语写作水平有限——就不一一列举了。
上次写到了一位失联的朋友，这次就试着写出另一位吧。我最近想到她，是因为我那张不可退改的机票终究还是退改了，损失惨重，但那已经是另一个故事，或者说，还没有成为故事的碎片，而其中一个碎片就是：我本来要在东京转机，停留三个小时，现在却变成了四日游。
她跟我一个初中，后来她跳级，一跳便跳进了大学，却是一所无人知晓的大学。不如不跳，我当时想。她是否也这么想，我无从得知，可后来她转学去了东京，前后一算，她读了整整六年的本科。所以，我每次想到东京，就想到她。
初中的她是一个暴躁易怒的少女，头发暗红，步伐沉重。（我忘不掉她走路的姿势。她不像一个十三四岁的女孩子，更像一个心怀怨怼、目中无人的大汉，像影视剧里的鲁智深。）可我那时觉得，她还是很漂亮的，是一个让人怜惜的女孩子。
我们班不大，大概只有十二个孩子，所以大家平时只能好好相处，即便吵了架，也谈不上排挤或孤独。（当然，我是孤独的，但那是我自己的事，与同学无关。）原因很简单：人太少了。可不知道从什么时候开始，她好像自己把自己排除在外了。她不喜欢我们班里的人，大概是嫌他们太无知。其实，我们都很无知，再早熟的孩子也不例外。只是，我们并未察觉这一点。
那时的我，还在学着如何伪装成一个正常人，她连伪装都不屑去学。（我那时还没有接受，我就是一个奇怪的人，到哪儿都显得格格不入。我不适合过普通人的日子，大概也不能。）
前两天，我翻了翻和她的旧聊天记录，她都是三言两语，偶长篇大论，越到后面就越简短，直到最后，她再也没有回我。其中有一条，我印象最深：“他们跟我说话就好像我们是好朋友似的。”在她眼里，别人的善意就是烦，是高攀，是试图拖她下坠。换做现在的我，也许能劝她几句，可那时，我只是敷衍地回了一句，“真讨厌。还好你以后见不到他们了。”
…
她的姥爷是中国人，也许是武汉人---我隐隐有这样的印象，但已经记不清了。红发白肤的她，却并不像人们想象中的混血儿。我知道，那时，她因为这件事而苦恼。
据我观察，对她来说，中文一直是一个烫手的东西：初中时，她选的是西班牙语，没有选中文；高中时，她曾在西安留学了一个暑假，可她一回来，竟然告诉我，她在寄宿家庭里几乎一直用英语交流，中文并没学到多少；后来去了东京，学的自然是日语。我听说她毕业后，就搬到了台北，不知道那门烫手的语言学得怎么样了。
我考进了几所顶尖大学，她没有；这本不是什么值得在意的事，毕竟美国大学的录取标准并不单凭考试成绩，所以被选中的人，什么样都有。我的SAT只错了一题，但我想，她或许觉得，我并不比她聪明，不配那个位置。（至于她是否比我聪明，我不知道，也不觉得重要。）
上次见她，我告诉她两件事：第一，我开始学中文了，第二，我申请了一些较好的大学，希望能考上。她并不高兴。从那天起，她再也没有回过我的消息。
2026-01-05
I think that today was the first time someone has called me 才女. (Apologies if you, the reader, previously thought that I was a man. But perhaps I am just someone who can be called 才女. Well, I did not mislead you. It is all just unicode characters, anyway.) That is a hard word to swallow. It also comes attached with the long name of my school, which makes it even heavier, bulkier; and my school could have been others, shorter, but I made certain choices and so now it is still this school, and apparently I am a 才女 from this school. I don’t know about that. (It isn’t that I regret those choices, but that those choices remind me that I cannot experience everything I desire at every time). I like what 田晓菲 said about that word.
Anyway, a long time ago, in another school, when we were made to describe ourselves in three adjectives, I, an asshole, wrote: “3-dimensional, has skin, indescribable.” Only two of those might be true, but I do wish that it were all.
2026-01-04
听说北京人艺的票很难抢，我朋友却抢到了。不过，“抢”这个词也许不太准确。
咱们要去哪儿？我问他。去后台，我得看我爸。行。又要见家长了。
2026-01-04
“咱们的—”他看了看我的脸，那是一张白人的脸。我笑了。他接着说， “北京的—”
2026-01-01
这次来北京，是一次毫无目的的漫游。
这几天，我偶然走过许多熟悉的地方，让我想到了一位半年前失联的朋友。因为我平时回消息很慢，我失联的朋友不少，但这位不一样，他是为数不多没有回我消息的人。
我们是在北京认识的。他的文字很幽默，也很流畅。我记得第一次打开他发来的链接时，我是多么的忐忑，因为我知道，如果他的散文写得平庸、浅薄，我们大概也就只能是泛泛之交。我读不懂那样的人，也不相信他们能读懂我。可结果，他的文字别有趣味，然后我发现：文字好，才可怕。
那是因为我从小就不知道什么叫“深交”。这多半和我的表达方式有关：我是一个无法通过口头语言表达自己的人。假如有人观察了我整整一个月的时间，把我的一举一动尽收眼底，他大概对我是什么样的人还会一无所知。也许在别人听来，这是一个极其荒谬的想法，但我相信这是真的。所以我读懂了他的文字，却迟迟没有把自己写的任何一篇给他看。（真的是这样吗？还是说，那时根本就没有什么拿得出手的“作品”可以给他看？我记不清了。）
我上次见到他是在英国。那时，我已经收到了三所学校的博士录取通知，理应感到高兴，但我只是疲惫，想停下来、想思考、想隐退。
三月的某一个下午，我们面对面坐在剑桥的一处咖世家，我抿着廉价的低因拿铁，说，有时候，只是别人的一句话，就可以让你对他彻底失望，不再当他是朋友。说完以后，我才意识到这是一句多么残忍的话。不对，我又改口，也许并不是那样的吧。但他回答说，没错，就是那样的。
那天我就一直在想，到底是他说的一句话，还是我说的一句话呢？又是哪一句话？（我很确定，那句话已经被我们其中一人说了。）可想了半天，竟还是想不出。
总之，他人不错，就是有点太像我爸，每次都会往最糟糕的方向想。（毕竟都失联半年了，总得找个理由不惦记他。）
2025-12-31
今天所看到的平凡人事物：in a 茶姬, a young couple signing a contract for a house, and he uses her liquid lipstick to press his fingerprints (I suppose blood is not very fashionable now); at the highest point in 日坛公园, three men fly their kites out from the old pavilion into the new city skyline, and there are kilometers and centuries between them; a bit farther down, I see someone who has a similar face to mine: 逆号，我们是外国记者，she says in her warbling tones, broken, and he translates her Chinese into better Chinese—naturally they are asking sensitive questions about a certain island that begins with a T (can they think of nothing else?), and the 老太太 gives a full interview before they ask, Would you mind saying this in front of the camera, and she waves her hands and shakes her head and continues her walk down the stone path. (The cameraman---he must be the cameraman, since there are only three of them, and he is neither the reporter nor her Chinese-Chinese translator---studies some hedge, and his camera is nowhere to be seen.)
2025-12-30
昨天有一位朋友开车到机场来接我。不知道是不是因为倒时差带来的疲惫，还是因为16个小时没摄入咖啡因导致的剧烈头疼，但她开车的方式竟是说不出的熟悉。我好像在梦里那样开过车，又或者在游戏里。途中，她时不时注视着屏幕上的高德地图，问我，“这是对的吧？对吧？”（须知，我并不会开车。在美国不会，更何况国内呢。）
她开的是一辆宝马电动车。她说，这车型比国产电动车贵很多很多，所以卖得不好，最后也就被下架，现在算是罕见了。难怪胡同里的老头老太太都盯着她的车看。这儿可以掉头吗？（我不知道。）
…
电动车行驶时几乎没有声音，车外的尘嚣也听起来不真切，像在海水下游泳时听到的声音，也像小时候调皮捂住耳朵时所听到的声音。几年前，某一天凌晨，我第一次乘坐电动车到机场，一路上便朦朦胧胧地想，要是可以一直活在这样的声音里，那该多好啊。可我毕竟还是到了机场，下了车。
2025-12-29
This is what happens when you buy non-refundable airline tickets in a post-surgery fugue. More on that later.
2025-12-29
The last two weeks were, among other things, mostly filled with pressure-cooker paper writing. I finished footnotes on the final final paper over 30,000 feet in the air. (I am writing now from China.)
I actually do not want to talk about my papers (which, if it is a subject at all, is a subject for another day), but the pressure-cooker always makes me reconsider just about everything in my life; some of the smaller things, like “I should have done physics” or “what if I had taken the Harvard offer?”* lead to bigger things… and I am rambling now, not in the cute way, but in the medically-cannot-have-more-tea way.
The conclusions are pretty simple, I guess: first, I do not want internet in my home anymore; and second, I do not actually enjoy buying things and especially do not enjoy owning lots of things, and maybe that is more normal than modern America makes it seem. I do not want a big house or a mortgage or whatever. I think my maximum operable space is probably around 500–1000 square feet. I do not want to use credit cards. I do not, and have never wanted, a six step skincare routine with a laundry list of questionably-sourced ingredients to absorb indiscriminately into my body. (I would rather exercise, not eat sugar, and avoid histamines.) I have actually faced a lot of judgement from certain people for no longer expressing desire in these things. In fact I am more so afraid—how could you not be when faced with the Storage Unit? (That horrible middle class American dream-turned-nightmare.) A house which is too big but somehow you always say is too small; a leased car, or two, or three; loans; an expensive bag which you must always worry about spilling liquids in… I can make an exception for good groceries and books---that is, in my mind, proper nourishment.
I promise this should all make sense. Freedom is maybe something like a lack of blockage (达), which, unlike what some people I have encountered seem to think, does not mean that you are free to commit villainous deeds or abuse others or that you need to be at least a millionaire. I fully believe it is possible to be a person who experiences this openness, this freedom, in most situations. But the more your life stiffens, the more you desire, the more you purchase, the more your time is eaten by the algorithm—that is when you become poor, and you look around and see no more paths (穷).
Xunzi put it pretty well: “君子役物，小人役于物。”
You need both 1) a good understanding 2) money, because money grants you time, which is freedom, but if you do not have a good understanding, then no money will ever be enough. I have seen it again and again—including, even, in my younger self, who wore secondhand Prada, but thankfully is dead now.
*I made the right choice, for a lot of reasons, promise.
2025-12-27
There is this guy who texts me every month to ask if I am coming back to Beijing. We met the day before I left last year, and yes I am coming back to Beijing, but I will not tell him; he never met me, he met something like a character from《封锁》and the only difference is that he remembered my contact information.
2025-12-16
The website goes silent as I, a freshly transformed paper writing machine (PWM), descend into FINALS. I will begin my human rehabilitation program in a week or so.
2025-12-12
It would be silly to watch a slightly more intelligent dolphin look down on other dolphins, or for two intelligent dolphins to belittle each other. I am sure we are all someone else’s dolphins.
2025-12-10
Recently I have become interested in the United States, but as a foreigner would.
2025-12-10
2025-12-9
Very-slight-almost-imperceptible intimations of violence: in the morning, I dropped my hairdryer in a filled bathtub; at dinner, I watched a video of my friend shooting an M16 in New Jersey, and twice that day I visited a building which had been recently burnt and blackened and it was only on the second visit when I noticed DANGER ASBESTOS (or, ASBESTOS DANGER) on the police tape.
2025-12-07
The sirens start (like a pack of coyotes, like calls to prayer)
2025-12-06
Yesterday I met with Dr. B. We talked about the Youth (which is actually my generation, but recently I really feel very old). It’s the usual: they don’t read, they don’t think, they use ChatGPT, they can’t even realize what it is that they’re missing or what it is that they’re refusing to engage with … It’s true though. I know we’re losing it because I also grew up in a place where education was a footnote to making money.
They don’t understand that generative AI is predictive, which means that it “writes” based on writing, based on our current paradigms, our current epistemology, our current knowledge; how can we be sure that any of this is “true” to begin with? Imagine, for a moment, that we had generative AI in the 14th century, and think about how it would answer your questions. (The absolute dogmatic confidence that we have in modern knowledge is astounding.) I could go on, about the MIT study which showed that AI usage negatively affects brain interconnectivity even after the user stops, or about how the smart kids have better chance of using AI to effectively game the system (no equalizing here), but I won’t; I’ve said it too many times.
(I try to remind myself it is always good to ask the questions, "Why? To what end?")
2025-12-05
I have lived on third floors, fourth floors, fifth floors, and once even the eleventh floor, but I hated that—though I could and did run up and down the stairs, for all pragmatic purposes, there was still an elevator in between me and the ground. The elevator would break; stop in-between floors, refuse to open, even once, as I was moving out, impatiently snap shut (despite my leg) and swipe my things away. When the elevator went down with me in it, I knew it would inevitably go up again, with me in it, and when it went up again, still with me inside, I knew it would inevitably go down, with me, and that this would continue endlessly until eventually I died or the elevator died or I moved out. (Stairs are different: I can stop the cycle, I can go up, I can go down, I can go sideways, or knock on a neighbor’s door, or look through the trash, or pause at the window.) I also lived across from the elevator; most people might hear their neighbors shouting at their computer or (rarer in this day and age) another person, but I heard the elevator. I did not like the elevator.
I have also lived in a house, my parents' house, which used to be my house as well. When I was a child, they put a glass door in the back and I had nightmares about it for weeks or maybe months. Recently my father expressed interest in replacing the entire back wall with glass, and I told him that someone would throw bricks into it. He asked who would do such a thing and I said me, myself.
2025-12-04
Underlining in red pen---a tremor in my wrist, a bump on the train, and how quickly it turns into a strikethrough! (There are milimeters between approval and disapproval?)
2025-12-04
Something about PhDs: basically, you can be very abnormal and even totally unable to do dishes like a regular person (in my observations, this is either: obsession with dishes, or ignore dishes; if I ever find a PhD who is normal about dishes I will be concerned about their dissertation), but the PhD functions as a get-out-of-jail-free card. I think. The kitchen sink is a microcosm. Now you are just an eccentric.
2025-12-03
Now and then I remember Harold Bloom’s only novel. I think it’s worth talking about. It’s really, really terrible: sometimes I read it aloud to my family or English-speaking friends and we laugh and then close the PDF on the second or third page, or skip to the middle and laugh some more (and then we close the PDF).
Whatever you might think about Bloom, and I will say I probably agree with him on more points than most do, it is a good reminder that there is something very different between scholarship and fiction (for all their similarities). He obviously does not write in the style of American illiterate (that terrible style of the overly confident adult child), but there is something extremely dead in his fiction.
2025-12-03
If I were smarter, I probably wouldn’t write anything at all. Sometimes I think the creative impulse is just the death throes of someone realized their mortality, but has not quite figured out what to do with it. When I make things I probably feel that I extend myself, that I create a new universe, one which can be lived again and again, perpetually recreated and revised and represented in the minds of others, and yet at the same time I surrender my limited time to assemble some (in)organic material, or bytes on my computer, into some lifeless design. So if I were smarter, I'd probably give it up.
2025-12-02
Occasionally, when I have guests, I wish I could put a curtain over my bookshelves.
2025-12-02
Yesterday the consulate was mostly filled with Chinese-Americans, some Indian students, and a few white boyfriends. Eventually, an older white man named Jim sat down next to me and began to scroll his 朋友圈. I cannot help but wonder if we would have talked, or someone would have talked to me, if there were no phones. Even now, sometimes older people start talking to me unprovoked, and I think, how strange, and then remember that it is me who has become strange, the eternal stranger, because I grew up post 9/11, in this world where every stranger is scared of strangers, and so I didn’t speak to anyone until my number was called and stranger #194 went up to submit passport #194.
When I came back, my cat started to vomit on the carpet, so I directed him to the cover of my university’s HR benefits. It was a success, but I guess I will never figure out what those benefits are; well, I’d rather have a clean carpet.
2025-12-01
Sometimes, when I am walking around the city, I smell something so similar to a scent I have smelled before, that I have to stop walking, because my vision is taken over by memory, and I am there and no longer here, if only for a moment. (It happens with sound, too, but not nearly as often.) Some places I have been transported back to: the wooded area around my grandparent’s island home at dusk, with hydrangeas; underneath the pine tree in Sasha’s backyard, having lost something; a hutong in Beijing, where it was raining, and there were two of us, but I only had the one umbrella---predictably, I didn’t share, not because I am rude but because I thought they’d rather get rained on; the museum of children, with that sick smell of white bread that I was not allowed to see nor eat; and some where I have forgotten too much to name them, and endless others. I never really know what to do about it.
2025-12-01
I am very cautious about people who pack their sentences with -isms and -ologies and names of dead men. I call it “术语堆砌法.”
2025-12-01
(Re-)exposure to something cruel and/or violent does not just force you to face something already within yourself, but it can seem that way, and some people like to pretend it is this way. If you are not careful, it is more like a growing tumor, or a knife, dragged across an old scar, widening it.
2025-12-01
A silly problem with an impossible premise: I do not like the idea of having a style, somehow, I want to be like tap water; style seems to be a perversion. I can’t shake it. I used to get nightmares about tattoos. It’s the same thing.
2025-11-30
Do you remember the Onion video about the man who studied anteaters?
2025-11-30
I promised myself I would write more about my own experiences, not just my thoughts, but it is possible that my thoughts are just my experiences: I am almost always "out of the moment." Anyway, I went to the Met today. The weapons exhibit did not have any guns past the mid 19th century... Probably it would be too uncomfortable to have an automatic machine gun at the end of a long hall of ornate and antique swords, daggers, rifles, etc., but they should really try it.
It may have been my state of mind, but I did not find the newest exhibits very pleasant. I spend too much brain power thinking about the optimal route. I want to read everything, but then I am reminded why I do not like my phone, or too much web-browsing: my brain is shattered with so much information, too discrete, like swiping through posts. Has even the museum become phone-ified? Or is it the audience (me) who is the problem, and the museum was really always like this? (It is probably a bit of both. The museum was always a discontinuous presentation of items and information. But we all have internet brain now.)
2025-11-30
我从小就是一个表达欲很强烈的人，可惜我的表达能力一直跟不上。再说呢，我总是在中文和英文之间盘旋、不断失衡，像跷跷板的两端一样。
A thought: “the wind is really big today”（今天风很大）
2025-11-30
I am an elephant. (We are all elephants, and we are all blind men. A blind man could spend a month with an elephant and still not know where his elephant liver is, or if he has a liver, or if it is soft.)
2025-11-29
Reading Gaskell in between Brontë and Dickens is like putting the bread between two real courses (lobster risotto and baked Alaska).
2025-11-29
A novel is like a building, but construction is not so easy, and seeing is not so simple. Best way to understand, then, is to write yourself -- to become a novelist and to experience the "dangers and difficulties of words" (Woolf). Both great perception and great imagination is needed to read; and maybe this is why I do not trust readers who cannot themselves write, because they can only see that the building is made out of bricks, but not the ovens in which they were fired, the source of the clay (perhaps even concrete), the carvings across the lintel, or that I have stolen some bricks from another building, that some are not even bricks...
Reading can become passive (to READ as you would WATCH), but it shouldn't be. Writing demands the mind to be active.
I see different bricks, different entrances and exists, depending on whether my mind is set to scholarship (the production of a paper) or tailored to fiction (the production of a story). And then there is another, which I have not experienced too often, not since K-12, where the novel overtakes me, and I forget that the bricks do not exist, and when I remember my past I must sort through bricks and determine whether they belong to a book-building or a real-building. (But is there really even a strict, or meaningful, difference? And another thing: my dreams are often so mundane that I spend minutes trying to decipher whether they happened or not, and sometimes it is a real experience which I mistake for a dream, until I confirm with another that it had in fact happened. It is without a doubt very jumbled now.) What about painting? Is there a painting mode of reading? (Is this when I pay more attention to white space and the contours of the words and letters rather than their content?)
But worse than all that is complacency.
2025-11-29
Ingestion; I read a book, or media of some sort. Digestion; I think it through while doing nothing. Regurgitation (or something more pleasant); creative output.
I think, through coursework, I have ruined the balance between these three, and I am in a constant state of indigestion. In high school, or even the first two years of college, I did not take my coursework seriously so I could pursue what I wanted. I was not so overwhelmed with new standards and new information and new ideas that it became difficult to work through problems I wanted to work through. Now it takes a long time to finish things, and before I finish I have decided that I need to begin again, because I have ingested too much and I realize the insufficiency of the original. This is good, but too much "food" will kill a man, kill his brain.
2025-11-29
I am glad I know people who will allow me to question the election cycle. It is okay not to have answers.
2025-11-28
But nothing touches at the atomic level! (So I am told)
2025-11-28
Sometimes I get so frustrated with creation: when I think about how the universe will eventually end in heat death (probably; this may be our best hypothesis, but it's all in my head ... never once have I seen something which suggested "heat death" to me, you know? People used to look into the sky and experience the firmament or 分野 or what have you, and now I experience "luminous spheroid[s] of plasma held together by self-gravity," but really we still all just see a bunch of white dots on near-black) or how I will inevitably add to the pile of errors and words and so, so many words and that my "work" will not necessarily be any more universal or less in error than what has come before. But is "universal" really what I want? To make the "universe?" (No.)
I could write more on that, but I won't; I want to talk about things (not) lasting. There is a scene in 三体, on Pluto, when the solar system is about to get super smushed, and they discuss what lasts the longest: not electronics, not paper, but stone carvings... (I want to make video games, but I always keep coming back to words, just words.)
2025-11-28
Started a website so that I can shout into the void and maybe write in more complete sentences; instead of, you know, writing just enough so that I can recover the original thought. (Maybe it will still be that.) I really took "言者所以在意，得意而忘言" and ran with it.
2025-11-27
Thanksgiving dinner: “从来没有人这么想过！” x 15. What to make of this? Why say this?
