Preface

A good life isn’t necessarily a life of material abundance. It’s about finding your own rhythm and your own freedom. — I May Be Wrong

Walking through the deep night, if I look up I can still catch a few scattered stars, twinkling. In the last two weeks I’ve averaged finishing a book every five days — The Neapolitan Novels, Bright Night, Confessions of a Wicked Woman (which really should be titled “The Long Afternoon”). Reading them, something deep landed: womanhood is a condition. They’re all novels, set in different eras, different countries, different social backgrounds — but in how they write the unique kinship between women, the way women hold each other up and recognize each other, and in how they write the trauma women endure under patriarchy and male chauvinism, the books resemble one another extraordinarily. Reading one of them I could see several others in it. They left the same impression on me — occasional bright spots, but most of the time silent, oppressive.

I recently opened a book that’s something like a spiritual / inner-work title — I May Be Wrong. I’ll probably take it slowly; non-fiction always takes more effort to read. I keep mulling over what kind of life is the one I actually want — do I want to chase what the world calls success, or just live simply? Sometimes I feel like I have no desires at all, just breathing is enough; other times I feel like I should be fighting for something. These two contrary feelings each pull on one end of a rope, neither wins, and I’ve been knotted in this contradiction all the way into my twenty-fourth year on earth. How many more moonrises will I get to see in my life? I could conk out any day and never see the next morning’s sunrise.

Between hustling and praying to the gods, I went with fortune-telling. At the end of 2023, fortune-telling introduced me to a sister-friend, and I asked her to read which city I should work and live in — because Shenzhen had been catastrophically unlucky for me. I got sick every single month and kept handing money over to hospitals, had a week of unexplained bloody stool, knee synovitis. Work wasn’t going great either, and the pay early on was depressingly low. A few days ago she messaged me with my reading for 2025: I’d again be tired from work, the competition would be intense. Isn’t that just a repeat of 2024? I’ve been desperate to break out of that pattern. I don’t quite buy it. Leaving Shenzhen — this fast-paced, ruthlessly pragmatic city — is already in my plans. Is fate set in stone and impossible to change, or can it be changed by what we do? I’m genuinely curious where this thing is going to bend.

You Are Free

Yes, I am free. I can do anything I want, start whenever, stop whenever — I’ve got real control. This week I spent more time sitting at my computer, picking up the basics of front-end. A long time ago I was more interested in building websites than I am now, but I never studied it systematically. After a 30-minute lesson I actually built a website homepage along with the instructor — no backend interaction, but I could roughly read the front-end of various web pages now, and that code I wrote with my own hands. Genuinely satisfying. If I’d practiced programming properly back then, if I’d tried more things then, would I have more options now? Too bad there’s no “if.”

Nostalgia is a man’s Odyssey; escape is an epic written into a woman’s body. This is my second year not going home for Lunar New Year — the main reason is plane tickets are obscene and the whole trip is too expensive. But honestly, my subconscious has been telling me: I don’t want to go back. I can’t fully articulate why. After I left home I almost never think about it. We became family through blood, but we don’t actually know each other’s hearts; the distance between hearts is wide. The occasional phone call ends up in an argument over differences in values, and I’ve used up every cutting word I’ve ever learned to wound my mom in defense of myself. Maybe it’s because I know that no matter what, she’ll forgive me — because I’m her daughter. A few days later, we’ll cautiously, gently start talking on the phone again. So keeping some distance from my mom is the best choice. It preserves the relationship between us to the greatest possible degree and keeps either of us from getting hurt.

It’s Only Love — Don’t Let It Defeat You

Society teaches women everything about a vague, ill-defined love: long for it, give it, receive it. While reading Confessions of a Wicked Woman I came across the line: It’s only love — don’t let it defeat you. Love too is a kind of invisible cage. The point of “don’t let it defeat you” is that we don’t have to obsess over whether we’re loved — by our parents, by our partner, by our friends. It’s only love. What we need more is freedom and power, not to be trapped in a cage built out of love.

What is real love? My love for my mom is wanting her to live for herself; wanting her to call and tell me what she needs so I can go buy it for her. A psychology book I read long ago put it this way: Real love is letting the other person become a better version of themselves; Love is respect, not control.

Nothing Lasts Forever

People come and go, gather and scatter. I’ve never believed anything is eternal — except change itself, because everything is in flux. Human emotions, leaves falling, sun turning to rain — everything is fleeting. When good things happen, I accept them already braced for the worst. Will fate ask for something back in exchange for what it gave me? — that kind of thought. I have a powerful, persistent feeling of not deserving. I don’t know where it came from. My instinct is to read “something good” as a sign of “danger and unease,” and after a stroke of good fortune I’m always uneasy, low-grade panicked, walking on eggshells. What’s the cost going to be? — that’s the first thing my brain reaches for.

In this world full of uncertainty, there’s only one certain thing: we will all die. To put it more delicately, every life has a stopping point. I’ve at least mentally rehearsed dozens of ways to die — natural death at a certain age, choking on food, someone stabbing me from behind, strangulation, drowning, being killed in a random-attack incident, a car accident, a sudden incurable illness, and on and on. After watching too many crime dramas and hearing too many real-world cases, my imagination has expanded without limit. Once I even dreamed of my own funeral. My thoughts about death are tangled — like a pile of yarn balled up on the floor. Where do we go after we die? Is death really the end? It’s all a mystery.

🎨 Books, Film, Music

📕 Books

✨ Videos

Lately I’m hooked on case-breakdown videos — I have to listen to one before bed to fall asleep (a sort of unnamed bedtime ritual).

🎧 Podcasts