I had wanted to begin this series for a long time. I kept talking myself into it, and kept not starting. Part of it was laziness, part of it was never having time I could truly give to it; and on the occasions I did try, what came out never quite matched what I had in mind. Knowing that others might read it made me more careful still: every word would need weighing, every detail refining. The hesitation went on for a long while, until recently, when I finally began building this website.

I have always been drawn to writing that is expressive and driven by story. As a child, I was a TV kid. In my kindergarten years I lived with my sister and my grandmother, and we mostly watched whatever she was watching, which usually meant the overwrought eight o'clock soap operas. I understood very little of them, yet I found them thrilling. How could adults' feelings turn so suddenly, and so violently? (If you have seen Love or anything like it, you will know what I mean.) My sister and I would act the scenes out afterwards, making little props, scraping together whatever costumes we could, and performing them with all the drama we could summon.

Perhaps it is simply that I have always needed to express myself. With the things I care about, I tend to be open and sincere. I once tried, quite naively and in complete earnest, to share everything I had learned with the people around me. Slowly I realised that not only did few of them listen, but I almost never met anyone who truly understood me. For years, I hardly found a single such person. So I put that part of myself away, somewhere deep inside.

The real seed of my writing was planted in middle school. In primary school, keeping a diary had felt like an unbearable chore. In middle school, our Chinese teacher asked us to write a short essay every day. At first it was a nightmare; everyone complained about the workload, and so did I. We were, after all, inside the cage of China's exam-oriented education, where nothing was approached from a human point of view. Everything existed to serve grades and exams, and even the way we thought was shaped by them.

Over time, though, the writing itself began to win me over. Middle school was also where I first saw how cruel people could be, and watched the poison of that system seep into everyone around me. No one could be trusted; asking for help brought only mockery or slander. It marked me deeply. What I had was an A4 notebook, a place where I could write freely without caring how anyone would react. In it I could say whatever I wanted, and condemn the injustice I saw. It was then that I began to understand the Chinese writer Lu Xun far more deeply, and my reading turned towards satire. That notebook became my refuge for free thought and expression. Writing already meant something quite different to me than it did to my classmates.

In high school, what little freedom I had shrank further still. It was like being moved from a wildlife park into an even smaller cage. There was almost no time outside of study. Everyone had it drilled into them that grades were everything, and that the college entrance exam would decide their life. Entertainment did not exist; even reading outside the syllabus was considered irrelevant to study, and therefore forbidden. I was lucky that my Chinese teacher, Miss Wang, was open-minded, and she came to influence me greatly. On the very first day, she recommended a long list of books. I was not much of a reader in the usual sense, but perhaps her gentleness made me trust her enough to take her advice. For the first time in a long while, I asked my mother to help me find those books, and I read every one of them carefully, to the end.

In the dormitory, we had one free hour during the midday break, and it became my secret hour of peace. My way of thinking changed a great deal in that period. I would finish a book in a day or two and begin the next at once, and this went on for months. I came to understand critical literature more deeply, no longer only the obvious satire I had found in Gulliver's Travels in middle school. I still remember A Tale of Two Cities vividly: the quiet humanity of a man giving his life for love moved me to tears, and I even dreamt of the other fates the story might have held. I also read books I only half understood at the time, such as Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, 1984 and Brave New World, along with history such as Tang Degang's From the Late Qing to the Early Republic.

These books pointed me in a new direction, one I knew the people around me could not see. Then, in my second year of high school, the pandemic arrived and classes moved online. Much of my reading time became time for films, and that turned out to be a major turning point in my life. I watched two or three films a day. I could name almost every Hollywood actor and director, and even composers like James Horner. I worked my way back through the decades, from the 1990s to the 1960s. (I will write more about my film journey in another post.) If that first year of reading had opened the door to another world, that year of films was my convertible in it, letting me roam freely and go wherever I liked.

I have often wondered why the move to film happened so naturally, and why my passion for it burned so strongly. I think it is because reading and film are, at heart, the same thing: both are forms of expression. And expression is what I care about most. I need a way to show myself, to make my voice heard, to create. I do not necessarily need recognition, or for anyone to agree with me. It is a little like Rupert in The King of Comedy: I want people to see me, my personality, my soul, the things I want them to see, and, if possible, for that to bring about some influence, or some change.

In 2019, something happened that changed my outlook entirely. The moral sense that China's education had erased came back to me, and for the first time I became aware of responsibility. Are we really powerless? What can I do? How can I help? My goals and direction in life began to take shape, and I began to understand what life, and living, might mean. This became the belief that later carried me to the UK, and has shaped how I have grown here.

I believe there are many people who feel as I do but remain unseen. I want to speak, not only for myself, but for them, and for everyone who needs and deserves to be noticed. In this blog I will share design-related work, but also my observations, my understanding of things, and the stories of the small, easily overlooked lives around us.

Because we are made of both feeling and reason, we respond, almost without choosing to, to what others live through and feel. We reflect. We are moved. And that, I believe, is the reason this blog exists.