A letter to a friend [edited]

19.10.2025

You asked how my summer went… It was a blur of colour and heat. I took in too much and created too little, artistically speaking, and drowned in the beautiful landscapes and architecture. We visited my grandparents’ old village in Nanyang, Henan and it broke my heart. My dad showed us the mountain which was dug up for construction and no longer exists, the river beach he used to play in now gated with metal, the forest which has become a rose field, the elderly woman next door whose children have left to work in the city. Just like in Soul Mountain, a feeling of searching for something that is already vanishing… all this in contrast to the hyper-consumerist city life which is dazzling and vivid and unbearably overwhelming.

Days in England are quiet, pastel, a cool autumn which allows me to think clearly. I’m still processing all the images of my summer - I’d love to say I was able to figure everything out, far away on the other side of the world. But I fall behind with work. I try to get ahead of myself and trip over my own feet. I am scared to ask questions in class. I forget to journal. I don't find enough time to practise piano. I get angry at my parents. I spend too much time on the internet. I feel like a child thrown into the adult world; I look at my friends and think that I should be putting myself out there, meeting more people, learning to drive, drinking more alcohol, finding a part-time job, going clubbing…

Maybe I should be living out the university experience more. But, for now, life seems to me clearer than ever, now that I get to be alone for a good amount of the day. I let the autumn colours sting gently in my eyes. I let myself explore unfamiliar streets. When I'm too tired to read I invent lives for the strangers sitting opposite me on the train back home, and every day I walk across the Thames under a white sky, feeling the pulse of the city. The world sparkles as if I were seeing it for the first time.

I’ve made a new friend in my course too! She’s intelligent and on top of her work (an INTJ!) and likes worldbuilding and writing stories. She is from Turkey and I can’t imagine how big of a change it is to find yourself living alone in a different country - hearing about her life back at home offers me a fresh worldview. I've met coursemates and lecturers who are wonderfully passionate about this degree, and it's been so motivating.

I am trying to love computer science. "At the end of the day your degree subject doesn't really matter" but I can’t help searching for something human in what seems so artificial and inaccessible. Recently inspired by computer art again - Cybernetic Serendipity, divine machinery, spending obscure hours wandering in the graveyard that is the Geocities archive… it might be a superficial interest at first, but I tell myself that meaning will always reveal itself if I look hard enough. I can’t give up before I’ve even started.

Like many people my age, I search for my identity. Something unsettling I read recently: "I am not me. I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am."

A terrifying and vulnerable thing, the fact that if I continue hiding behind this mask I’ll eventually forget what was behind it. That identity isn’t some solo project I can work on alone but rather formed on external relationships. To exist in the world I might have to share myself with it.

It all comes down to creation, doesn’t it?

I am not making enough art and it’s making me wallow in self-pity again. School enforced some sort of creative schedule: I was composing regularly, writing essays, making art for school projects and for friends. I will not succumb to the weight of my unrealised potential. Sundays have become an “artist” day - where I forget about my degree and sit down with my projects and lose myself in that flow-state again, like I'm doing right now. Art seems to be the cure to all my problems, and I keep forgetting. Perhaps by writing this I’m tracing over sketch lines of myself until they become clear.

_

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

"High city hills! Great marvels of architecture that the steep slopes secure and make even greater, motley chaos of heaped up buildings that the daylight dapples with bright spots and shadows - you are today, you are me, because I see you, you are what you want to be tomorrow, and I love you from the deck rail as when two ships pass, and there's a mysterious longing and regret in their passing."

Connections

I envy people who seem to have such connected lives. The signs make sense. Their experiences, interests, fears, personality, it all seems to write itself like a story, a development, a source of perpetual growth. The pieces fit together in the puzzle. I'd always dreamt of a storybook life, wishing that all these experiences and memories would mean something. But life isn't a novel. Things don't make sense. I can't make sense of myself, and I don't know where I'm going. I feel so disjointed from reality, like I'm living a separate life to the one inside my head.

But... maybe that's the beauty of it all. The tangled threads of and relationship and feeling. That's a story in itself. And even if the story of my life isn't a masterpiece, I'm still trying to make connections, you see.

_

Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian

"To talk about a mixture of history and legend is how folk stories are born. Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative. Reality can't be verified and doesn't need to be, that can be left for the "reality-of-life" experts to debate. What is important is life. Reality is simply that I am sitting by the fire in this room which is black with grime and smoke and that I see the light of the fire dancing in his eyes. Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can't be related to another person. All that needs to be said is that outside, a mist is enclosing the green-blue mountain in a haze and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a swift-flowing stream."

_

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

"Brief dark shadow of a downtown tree, light sound of water falling into the sad pool, green of the trimmed lawn - public garden as twilight sets in: you are in this moment the whole universe for me, for you are the entire contents of my conscious sensation. All I want from life is to feel it being lost in these unexpected evenings, to the sound of other people's children playing in gardens like this one, fenced in by the melancholy of the surrounding streets and surmounted, beyond the trees' tallest branches, by the old sky where the stars are again coming out."

xhs comment on 2000s nostalgia

"我仿佛看见我老婆正爬在窗户边听磁带呢"

"I seem to see my wife crawl onto the windowsill, to listen to a cassette tape."

_

The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

"I love all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love, and perhaps also because nothing is worth a human soul's love, and so it's all the same - should we feel the urge to give it - whether the recipient be the diminutive form of my inkstand or the vast indifference of the stars."

On the way home from school

On the way home from school, I would pass by an apartment window where a life-sized toy dog was facing the outside. Under his marble gaze the motorway stretched out on all sides, pulsing day by day. He’s no longer there. I hope, perhaps clasped under someone’s arm, or from inside a clear plastic bag, about to be packed away in the boot of a car, he was able to get a taste of that open sky he watched for so long.

_

Translated from a comment on 小红书

It was pouring down endlessly on me, who had no umbrella or anything. I fell defenselessly in love with you.

A Painting of Spring

In the morning,
you draw a painting of spring
And you tell me
We’re all alone, in the end
Your smile
momentary like water
So here I am.
Your silent portrait
close to me, still
Letting go.

Princess Line

Text from Papa Told Me, Episode 9

In Matoba's family, there is only a king and a princess.

"...Or rather - "

A princess and a servant.

"That's wrong!"

--

She must be at school by now.

Is she climbing up the hill?

Leaving home,

Going down the subway staircase, riding the escalator,

Walking down the passageway, riding the train, getting off it and running up the stairs, passing the crosswalk in front of the station -

Bumping into a multitude of people.

I have no idea what kind of person is among them.

"It's a miracle."

"It's a miracle."

---

Nobody knows where danger is hidden,

Nobody notices it while you smile, that the heart is hurting.

But there's no way to stop it.

In this world, I thought I could provide a safe place for her as far as my arms can reach,

But that place is getting smaller.

---

It's always difficult to keep your promises. And if you're talking about difficult promises...

My promise with mom certainly was an intensely challenging one.

Damn it, it's very hard for me.

But I have a superpower.

It's that I know you're the only girl in the world who was born with a golden crown -

It's invisible to others, but Dad always sees it in perfect clarity.

Stand proud and hold your head high, so that golden crown won't fall off.

Dad will always watch over you.

Don't you feel a little more reassured?

Figure sketching

There's a beauty to figure sketching in public.

To think that somewhere out there, someone has recorded a fleeting moment of an existence, frozen in space, frozen in time, the eternal memory of a stranger.

R.Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"The wind rises and then falls, then rises and sighs, and falls again... from so many miles away."

飞蛾

"flying swan"
...is what I always thought of.

the moth.

they say
it lives forever in shadow and yearns
forever for light,
blinded by love.

brown paper wings,
charred by flames.

quiet, humble,

earthly creatures.

silent paper wings...

Dandelion tea

On that hazy morning in the beginning of May, you left to harvest dandelions in the rain.

Returning home with raindrops glistening in your hair, you separate the roots, flowers, and leaves. Long, silky leaves; the plants are still young. “Otherwise, the tea will be too bitter”, you tell me.

As you trim the leaves, the water in the pan starts to boil. Steam dances quietly like shadows in the kitchen, colours of mirrors and glass.

You make tea with the flowers, too. A pot full of golden petals, melting into the bubbling water like clouds into rain. Store it in the fridge, to make into sweet and sour iced tea for a bright spring day.

But my favourite is still dandelion root tea. I watch as you cut the brown roots, revealing delicate white flesh. Preheat the oven, carefully spread the roots onto a pan. It is ready in two to three hours; as soon as you open the oven door, the kitchen fills with a warm, earthly scent. Grind into powder, add into hot water, and filter.

Once made, add citrus and honey for a sweeter taste.

The hazy morning in the beginning of May. I still remember. We sit down to drink your dandelion tea, listening to the spring rain.

Slowly, I feel the honeyed flavour bloom in my mouth, and try to hold onto the aftertaste –

A subtle sharpness that lingers like a bittersweet farewell, then disappears like a fleeting memory.

蒲公英茶 （Dandelion Tea）

五月初那个朦胧的早晨，你就出去在雨中采蒲公英。

带回家来，头发沾满了水珠, 你把根，叶和花分开。 又细又长的根, 亭亭玉立的叶子。 “一定要趁蒲公英还没有老去采， 不然泡的茶会太苦”，你对我说。

你一边把叶子切好，一边把水烧开。热水的蒸汽像影子一样舞动， 在厨房里静静的荡漾。把水倒在叶子上，浸泡几分钟，加点柠檬。

你也用蒲公英花沏茶。满满的一锅花朵在热水中像云一样融化。泡完把它放在冰箱里，晴天可以做成酸甜可口的冰茶。

但我最喜欢的还是蒲公英根茶。我看着你把棕色的根切成断，露出纯白色的内部。预热烤箱，小心地把根放在烤盘上。两到三个小时烤完 ; 你一打开烤箱，厨房里就充满温暖而朴实的烤根香味。把根磨成粉，加入热水, 最后过滤。

泡好后，加入柑橘和蜂蜜，以获得更甜蜜的味道。

五月初那个朦胧的早晨。我还记得，听着春雨的声音一起喝了你做的蒲公英茶。

慢慢地，我品尝在口中的微妙甜蜜。 我让那安静的余味留在嘴里 ––

一种淡淡的苦味，像苦乐参半的告别一样挥之不去，又像转瞬即逝的记忆一样消失。

Quiet Life

The sky at night is clear enough for me to see the stars.
In the house down the road she plays the piano.
I'm reminded of the special days by their fireworks.
On sunny days I can see the clouds from my window
and the light glints off the cars and the rooftops.
Such is my quiet life.

Window

Multicoloured windows of the city, like stars in the night sky.

Each a little light.

Each a little life.

Evening

WIP

Up close the streets are loud and uncaring and immediate.

But looking down one evening from the top floor of an apartment building the city from above becomes silent as open sea and delicate as the pumping heart.

I am overwhelmed by the entirety of it all.

I guess you never realise it until you live right within the heart of the city. The multitude of lives around you.

Here a child spreads a mattress on the floor with his mother. A couple stretch out on the sofa. Someone comes into the room to take in the view, then rolls down the blinds and switches off the light. Someone is working late into the night.

A father chases his son around the playground as the mother watches, the late afternoon sun tugging on their shadows. It is hot and humid and the cicadas are louder than ever and there is smoke in the sky and holes in the pavements but still the laughter goes on, the lights continue burning and life is vivid and beautiful.

Once again, I have fallen in love with this world.

Forest

Jeongrye Choi

Does the path leading to one tree
go like this to another?
Does it finally arrive
at all the ultimate trees?

The idea beauty of one tree
is so much like that of another.

No end and no beginning.

Green quivering
for a moment -
whose shadow are you?

tree

droplets
of golden sun
through the branches
above me
light
melting and forming
between the leaves
like underwater shadows

treasure

the wind touches your hair, stretches your shadow

you tell me
there is a treasure in your heart

"...please don't ruin it"
you say

as you lead me,
somewhere faraway, and I am fearless.

but the wind
the wind is rising, and it's time to go back.

look,
the world out here shines bright.

yet,
why do I still sing your song?

wait for me
I'll meet you at the end of the path.

but the wind
the wind is rising

and the wind
the wind is too strong

and where is your shadow?
and where is your heart?
and where is your treasure?

and I
can't seem to find you anymore.