I stared at the words I’d written by hand, with the incredulous gaze of a prehistoric time traveler observing the ruins of her own creation—no longer seen as human engineering marvels, but rather Paleolithic relics—unsure of what’s left of me when the algorithms today tell my story better than I can.

I wrote them anyway. I sent them out. And they said, no.

Sometimes I think about running.

Not to a place, but to a feeling.

Somewhere I don’t have to be this person, with these hands, this face, this voice.

I want to unmake myself. To peel back the clunky shell of whatever I’ve become. What would be revealed if I dared to look closer?

I want to unlearn the world. To forget what I've been told to want. To see with my own eyes, what's out there in the dark.

Maybe it's nothing.

Maybe it's everything.

Maybe it's just me:

Small, human, still feeling, still wondering.

And maybe, just maybe, that's enough.

Anqi’s note: This is the first story in a video story series I’m trying out here on The Aftertaste. As I tell my stories, I’ve come to realize the way I relate to the world shifts depending on the moment—sometimes it feels like words, other times, a color gradient, a moving picture, a passing sound, each with its own texture and flow. In this post, I want to show you my world, not just through words, but through visuals and music, too.

You’ll notice that the visuals and the writing don’t always match up exactly, and that’s by design. Each part of the story has something different to say, and I’m curious to see how it all comes together. I’d love for you to join me on this little exploration, and I’m always open to hearing what you think. :)

Where I’d Like to Be Buried

In every leaf—that trembles—In every drop—of dew—

No stone—no marker tall—

Just this green—growing sprawl

Bridal Kiss

Pure as frost, fiery as sin,

Velvet lips sear with embered skin.

She bends to kiss the night’s cold breath,

A bloom of love, a bloom of death.

In darkness, the bride waits,

her vow begins—

the under world calls

where light thins.

Heart of the Forest

Afloat, pulsing, red—

a secret they promise not to spread:

Born of neither light nor name,

the specter comes alive to claim.

And those who gaze upon its grace,

shall find no solace in any place.

For in this heart, the ancient forest

wakes,

and every soul it touches,

takes.

Beneath Midnight Waters

A flicker of silence,  

slipping like a whisper between the teeth  

of orchids, their scales  

peeling moonlight in the hush  

of blue glass.

A keeper of a shrine once told me:  

we bury our gods in bowls,  

and here, beneath the waters,  

they swim, petals & fins,  

throats full of secrets.

I watch them bloom.  

A mouth opens, like an apology,  

but the apology never comes—  

only light, only this  

brief resurrection  

where they turn, iridescent & fragile  

as prayers, their bodies  

bent like reeds  

around an invisible current.

They forget  

their names,  

& I forget the sound  

of mine.

So we are here,  

among reflections,  

each ripple a gesture of mercy  

I can’t understand.

But I see them still,  

the orchids,  

their mouths pink & wild,  

swimming circles  

beneath midnight waters—  

bright, unbroken  

& reaching for the edge  

of something they’ve never seen.

Sputnik Sweetheart

A sigh

unspoken,

where

s t a r s

lie

broken.

One Breath

What is the love language of touch

if not the memory of falling?

Our petals—moonlit pages of an unwritten promise:

When the wind comes, & it will come,

we'll carry each other's ghosts,

we’ll sway, shiver, not as two,

but as one breath, as

one trembling vein.

Bound not by choice, but

by the gossamer thread of

Fate, spun from our own silk.

We wait, as flowers do,

leaning on each other’s

last breath.

That initial stab of pain, sharp and insistent, caught me off guard like the sudden recognition of a childhood haunt. My fingers scrabbled at the worn-out edge of the examination table as the endoscope plunged in and rampaged inside my body like a bull’s horn. 

"It's okay, ah, it's okay." I murmured through gritted teeth—a mantra, reliably as ever, for the girl I was ten years ago in this same hometown hospital, and for the woman I'd become in lands far from here. 

A young nurse sat nearby, her eyes fixed on the computer screen where my insides were laid bare in stark black and white. "Try to relax,” she said, her voice carrying the lilting tones of a familiar dialect I never learned to speak fluently. "The more tense you are, the more it hurts. Take deep breaths." 

My eyes darted to her hand, steady and sure on the keyboard. Before I could think, my arm had reached out, fingers intertwining with hers like a drowning person grasping at a lifeline. She looked at me, surprise flickering across her face before it settled back into professional composure.

"Don't move, okay?" the nurse cautioned, gently extricating her hand from mine. "Dr. Su is examining you now. She's very experienced".  Her fingers, cool and impersonal, brushed against my side. I suppressed a shiver, not from cold, but from the strange intimacy of it all.

Suddenly, the thought of others intruded—countless others. Not in some grand, philosophical way, but in the most flesh-and-bone manner that viscerally resonated. I imagined people in hospital rooms across the city, across the country, even: Some in prolonged battles against their aches that had become unwelcome companions, others facing down their final moment with whatever momentary strength they could muster. 

What went through their minds, I wondered, in those long hours when the clock seems frozen and the night stretches on? Did they find themselves reaching out, almost unconsciously, for someone who wasn't there? A mother long gone, perhaps, or a lover estranged? I thought of hands then - weathered ones, soft ones, ones bearing the marks of work or illness. How interesting that in moments of weakness, we might all be reduced to children again, wanting nothing more than to have our hand held. 

It wasn't a comfort exactly, this connection I felt. More like a sudden awareness of a world beyond my own discomfort, a world filled with ordinary people who, like me, might be surprised by their own vulnerability in the face of it all.

Dr. Su's voice cut through the haze. "Look here," she pinpointed for others in the room, "They are indeed growing. They aren’t big, though. Nothing to worry about, my dear. We’ll schedule you for surgery tomorrow. " Her tone carried a peculiar mix of clinical precision and homegrown warmth, like a judge delivering a lenient sentence.

Relief washed over me, but it was quickly followed by a startling realization: this cellular rebellion within me? It was me. The me from years ago, packing my bags and leaving Jinan behind without a backward glance. The me who decided that the path laid out here wasn't the one I wanted. And now, drawn back by my body's protest, I found myself where it all began—yet ironically, already planning my next move. 

"How old are you, dear?" Dr. Su asked as she maneuvered the probe inside me. 

"Ouch... twenty...twenty five..." The words escaped me in stutters as if embarrassed by themselves. 

"Such a big guī nü,” a nurse teased, with the old-fashioned endearment exclusive to those who grew up in northern China—guī nü (闺女), meaning 'innocent, young woman'. 

"Indeed. I thought she was barely eighteen, carrying on like this.." Dr. Su agreed, laughing along. 

Their chuckle wrapped me around with an unexpected comfort like the well-worn cotton quilt my grandmother stitched many winters ago. I made a face.  

Soon as I stepped out, I discovered my mother had been a silent sentinel outside the door. Her eyes, wide with concern, searched my face. "Was it very painful?" she asked, her voice tight with worry.

"Mm, just a bit," I stated matter-of-factly, arms crossing my chest like a shield.

"How long did it hurt? Is it still hurting? Did the doctor damage something inside you?" The rapid-fire questions tumbled out, each one laden with pressing anxiety.

"Not at all. It was very brief."

"I heard you cry out from outside, and it worried me so much..." Her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. 

I couldn’t help but pull her into an embrace. She felt small in my arms, her shoulder just reaching my chest. 

"Look at you," I said awkwardly, patting her back, "worrying over nothing."

I shared the nurse's surprised reaction to my actual age. Mother laughed through her tears, saying, "That's because they don't know we have always treated you like you're fifteen." She paused, then added, "Even your grandmother, who's over eighty, still fears injections. She cries like a child every time."

The image struck me then: my elderly grandmother, her skin like tissue paper left for too long in the sun, curled into herself, more fragile than the child she once was, her daughter—my mother—becoming a mother to her own mother. 

Perhaps we never truly outgrow our vulnerabilities, I thought. We just learn to hide them better until we can’t anymore.

Mother reached into her bag, pulling out a chocolate bar. "Do you want some?" 

I nodded, but as I reached for it, she pulled back. "Don't move, your hands are dirty. I'll feed you."

She carefully tore open the packaging along the serrated edge, squeezed out the first piece, and brought it to my lips. I frowned, dodging my head slightly. "I can eat by myself," I insisted, despite her dismissal, "I won't touch it with my hands."

The chocolate melted on my tongue, its sweetness suddenly at odds with the acrid smell wafting from the nearby toilet. At that moment, I saw the candy's journey - silky smooth as it slid down my throat, only to dissolve into a formless mush in my stomach. Unbidden, an image flashed through my mind: Kobayashi Eitaku's 19th-century scroll, "Nine Stages of Decay." It depicted the decomposing corpse of the beautiful Empress Danrin, her body abandoned in the wilderness per her final edict—a stark lesson in impermanence for her beloved countrymen to learn.

I imagined passersby confronting the Empress’s body. Once coveted by courtiers, her flesh swelled and purpled, decayed and liquefied. In my mind's eye, insects and beasts tore at her with the same fervor her admirers once gazed upon her face, her bones scattered like discarded love letters, until even dust forgot her name. The visceral imagery clung to me, as sticky as the chocolate on my teeth.

An elderly lady shuffled past in the corridor. Her gaze lingered on me before shifting to my mother. "Your little girl is quite pretty," she remarked with a friendly smile, then gestured towards her own mouth. "Oh, what's that she's eating?"

"Come here," Mother murmured, leaning in. "Let me wipe your mouth."

I jerked away, "It's fine, I can wipe it myself."

"Let me do it," Mother insisted, her hand hovering. "You don't know how to clean after yourself. There's still some, look, here."

"Ma, I said I'll do it myself!" The words burst out. 

Mother's hand froze, her head tilted, brows knotting together. She turned and walked away, anger and frustration etched in the stiffness of her shoulders.

In that moment, as in countless others, I felt the ever-growing force of her near-obsessive need to shape me—as maternal as it was desperate. And beneath that surged a tide so strong that it threatened to sweep both of us away.

How could I explain to my mother that I had already been shaped, for better or worse, by forces beyond her womb and her home, by experiences she could never have imagined for me? That I had been carved by rivers she had never waded? That I had been kissed by words in languages she hadn’t learned? That strangers had left lasting marks on my soul in manners the tight grip of her tending hands could not? That I’d discovered and lost treasures she didn’t even know existed? 

How could I make her see that the fifteen-year-old daughter she had in mind was only the phantom of a version of her own past? 

I drifted to the elevator, my gaze drawn to the window. Late summer rain had been falling incessantly, its rhythm an inconsistent percussion against the glass. Rumors of an impending typhoon hung in the air, as lingering as the humidity that clung to my skin. The damp chill, though a respite from midsummer's swelter, brought no vigor—only a pervasive stickiness that seemed to seep into my very bones. I really do dislike rainy days, I mused.

As if plucking the thought from my mind, mother pulled away, composing herself. "When you go to Seattle for graduate school this fall," she intoned, her voice low and portentous, like a fortune-teller divining an ominous future, "It'll be weather like this every day."

She was right. If recovery went well, in a month or so, I'd be in America again for my second degree. The rain in Seattle would be different, though. The rain there would be a constant companion, a lingering mist rather than the thunderous downpour in Jinan. 

I envisioned that faceless city across the vast Pacific, waiting to enfold me in the waning days of 2019. Would my hard-earned savings in the past two years and the school’s benevolent fellowship prove wiser investments this time around, with valued credentials like “Engineering” and “MSc” stamped on my degree instead of the scarlet letters of the Arts?

Would I rightfully earn my spot somewhere in the gleaming towers of tech giants, arduously scribbling my story in bits and pixels?  Or would I, like the omnipresent rain, slowly dissolve into something vague, something indistinguishable from the evergreen blur of the Pacific Northwest?

How strange, I thought, to grieve for a future that hadn't yet betrayed me.

"You'll be in a lot of pain after the surgery tomorrow," Mother’s litany of forebodings brought me back to reality, her anxiety weighing in on my shoulders like a familiar blanket. "You won't be able to do anything for days," she emphasized.  

"You've got to be careful on rainy days." Father's voice joined as he lowered himself into a chair. He fished out his old Huawei, the screen flickering to life with a video compilation of electric shock accidents on rain-slicked streets: Perfectly healthy people, their lives snuffed out by a simple touch of an electric pole, collapsing into puddles like marionettes with cut strings. Dad peered through his reading glasses, head tilted back, fingers fumbling with the digital screen.

"Your Baba really looks like an old man now," Mother remarked, her tone that of a slightly disgruntled policewoman who caught Time itself in some petty crime.

San Francisco's open secret is that it shelters those who don't quite belong anywhere. But there are two kinds. By day, the streets bustle with people who choose to drift between places. By night, the same streets fill with those who have nothing left but to drift between places. The former reassures me with a semblance of human agency that tantalizes, and the latter threatens me with the raw truth of an unforgiving jungle stripped bare.

You notice the night drifters most easily in February, the rare time around the year when San Francisco decides to indulge in rain. Like a prisoner granted reprieve from a year-long restraint, the rain hesitates to go back, its continuous kisses cracking open the earth, where shades of green—fresh, old, deep, light—gush out, their boundaries dissolving in the misty air. However, as if dreading the punishment from violating an unspoken curfew, everyone unanimously retreats to their own enclaves before it even gets dark—Neighbors hurriedly draw their curtains, cars huddle under covers, and birds feign sleep.

The endless rain dilutes even the strongest bonds.

That’s when the entire city gives its way to the night drifters. In the emptiness of night, their silhouettes emerge ever more clearly in assorted postures. Some push broken shopping carts, others haul sacks over their shoulders, and a few march forward, wrapped in tattered blankets. They pass by my window—silent, screaming, limping, pacing back and forth, or scanning their surroundings. 

They are people, yet at times they resemble anything but, depending on the temperature, the court rulings or the reach of essential services. Year-round, they drift like cottonwood seeds, swept away by the whims of enforcement officers. On a cold, rainy day, they hop on and off buses like community cats seeking refuge in their mobile sanctuaries, waiting for the sun, seemingly believing a nap under its glow could revive them. Yet, most of the time, they silently endure like shade-tolerant plants in damp, dark places—under the Bay Bridge, behind the bushes of Golden Gate Park, in the crevices of Mission District alleyways, in the most resource-savvy movements of vulnerability—the pushing of syringes with shaky hands, the orange glow flickering against cracked skin, the hazy eyes searching the ground for something unseen.

I think of these night drifters whenever I move. I moved more than 20 times in my 20s, sometimes because I had to, more often because I wanted to.

These migrations have finely attuned my senses to credit scores and age buckets, to moments of being let in and moments of being left out, to first times and last times, to what kind of door will close forever, to what kind of person will never see me again, whether someone somewhere wants to leave me better or worse than they found me. I've also mastered the art of not showing up for endings—endings of things I cherished: the end credits, the departing trains, the last shots, the final days. If I don’t participate in its end, then it never ends for me—it is always beginning, always ongoing.

It is in the midst of this drifting existence, I remember a distinct figure I saw on a February night.

I was working at my desk by the window when I noticed a figure pulling a tattered cart through the dim lamplight on the pavement outside. He lifted his head, looking toward the only source of light — my room — but didn't stop walking. Under his messy hair, I saw the eyes of a young man, which met mine for less than a second: The intense glare in his eyes pierced through the misty night, striking me with a painful clarity, an unbearably strong yearning that made me flinch a little. 

I saw this kind of young gaze before I moved to San Francisco. During the long winter of the Covid lockdown, I was living alone in U-District in Seattle as a broke graduate student without any source of income or a driver’s license, though, technically I had a roommate, but she was perpetually at her boyfriend’s place, whom she had found on the dating app everyone despises six months into quarantine and successfully convinced herself to fall in love with. Back then, my weekly grocery run to the Trader Joe’s a few blocks away became one of my few excuses for inmate yard time. Treating each step out of my apartment door as a ceremonious journey, I took the time to savor every detail around me.

It was then I noticed the tent nestled in the indented corner of the exterior wall next to Trader Joe’s. On a deserted street perpetually shrouded in misty drizzle, the crumpled blue fabric of the tent wove into the gray concrete on its two sides, making me feel as though I were walking through a poorly photoshopped dreamcore screenshot. Yet, its persistent stance became a reassuring sight of companionship over time. I peered into the tent a few times, trying my best to hide my attempt, like a child sneaking a peek at a forbidden site, both curious and anxious for the scene awaiting me.

To my surprise, I saw piles and piles of paperback books huddling together, forming an additional layer of enclosure that successfully shielded the tent’s inhabitant. I caught the names of a few trending and classic fantasy series—Tolkien, Martin, Rowling—before my lingering gaze became too shameful to sustain. Though I fled, the scene took me back to my childhood days, when, without a smartphone or wifi, I would always carry a few books with me. They were my shield against the awkward silences of playground politics, my companions during lunch breaks spent alone on the bench when other kids at the dining hall brandished sticks at me until I ran away.

I imagined the kind of person who would carve out a niche fortress of books like that among the various encampment styles in American cities I was beginning to acquaint myself with, like countercultural scenes from third-rate post-punk MVs. There was no such scene on the streets of China, after all. If "being homeless" is a lifestyle that varies by region, I wondered whether this person would have fared better in the small town of my undergraduate college in western Massachusetts compared to the Trader Joe's corner in Seattle.

Back in undergrad, I often ran into a man named George in his 50s at our school library open to all. He was always reading a book or browsing on the public computer. George was among the last to leave, lingering until the closing time when the front desk staff came to kick us out. I recognized him because he slept at the homeless shelter where I volunteered. He told me his family was in Cape Verde, in West Africa. His story is one of a shattered American dream echoing that of many other ambitious chasers. He came here for college in the 80s, only to be ensnared by the plot twists of a foreign land—lost jobs, mounting debts, a health crisis and broken relationships, one thing after another, all of a sudden, nothing was left. Sometimes, when I raced from the library back to my dorm in the freezing wind chills of New England, I imagined George slowly making his way back to the shelter. How would he defend himself against the long nights? Did he ever have anyone to share his thoughts on his readings with? I quickly cut my stray thoughts short—I realized I wasn’t in a position to imagine. If anything, I tend to imagine too much for anyone’s good.

When I got back home from Trader Joe’s that day, I texted my friends about the corner, asking if I should approach the person camping there and offer a small gift, just to say hi. I was nervous and scared. I've always been the kind of woman who avoids eye contact when walking alone, who calls an Uber instead of taking the ten-minute walk home after sunset, so long as the cost fits within my monthly budget. I'd brush it off, saying I didn't want to brave the cold, when my tall male friends innocently suggested I could just walk. I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s mood by recounting the time I was hurled racial slurs and almost run over by an anti-Asian stalker driver in broad daylight, or the time I was knocked down from behind, assaulted, and had my favorite blouse torn. I’ve learned to not to be that character in a cringe comedy who can't grasp social cues and ends up oversharing, only to find herself playing her own supportive audience by forcing awkward laughs to fill the uncomfortable silences.

That said, with my friends' step-by-step remote emotional support online, I finally bought a bunch of bananas from Trader Joe’s. I bent my back, handed them to the unknown shadow, took a deep breath, and spoke in a voice like a nature photographer coaxing a critter out of its cave, “Excuse me?”

I waited for a few seconds that felt like an entire quarantine lockdown to see a face cautiously pop out from behind the fortress—it was the face a young guy, no more than early 20s, with tousled blonde hair framing a face so fresh it could have graced the cover of a hipster band's album. His blue eyes met mine, locking onto me with a silent yet expressively clear gaze that could sting like a bee. I felt a fleeting, sharp pain, soon diluted by the stink in the air.

I asked, “Would you like some bananas?” He replied flatly, “Sure, thank you.” I put the bananas down and fled the scene.

When I got back home, I downloaded an app called Samaritan that claims to put a face to the homeless scene in Seattle by documenting people’s stories. With the frenzy of a stalker trying to dox her anonymous mutual online, I searched through the catalog, hoping to discovering something about this guy. But I didn’t see anything remotely similar. I realized I didn’t even know his name.

His tent remained there through most of the winter. Then one day in spring, I saw him again at a traffic intersection on my way home after getting my first vaccine shot. He didn’t notice me. He was dully pushing forward a shopping cart filled with all his belongings. There were no books in the pile this time. He wore a stern frown, as if displeased with something fundamental about his world, a realm no one else could penetrate.

That was the last time I saw him. I never discovered where his books went before he disappeared.

A year later, I left, too.

Around me, people popped up like alerts on a phone screen, magnetically sorting themselves into circles of varied levels of relevancy to the Silicon Valley book of ambitious scheming: moving to New York, starting an AI company, scouting for a VC, writing Substack essays, exploring polyamorous romance, pondering about AI and philosophy, going on a wellness retreat, yada yada.

Amidst the buzz, there I was sprawled on my mat, soaking up the sun like a lizard on a rock. Overwhelmed—or more accurately, tired from another iteration of the merry-go-round of delivering my life story ™️ to an ever-changing cast of characters who flaunt conversational skills like well-trained athletes for an olympic sport called authentic relating—I retreated to my phone, diving into a bookmarked essay as if it were a life raft.

Just then, she appeared.

She sat across from me and helped herself to some snacks. Without a word, our eyes met briefly, like two dogs sniffing and acknowledging each other. Neither of us said a single word, as if we were both too seasoned in park social etiquette to bother with the unnecessary formalities of human greeting. In that moment, there was perhaps a mutual appreciation for the unspoken consensus to coexist distantly.

In the next hour or so, I overheard her weave in and out of conversations nearby like a humming bird sampling a meadow. I couldn’t help but notice how every laugh sent her brown curls into subtle oscillations, like a thicket of ferns caught in a breeze. Her appearance was deceivingly delicate, for when she spoke, her voice was a husky echo tinged with a sense of cool, tomboyish nonchalance.

We existed separately together, until when I flipped over to stretch my neck. She seemed to find herself in a lull, too. She turned towards me. Our eyes locked.

She said gently and casually, “By the way, I think I like you the best.”

It was said with the ease and simplicity of someone commenting on today’s weather—an observation made in passing that didn’t seem to even necessitate a response.

Throughout my life, I’ve received all kinds of attention and affirmations from people. They have rewarded my grades, praised my sense of style and complimented the originality of my creativity. They’ve appreciated how I smooth over others’ rough emotional edges, noted my attempt to align my actions to a moral compass and encouraged my acts of service. They’ve laughed at my jokes and jolly, enjoyed my body, and even gotten a kick out of my odd collection of hobbies. And I’ve always tried my best to live up to these expectations. Like a clay donkey tethered to a potter's wheel, I mold the contours of my being amidst the push-and-pull between the insistent touch of others' hands and the guiding force of my own spinning will.

But there she was, a stranger who I shared nothing but an hour of my silent presence with, telling me in our fleeting exchange of a glance and a gesture before disappearing into the crowd, that she likes me just as I am.

You don’t have to do or be anything special, you don’t have to feel successful, look gorgeous, sound funny or show up selflessly. Of all these people, I like you the best.

You just need to be yourself and I like you the best.

May 3rd, 2024

1.

I pushed through the iron gate, the creak echoing off the stairwell's worn walls like a familiar greeting. Ahead, silhouettes of a man and a woman were inching down the stairs, leaning on each other more than the shaky handrail. The hallway's dim light seemed to soak into the man’s weathered skin, giving him a twilight glow.

I recognized the man—Old Gao, and next to him, Fangfang, her arm hooked around his. Despite Fangfang looking three times as big as Old Gao, there was something almost childlike in her dependence on him.

They both waited in place, as I slipped past with a murmured "Excuse me," barely louder than the shuffle of my feet.

The door on the second floor, perpetually left open, led me into a starkly bright world. It was a contrast to the stairwell's gloom, the kind of place that seemed too clean for its own good. Little Wei and Little Zhu were already at work, their movements a silent ballet across the checkerboard floor.

Old Meng was the calm epicenter. His phone conversation as a receptionist was a one-sided mumble that somehow felt as comforting as the worn sofa in the corner. When I asked about getting a massage, his "ah yes, no problem" was delivered with an accent thick enough to chew on. He moved to ready the bed with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this a thousand times before.

“Just now in the stairway I ran into…” I nearly brought up Old Gao and Fangfang, but then it hit me—we'd never officially introduced ourselves. Their names had just trickled into my ears from the chatter of the masseurs I eavesdropped on.

"Ah, they've gone out for veggies. After nine, the market slashes prices on leftovers, a real steal," Old Meng caught on quick. As he spoke, he stumbled over a stool—not tucked away under the bed as it should have been, but standing defiantly in his path.

"Watch out…" I blamed myself for not noticing sooner. But then, it wasn't entirely on me. The masseurs' ease with this space often made me forget their blindness.

They seemed to have tamed the space around them: the neatly hung white sheets, the dishes dripping dry on the rack, the thermos bubbling quietly on the counter. Everything stayed put, like well-disciplined guards waiting for command.

I rushed to smooth a corner of the bedsheet before Old Meng, bending down to slip off my shoes.

As I lay there, Little Wei suddenly turned his head, “Isn’t this the young lady who speaks so slowly?”

Little Wei hailed from Shanxi, about 30 in age, with a buzz cut and a big smile. His thick eyebrows and wide eyes, paired with that expansive grin, made him bloom like a sudden, awkward flower. What set Little Wei apart wasn’t just his looks but his eyes, which, unlike the others, seemed to take in everything with a clarity that belied his blind condition.

The first time I met him, I mistook him for someone who could see as well as I could. Gathering my courage, I had asked him, "Can you see?"

The room erupted in laughter. Old Gao joked, "He's a phony, sneaked in here, kick him out!" Little Wei joined in, "Guaranteed authentic, want to see my blind man's ID card?" He teased, pretending to search his pocket.

"Ah, no need, it just seems like you're looking..." I said, a bit embarrassed but smiling.

He explained, "I have retinitis pigmentosa. Can't see much in the dark, but in the light, I can make out the basics. You’re wearing a long coat, right? Hair to your shoulders?"

Later, curiosity got the better of me, and I looked it up. It turned out to be an eye condition without a cure, one that wouldn’t alter his appearance. It starts with night blindness, and over the years, vision fades away, like leaves dropping with the arrival of autumn.

"Hmm…You popped in here two Fridays back, right around nine at night. Little Zhu worked on you for a solid half-hour," Little Wei concluded his recall as if he had a calendar tattooed on his brain.

"Right, you have an amazing memory," I responded, face down on the massage bed. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and today, a migraine was doing its best to drill through my temples.

"The timer starts now, 60 minutes to go," declared Old Meng's phone.

The blind often max out the speed of their text-to-speech software, warping every message into an auditory blur. To decode it, you have to trade in some of God's other gifts—seeing, for instance.

Old Meng's hands skillfully navigated my neck and shoulders, kneading my muscles and bones with a precision that struck the perfect balance between firmness and gentleness. Those hands, weary from years of toil, resembled a carpenter's tools, occasionally creaking at the joints. Only when they were on the verge of collapse were they briefly set aside for a hasty mend, only to resume their devoted service.

I let his hands guide the dance of my neural network, feeling the points of tension in my body pulse with pain before melting away like effervescence in hot water. It grounded me, more than I cared to acknowledge.

If someone were peering up from underneath the massage table at that instant, they would witness my face contorting in sync with the cadence of Old Meng's wrist movements.

Was this raw, entangled mess of flesh closer to or farther from the kind of beauty I aspired to embody?

2.

"Ow, take it easy, would you? You're turning my grimace into a permanent feature," the male client grumbled from beneath Little Wei's expert hands.

"All part of the service," Little Wei shot back, slapping on the cupping jars with a magician's flair.

"Great, I already started off ugly, and now I'm entering a whole new league of hideous."

"Well, it's not like anybody here can see you."

"Jokes aside, I've got to find a wife somehow."

"Best of luck with that."

"And you? Your turn."

"Me? Oh, same old bachelor, my friend."

"You know, you could try your luck with Russian hotties in the Northeast, right by the border. Or snag yourself a Vietnamese bride—affordable, supposedly sub, and they cook great meals..."

"If she's happy cooking for herself, that's good enough for me," Little Wei countered.

"Why not take a leap then?"

"Some things you just can't rush."

"Ouch... okay, maybe a tad gentler."

"I've been thinking, maybe I'll head south with Old Gao next year, try our luck, see what Guangdong has to offer..."

"Ow, take it easy, would you? You're turning my grimace into a permanent feature," the male client grumbled from beneath Little Wei's expert hands, his tone one of gruff camaraderie typical of men who've shared more than a few laughs.

"All part of the service," Little Wei shot back, slapping on the cupping jars with a magician's flair.

"Great, I already started off ugly, and now I'm entering a whole new league of hideous."

"Well, it's not like anybody here can see you."

"Jokes aside, I've got to find a wife somehow."

"Best of luck with that."

"And you? Your turn."

"Me? Oh, same old bachelor, my friend."

"You know, you could try your luck with Russian hotties in the Northeast, right by the border. Or snag yourself a Vietnamese bride—affordable, supposedly sub, and they cook great meals..."

"If she's happy cooking for herself, that's good enough for me," Little Wei countered, his tone as dry as the Gobi.

"Why not take a leap then?"

"Some things you just can't rush."

"Ouch... okay, maybe a tad gentler."

"I've been thinking, maybe I'll head south with Old Gao next year, try our luck, see what Guangdong has to offer..."

Their back-and-forth kept rolling, easy and familiar. It was like I’d accidentally walked into a living, breathing scene of a Charles Dickens’ rendition of a massage parlor tucked away in the corner of modern Beijing—except nobody was asking for more gruel, and the only thing thick in the air was the scent of medicinal oils and the sound of banter. There I was, stealing a glance into their world through the looking glass, feeling both completely a part of and outside it.

Gradually, under Old Meng's skilled ministrations, the tightness in my muscles began to yield, the piercing edge of my headache blurring into a gentle lull. My thoughts, once sharp and focused, now adrift on the nocturnal current like paper lanterns dissolving into a dream…

3.

Every couple of months, Lili was swept away into the same dream—sometimes it was the Milky Way stretching across the sky, other times it was some unknown marvel. These entities, so alien and incomprehensible, enveloped her in an emotion that felt almost otherworldly.

Last week, she found herself once again wandering under that star-filled canopy in her dreams. The next morning, she shared this with Jackie, who remarked that the pursuit of such emotions might just be the most worthy human endeavor of all. Jackie then shared his own dream—a serene vision of ascending a forested mountain to a vast green plain, where a quaint university lay, stretching to the foot of a distant, taller peak.

Jackie's dream mirrored his temperament—calm and deep. Lili, however, craved something different: a kind of holy chaos in her chest, a fleeting divine revelation that faded with the break of dawn. The next day, she returned to her steel and concrete life, merging into the sea of faces at the office, her days reduced to keystrokes and screen glare. In this synthetic realm, the visceral stirrings of her heart grew fainter, leaving behind nothing but their hollowed-out shells.

She thought about how each generation had its unique burdens to bear, and wondered if this was the price her time demanded. Yet, this duty was paradoxically sculpted into a privilege—desperately coveted yet out of reach for many, which meant she ought to take care of it.

And what, then, did she become?

Her thoughts, actions, even her dreams were not solely her own. They echoed the collective psyche of those who shared her era. She was but one among many, like worker bees from the same hive, indistinct yet integral. Even this idea, it seemed, wasn’t hers alone.

How many out there can truly claim their voice as something of their own?

4.

"How many for you? I got twelve today," Old Meng asked Little Wei.

"Ten, just one more to go," Little Wei responded.

"I'm at one... plus four, and..." Little Zhu seemed to hesitate.

"Ah, make that nine and a half for you, I've kept count," Little Wei chimed in.

"Oh, aren't you something," Little Zhu giggled.

"Your brain's never been much use, better leave the counting to me and Old Meng," Little Wei teased her further.

"You're... really annoying..." Little Zhu pretended to be upset.

In the glow of these brightly illuminated rooms, their hours unfurled—segmented into halves, wholes, and one-and-a-halves. Day melded into day, often weaving into uninterrupted weeks.

What a magnificent and resilient creature is human—to confront time and mark their distinctions within it as such!

—> Read full story on the SquawkBack, issue 214

Seeing that there was perhaps no winning in hyping up modern romance, when my turn arrived, I found myself speaking of a day spent with the man whose love for me is without parallel in this world — my dad. Yes, that's right, my dad.

It was one of those rare, simple days where everything just felt right - sunny, warm, serene. We were just chilling by the sea at a beach back in China, which was a big deal because I've been living abroad for many years. My dad took me to a restaurant for seafood skewers and then we strolled down this quiet beach strip towards a lighthouse.

Along the way, dad was unusually excited. He behaved like a big kid, all wide-eyed, pointing out the oddities in every little tree and seashell as if seeing it all for the first time or perhaps the last…I couldn’t help but laughing at the way he goofed off, which made his signature outfit stand out — typically featuring casually mismatched clothes defying all fashion norms. In this case, he was wearing a cowboy hat and crumpled dress pants - too formal for the sand, too earnest for ridicule.

As I watched my dad explore with the wonder of a child, I remember feeling this bittersweet tug, washed over by a strong sense of “Nowstalgia”, hearing the whispering of these moments slipping through my hand, fleeting, finite.

As a usual ritual, I captured these moments on camera, not expecting that in the miles and years away from that day I hadn’t been able to see him since, these photographs would become talismans against time, against the long, lone nights of lock-down, against the silence between visa status updates, the distance that stretches between unanswered existential queries. They solidified as proof that happiness, once felt, leaves an indelible mark no one can take away from me.

After the meeting, one of my coworkers came up to me. He’s a middle-aged guy with an eloquent speaking style that I always thought could narrate documentaries. This time, his voice was soft and words simple. He said his wife had always been a romantic woman. Since she moved on, he’s been spending Valentines with his daughter. He said he’d usually take his daughter out on this day to a restaurant she likes. My story made him see that he could be the dad in my beach day, and he wanted to thank me for that.

I recently re-watched Christopher Nolan’s film “Interstellar”. Ten years ago, my initial viewing left me stunned by its audio-visual grandeur and scientific imagination, yet uninspired by the emotional core underneath the shell of hard science. Back then, like many people, I felt indifferent about the film’s central premise of love as the transcending force against time and space. If anything, it came at the cost of the film’s metaphysical depth.

Operating like a sort of deus ex-machina, love was what propelled Cooper to find his path inside the black hole; love was what convinced Murphy that the anomaly of the watch was nothing but a signal that her father was out there trying to reach her. How convenient it was, I pondered back then, for Nolan to designate love as a mystical force of a higher fifth dimension beyond quantifiable comprehension - that solved all problems for everyone involved.

Yet, with each passing year away from home, I find myself gravitating closer to this notion of love. A decade on, Nolan’s universe is beginning to look like a mirror held up to the emotional odyssey I have treaded.

The film’s original cerebral stimulation has waned in comparison to an emotional journey’s increasingly richer taste, paid for with the non-negotiable price of separation, of missed connections, of trials and betrayals in a world where love and desire often wear the same mask.

To me, love’s transcendent force, once kitschy and abstract, is now intimate, now necessary.

When I see Murphy coming to the realization that her father was her “ghost” and that she was always being watched over by him, I think of how my dad’s words — "Our hearts are always connected, no matter where you are" — echo through the years.

They are not just goodbye but a promise;

A mantra for those of us adrift in the diaspora, navigating the spaces between homeland and nomad-land, between foreign and mother tongues;

A reminder that even when the orbits of society sprawl too vast and fast, even when the mathematics of the game seem too cold and indifferent, this connection between my dad and me, remains unbroken.

Did you know that Nolan’s working title for Interstellar was “Flora’s Letters”? Flora is the name of Nolan’s youngest daughter.

This hidden footnote offers me a stolen glimpse into Nolan's personal universe, where epic narrative threads are stitched into the fabric of finer lines of tender intimacy. It consists in a revelation that must be experienced instead of reasoned. In this softer light, I discover the theme of Interstellar running in parallel to the lived narrative of my grandfather’s life.

As a captain and fighter pilot, grandfather soared not amidst the galaxies, but the war-torn skies of mid-20th-century China. Growing up, I used to see grandfather more myth than man, a devout communist carved from the revolutionary tales of a Maoist China caught in the throes of becoming.

Yet, in this newfound light, I see not a war hero's aerial combats and later personal battles against illnesses, but a father and grandfather’s steadfast trek through the challenges of his time, with the simple hope of coming home to his loved ones.

I still clearly remember a video call we had in the last year of grandfather’s life. As if time itself had accelerated, grandpa emerged from the depths of a coma that seemed to claim a bigger piece of him with each passing second. There, amidst the sterile hum of hospital life, where faces of my cousins became strangers and familiar voices faded into the background of his world, my dad pressed the phone close to grandfather’s ear, "Shout at your grandfather" he urged me on the other end. And I did, bracing for the echo of silence.

But then, in defiance of expectation that was too cinematic to be true, grandpa’s whisper, frayed yet unmistakable, pierced the silence, "Anqi, stay."

In that whisper, the universe contracted to a single point of convergence, echoing the "stay" in Cooper’s code and Murphy’s plea, each one a reflection of the other.

Cooper has a neurotic daughter consumed by her life-long fixation on reaching her father, and a steady son who goes more with the flow. Both are bound by love for their father, yet it's the daughter's relentless love, misunderstood love, pain-ridden love that makes it possible for Cooper’s message to carve through the tesseract to find her, standing against the inexorable drift towards entropy.

Yet, grandfather's plea for me to "stay," didn't pull me back in time. It became not a comfort, but a specter of what I’ve left behind, echoing the cost of my choices, much like Cooper's, and that of countless other nomads in our world who bet their best years, their best efforts on tomorrow’s uncertain frontiers instead of yesterday’s warm bonds. A dedicated pursuit of obsessions at best, or a natural instinct of cruelty at worst. This, perhaps, is the shared emotional debt every explorer and wanderer accrue in our quest for the beyond, adrift in the vast, echoing expanse of our own interstellar voids.

A few months after that call with grandfather, where once three voices filled the phone conversations, we dwindled to two.

As usual, I found my quest for understanding and solace reaching for what has already slipped through my fingers, as I asked my father, "Was it worth it? All the effort, the sacrifices from everyone throughout the years, knowing it would not change the outcome?" My reasoned cost-benefit analysis seemed inadequate here. Dad’s answer was clear and simple:

"We all love your grandfather. It can't be calculated like that.”

Ken Liu, prolific science-fiction author, once wrote in his story collection The Paper Menagerie, “At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.”

My dad’s affirmation, simple in its delivery, carried the weight of countless unspoken decisions of devotion—the same decision made over and over, in each push of the wheelchair through silent hallways, in every careful wash, in every spoon-fed meal in hushed companionship—with a sense of near-religious endurance that I stepped out of and could only imagine from the stories told.

It is in this context of personal absence that I find reassurance in Interstellar’s message—what's lost remains so, rightfully unredeemed by any notion of easy comfort. Old Murphy's farewell to her father in her deathbed, "Parents shouldn't have to watch their children die," followed by a shift in her gaze from the father she's yearned for across decades to her children and grandchildren, encapsulates this sentiment. At the end of the day, what awaits Cooper isn’t a happily-ever-after resolution or recovery of what he had to let go of, but rather an undeniable acceptance for the continuum of life that was and is moving forward all in his absence.

And so, time keeps rolling, carrying us in its current. We find ourselves mere footnotes in its march, stepping aside as new chapters are written with, or more often, without us—cries of newborns we didn't hear, the slow change in our folks' faces we didn't see, friends' laughter at weddings we missed, and the quiet fade of relationships we couldn't mend.

In acknowledging the cycle of life that pulses on without us, however, there’s not only a mix of lamentation and yearning tugging at us, but also a touch of peace and strength guiding us, found in the whispers of joy and sorrow passed down in the stories we inherit, not firsthand, but through the hearts of those who have lived on our behalf…

I remember, as grandfather’s world faded, his vision blurred, sounds muffled, and movements slowed, all except for his sense of taste. It remained, an anchor of earthbound joy, far removed from his youthful conquests in the skies. In a phone call, my dad recounted his effort to bring that joy to my grandfather's lips in his twilight moment: a spoonful of mango juice to bridge the gap left by the surgery's restrictions on solid food. The moment the juice touched grandfather’s tongue, he let out a soft yet vibrant laughter, breaking through the sterile stillness of the hospital ward, resounding with a sense of courageous clarity:

"Tell Anqi, grandpa is going happily! Sour and sweet, on my way to see Chairman Mao!"

Through my dad’s eyes, I could visualize, in that moment, my grandfather standing at a threshold, glancing at the closing of circles:

The good fights have been fought, the promises kept, and now grandfather was ready to embark on his final journey, ready to return to the spiritual ideals that had guided him at the very start.

As I am writing this, I find myself, too, standing at a threshold, where night bleeds into dawn, San Francisco stirs beneath a gentle drizzle, reminiscent of so many February mornings past. Nearby, the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption looms through the distant hum of engines, its monumental shape cutting through the gray sky, a testament to our aspirations for the infinite, for the ethereal.

In this solitude, the act of writing has become an act of constructing, the storyteller has become part of the story, the observer, observed - beneath the cathedral’s imposing watch over our struggles to reach beyond ourselves, I see this essay becoming a living tesseract laid bare: A multidimensional space for my own act of defiance, my own refutation of time—

To remember, to love.

Ross says, "She's not Rachel."

That's it. You're not Rachel, so you cannot replace the unique her. There's no logical calculations to it. It's not about what's on paper; it's about something you can't quite put your finger on.

I think of this episode whenever I scroll through my newsfeed, which is beginning to be filled with newborn AI influencers and AI replicas of timeless icons like George Carlin. We're staring down the barrel of a future where over 90% of online content is projected to be AI Generated Content (AIGC) in a year or two, and it’s catalyzing an identity crisis among human content creators.

At first glance, these AI creations catch your eye, mimicking human expressions so perfectly just like the way Julie wowed Ross. But the initial spark fades. The first wave of AIGC apps saw folks flocking in droves, only to drop in retention and engagement rates just as quickly. Diving into the heart of the matter, I think the novelty wears off in part because, in the end, our heart doesn’t connect with the AI-generated 'Julie' air-dropped into our life out of nowhere, but rather cherishes the shared history we have slowly built with the beautifully imperfect, easily-broken human 'Rachel'—the essence of being human that makes our stories, our creations, profoundly meaningful and irreplaceably ours.

Let me tell you why.

We, as humans, are out here, living it in real-time, feeling every high and low, while LLMs are just trying to keep up, processing a second-hand version of our compressions of reality. This is where the disconnect lies. AI’s creative process can't truthfully replicate the moment-to-moment human experiences in the making —the depth, the emotions, the messiness of it all unfolding around us every second that we constantly make sense of.

Take the example of my own journey as a bilingual improv comedy player. Improv's universal magic across cultures lies turning the idea of 'human mistakes' on its head, as you watch players salvage scenes from impossible premises and transform challenging twists into clever setups. Like that time on stage when, faced with a wild prompt, I simply paused, nodded, and said, "True." The audience erupted. Or when I made an unexpected exit with "I'll be back," leaving everyone in stitches.

When we are watching improv shows, we don’t feel the most connected to those perfectly timed, smoothly executed punchlines that feel eerily scripted; rather, it's those uncertain moments where players attempt "yes and" to the most unexpected if not downright wild prompts. What leaves lasting impressions on us isn't always flawless execution, but rather a hero’s resilience in navigating the plot twists, or even delays and deliberation on a bumpy ride that leads NOT to a perfect resolution but rather an acceptance of the absurdity of the circumstances.

This observation extends beyond the improv stage to the music that moves us, the expressions that touch us, and the personal stories that bind us.

Watching a virtual character's story unfold can't compare to the feeling of being part of a story told by real people, with all their imperfections and quirks. You don't watch a live-streamed game just for the technical gameplay; you watch it for the palpable tension, the emotional highs and lows of the players, their background stories and the genuine rapport they share with their audience. You don’t tune into a lifestyle vlog to just see a beautifully curated home and a made-up face, you want to connect with the raw, unfiltered moments of life of a real person, just like you, who smiles and cries and curses, gets sick and recovers, ages and changes, lives and lets live.

These preferences underscore the crucial role of individuality in our connections. Despite AI's superpower in accessing, combining, and presenting an endless array of humanity's creative outputs, its creative process is deeply impersonal. If we lean on it too much, it risks diluting the personal touch that resonates with us on a deeper level. Ultimately, what truly fills the void in our hearts is not the production of an efficient machine but the heart and soul of individuals, and specifically, that one or few particular individuals, unique and special in their own right.

We write a letter to someone we miss. Is the writing good? Not necessarily. But the person reading the letter may find themselves moved to tears. I mention that the gingko leaves on the street have fallen. They remind me of where we first met. Do you remember that alley? We shared a pair of airpods as we strolled together, shoulder-by-shoulder, awkwardly. Do these particular words and imageries have meaning for you? The LLMs don't know. But the person reading the letter, they know. They know entirely. Therefore, the content that resonates the most isn't the product of AI's scalable efficiency but rather the product of an irreplaceable personal connection, built upon shared emotions and personal memories that are stirred within us in the process of creating and receiving. And that’s how meaning is made.

As we navigate a future saturated with AIGC, It's imperative to remember that what we yearn for is not an endless source of stimulation, but rather connection. The new currency of value in the era of AIGC is not creative efficiency, but rather personal meaning-making. This realization points us toward a future where AI's role in content creation is reimagined, not as a replacement for human creativity but as a complement to it. The challenge and opportunity lie in making human-centric improvisation the central driver of an AI-aided creative process. In our creative process, we should keep asking ourselves:

How do we harness the strengths of both worlds - that of an algorithmic artisan and that of a human-centric improviser, creating content that is not only innovative but also deeply personal and meaningful?

How can we best leverage AI to generate prompts and scenarios that catalyze, instead of eliminating, spontaneous creativity, emotional depth and sense-making unique to human interactions?

What content formats (e.g. livestream) lend themselves best to preserve and present the resilience and wonders in human error-recovery?

How do we highlight the individuals behind the content we create through building healthy parasocial relationships?

Now, back with Ross making that choice. I, for one, will always be on the side of Rachel instead of Julie. After all, what we are craving are the connections and meaning that shine through a human-centric creative process. The goal is NOT to replace human sensibilities with AI; the goal is to keep the ‘Rachel’ alive in our stories, facilitated by AI.

By placing humans at the center of Human-AI co-creation, here’s to keeping the essence of our narratives unmistakably human, unmistakably us.

To keep users hooked in the sea of short-form videos and exploding tweets, influencers must craft niche and catchy content that’s consistently themed. I've observed relationship psychology YouTubers, with previously solid followings, pivot to TikTok, distilling complex human emotions into bite-sized videos like "things guys don’t know but make girls swoon." Even a childhood TV host, once revered for his serious content on a national channel, emerged in my social media feed, selling textbooks with the fervor of a sportscaster. His past as a national show host was his hook, each sale a testament to his credibility, anchored in his academic and television history.

A friend who rapidly grew his Twitter following emphasized the integrity of his key to success: Ruthlessly align your public content with your personal brand and execute it with discipline. Keep other interests for your alt accounts. I totally get it - If you are a meditation coach, don’t start randomly posting edgy 4chan memes - it muddles your message and dilutes your brand's appeal. Not to mention oscillation between political stances.

Yet, I can't help but question the cost when I see internet personalities fall apart as their carefully curated personas come cancelled. When we hastily idolize someone based on a few tags in their self-intro and top posts, are we complicit in the tragedy of our times, where multifaceted individuals feel compelled to confine themselves to a monolithic front with unwavering conviction in order to win?

This path, once committed, often ends up looking like a one-way street. You can’t easily walk back or steer away. Imagine switching from a self-help guru imparting ancient wisdom to a TikTok star showing off sensual dance moves, or dropping the glamor of a VC-backed, deep-tech entrepreneur and embracing the route of a Bohemian yogi, is not only challenging but costly. You might have to abandon your follower base if not totally ruin your established social capital.

It is in this particular context that being “based” emerges as a liberating pushback against a reductionist view of identity, a rejection of adherence to a set of rigid values or cultural traits. The allure of 'being based' consists in its intentional inappropriateness, a deliberate breaking of character. The courage to be based appeals to an emotional core unbridled from calculated commercial packaging, tapping into that hidden impulse you’ve learned to cage as a result of social disciplining. You can eat whatever you want, wear whatever you like, say whatever on your mind and do whatever you enjoy. It's okay to hate him today and love him tomorrow. You can just be. No consequences.

On the other hand, it’s also a seductive approach for quick wins in an influencer economy that structurally incentivizes a “me first” POV more so than ever in history, where the “super solo-ers” are the new elites in the making. Your capital is your own self-expressions that belong exclusively to you – you own the brand and all relationships. All it takes is nothing more than compute, GPT API keys or a vlog setup, and the unwavering belief that you are “the one”. Your insights, your character, your technical and artistic adaptability – they all beat the curve.

But the danger of leaning into being “based” as a personal PR tactic is that it can backfire if you haven’t clarified who you are in all your contradictions. Usually, your un-censoring involves a flavor of self-vindication to reclaim the power taken from the less socially acceptable parts of you by mainstream scrutiny and market mechanics. However, when you mix a personal brand optimized for mass public marketability with a private outlet of push-backs, you are caught in a subtle yet undeniable sense of dissonance, as you may begin to secretly question more than you’d like to admit: am I being my vulnerable authentic self or simply marketing a version of vulnerable authenticity? Your vulnerability, once a genuine aspect of your personality, is carefully honed into a sharp weapon on display, detached from the messy complexities of the rest of you.

Essentially, you need to realize that this nagging dissonance comes from letting one part of yourself that competes for power and recognition capitalize on the struggles of another part of yourself that’s already hurting as a result of not feeling enough in the gaze of the authority. It’s self-exploitation and self-empowerment rolled into one package deal. And you need to know that’s OKAY, too.

If anything, this internal rift encourages you to confront and embrace your multifaceted nature that is as inconsistent and in-flux as humanly possible.

Recognizing this murky complexity within you and confronting the interplay of your light and shadows head-on is not just an act of self-care; it's a necessary first step towards genuine reconciliation and integrated self-expressions. Once you understand that the power-seeking part and the hurting part both exist in order to protect you, you’ll be able to acknowledge and appreciate your vulnerability at both its most performative and most raw. From there, it’s a matter of testing and discovering where to draw the line - like a loving and fair parent who doesn’t play favorite, you don’t want either one to feel attention-starved or overshadowed for too long.

As for myself, my exploration of this step began in a quite disruptive workshop series that exposed me to a modality I didn’t know existed before but found extremely disruptive: Psychodrama, or acting-based improv for insights into the self and others. It even inspired me to become a coach harnessing somatic role-play for self-growth in my free time.

In this psychodrama workshop series, I was surprised to sketch out five personas within myself, each of which had its own agenda. Together with my facilitator and other participants, we gave each of them a distinct voice, witnessed their desires and fears, and acted them out in semi-structured improv exercises.

In this self-revelatory odyssey, as I shuffled from one role’s body and perspective to that of another, I experienced a cathartic mixture of anger and grief. This was because, in that space, I was allowed to protest against the constraints of maintaining a singular professional, social, or online image. I was allowed to mourn for the parts of my identity that I had to sacrifice or kill along the way to win over social recognition.

In that arena, I had both the freedom to choose to be me (and my whole collection of 5 dispersed alter-egos), AND the freedom not to be chosen to be someone else.

This series culminated in a self-revelatory theater performance, where I became the sole director and actor of my internal theater, putting those roles in critical dialogue with each other as they navigated an internal labyrinth in search of a way out.

The transformation occurred when I played out the entire script in the witness of an intimate audience: I lingered around each role, caring for and extending to each one of them a gentle, loving gaze that I hoped I had always received from this world. As I was doing that, I felt submerged in a well of clear, purifying self-compassion and empowerment.

This personal journey sheds light on the broader narrative of 'being based' in our generation. While the market amplifies personal branding, it often leads to self-alienation and self-numbing. We're torn between embodying a consistently polished persona and owning the rich internal conflicts that make us human.

The solution, perhaps, lies in finding a balance between these two extremes. Ultimately, the essence of 'being based' in this era of digital omnipresence extends further than just securing a slot in the online marketplace. We owe it to ourselves to make space for that constant inner theater to unfold and to nurture the inevitable tensions in between our inner roles. After all, the journey towards authentic self-presentations is not about maintaining a semblance of coherence and consistency, but rather genuine self-inquiries and ownership of our inner conflicts.

Keep exploring, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep being you.

In the heart of San Francisco, where I've made a temporary home, I noticed a pulse that seems to run on, what I've come to joke with friends, a new energy source. It's the self-sustaining '3H' cycle: Hustling, Healing, Hallucinating. One begets the other in a sequence as rhythmic as it is persistent. We hustle passionately, to a point where we seek healing in methods as ancient as they are avant-garde, before hallucinating (literally a by-product of healing too) with our AI co-pilot on the next big thing. Rinse and repeat. It’s a testament to the ambition of the audacious, each spin of the cycle greased by the sweat and blood of optimistic builders and daring opportunists.

If you are, like me, a tech worker with an artistic soul, an immigrant navigating the ever-shifting sands of socioeconomic statuses, a spiritual nomad perpetually in the process of recalibrating an identity that sprawls across diverse subcultures, an advocate of irrationality in a bastion of logic, then you might recognize this dissonance. It's the glitching sensation of observing the wheel of your fate as it bumps across parallel tracks each operating on a different speed that seldom converge: the personal, the professional, the aesthetic and the existential. San Francisco, for all its contradictions, is a city where such extremes are not just visible but almost theatrically displayed. Perhaps that is what sustains my complex kinship with it — a shared blend of alienation and affinity, as I navigate the landscape as an engaged onlooker.

The stark silhouettes of homelessness cast against the sleek automation of self-driving cars that glide through downtown streets like specters from some future midnight; the frenetic pace of young startup founders, oblivious to the irony of their lost Tesla plate possibly lying amidst the curbside assortments peddled by idle sellers they narrowly avoid on the streets of Mission. These juxtapositions might be dismissed as a mockery of the city's liberal hypocrisy, but they also speak to a resilience, a dynamic adaptability that encapsulates the full spectrum of human experience.

In the day and night hustles, where even the act of vipassana meditation becomes a strategic play in the game of productivity-boost-as-a-service, there's a marvelous grandeur to this relentless acceleration. It is fueled by an awe-inspiring belief in the potential of human intellect, all echoing with the digital clamor of a species biohacking its limits in overdrive.

Yet, in this whirlwind of acceleration, I found myself yearning for a pause, a moment of stillness. It was in the most unlikely of encounters, noticing a small experimental Japanese theater named Theater of Yugen on the map, that I discovered this sanctuary. Here, amidst the ceaseless spin of San Francisco, I found a space where time seemed to stand still.

First impressions of Yugen

Nestled between Tartine manufactory and a motley of studios in Mission, Theater of Yugen seems almost out of place with its quiet dignity. Its entrance, marked by heavy wooden gates adorned with a floral crest, seems less an invitation than a shield against the urban cacophony. Crossing this threshold, I stepped into a realm where history lingers in the air — a koto resting silently here, posters of decades-old performances there. The stage itself is an island of dimly lit calm, its wooden expanse stretching out like a tranquil sea.

Something about Yugen's mission struck a chord with me. It's a space dedicated to breathing new life into Noh and Kyogen (known collectively as Nohgaku), ancient Japanese theater incorporating lyrical drama and slapstick comedy. In its pursuit to meld these time-honored art forms with Western narratives, Yugen crafts a bridge spanning centuries and cultures.

This fusion mirrored my own journey. Having drifted from city to city, country to country in the last decade or so, I've been perpetually adapting — to new jobs, new adventures, new technologies, new relationships, new rules and orders. Yet, within me, there's always been a backward glance, a yearning to thread the elusive past, what I cannot afford to lose to keep myself in its entirety, into the evolving fabric of my present. Yugen, in its blend of nostalgia and innovation, inhabits that longing of mine, that bridge between what was and what could be.

I still vividly remember my first day at Yugen. I expected to be more like another face in the crowd, but instead as the only new student, thrust into an impromptu one-on-one VIP lesson with Lluis, my teacher. With Miwa and Kyoko, co-directors of the theater, observing from the audience and snapping pictures occasionally, the singular focus I received was almost unnerving. When everyone smiled at me and asked if I'd be back for the next class, I couldn’t say anything but yes like a reflex.

Lluis himself is a study in contrasts — a grocer by day, he transforms into a Nohgaku master by night. With decades of experience under his belt, he is the most recent succeeding instructor at the theater after the founder Yuriko retired. Lluis has a way of making each movement feel significant, each chant weighty with history. Yet he's also got this calming, almost casual demeanor that makes you feel okay about being a beginner. His teaching style is a mix of light guidance and gentle encouragement, with some unexpected humor. It's refreshing, especially after a long day of working at the laptop.

Jo-Ha-Kyu

Learning jo-ha-kyu, the central heartbeat of Nohgaku, was like reclaiming a lost language of movement for me. It's a concept of pacing — “Jo” means starting slow, “Ha” is building momentum, and everything ends swiftly at the peak energy of “Kyu”. In a world where everything is about grabbing attention from the get-go, Jo-Ha-Kyu felt like walking in slow motion amidst a time-lapse. It was counterintuitive at first, yet somehow made perfect sense.

Outside of Yugen, I learned that my speech must arrest my audience at the very start before I get cut off by someone else. I don’t remember how many elevator pitches I had to hone into razor-sharp brevity, scratching my head for the most provocative bits to front-load, hoping that something would land before the we reach the fifth floor. I learned that that is the formula for being seen and heard. If anything, one might as well go straight to offering “Kyu”, the climax, and what’s even better - stay there, keep the Kyu coming and coming.

But here on stage, I am permitted to start slow, appreciate the beauty of a build-up, and master the power of stop. The pacing gives definition to seemingly innocuous movements and lines. It feels as if Jo-ha-Kyu is a timeless spell that holds in it the collective faith of generations of life-long Nohgaku artists before me, entrusting me with the secret power and reassurance to set my own pace, slow down before I accelerate, and to leave it at its peak, without lingering or hesitation.

The Art of Restraint

In my debut, I played an owl-possessed younger brother in a Kyogen comedy classic called "Owl Mountain Priest". It’s a story about an older brother seeking the incantations of a mountain priest to help his sick brother recover from an owl spirit’s possession. To me, my role’s artistic essence consists in the restraint it exercises - a Nohgaku ideal that fills in the counterpoint for me in a city where over-expression and excess is the celebrated.

Each step, each gesture on stage, was a measured exercise in understated intensity and elegance, expressed through the subtle ways in which I shifted and grounded my body. As the possessed brother, I was in a position to define and move reality with my body, instead of having it move me. The role demanded a presence that was felt rather than seen, a power conveyed in the spaces between actions, in what is left unsaid and undone.

An Owl’s Gaze

Becoming an owl meant more than donning elaborate kimonos of long sleeves like wingspans and dragging pants; it was a journey into a more primal, unencumbered existence.

On the surface, this transformation seemed straightforward—minimal acting, no overt expressions. Believe it or not, my only spoken lines were hooting at various pitches. Yet, in its simplicity lay what I found the most illuminating - a shedding of the self. I learned to embody the owl's still gaze, maintaining the bird’s intense, almost piercing energy in my body, while stripping away the human layers of desire and fear in my face.

My rhythmic spiral around the priest in the jo-ha-kyu pattern was not just performance but an unshackling from the need to derive and impart meaning, the analytical baggage that weighs in on one’s choices. It was a unique form of catharsis, distinct from the dramatic pathos of tragedy, rooted instead in a clear and pure form of existence.

Absurdity as a Closure

The climax of our play, far from the usual heroic resolution, was an absurd dance, a “Hootstorm” accompanied by repetitive stomping and spiraling, as the older brother and the mountain priest, one after another, succumbed to the force of the owl spirit my role was possessed by. There was no sentimentality, commentary or character introspection made in this conclusion. Instead, it was a simple presentation of how events escalated in a farcically matter-of-fact way.

The narrative’s deviation from the traditional hero’s journey found classic western scripts—renunciation of a neat resolution and contemplation—offered me a sense of closure that was unexpectedly reassuring. Performing on stage, I experienced a dual revival: I was both resurrecting an ancient eastern comedic tradition and making a parody of the contradictions of my own life recognized and left as they simply are—sometimes unresolved, often cyclical, always in motion.

Not all battles end in victory or defeat; some just dissolve into the rhythm of life.

Finding My Yugen

To me, “Yugen” is not only a theater name, but also a Japanese aesthetic and philosophical idea that has long whispered to the quieter corners of my soul.

“Yu” speaks of a kind of otherworldly depth; “Gen”, on the other hand, suggests a subtle and profound sense of darkness. Together they portray an elusive, almost ineffable spirituality.

I recall, on a night many years ago in Kyoto, encountering a door curtain. It bore the kanji for "Yugen", 幽玄, its fabric caught in a midnight breeze. In that moment, enveloped in the curtain's ethereal flutter, I felt the essence of Yugen around me.

Now, in the heart of San Francisco, a city ever in the throes of creating and recreating its grand tales, finding my Yugen, 幽玄, has become a personal quest. It's about clinging to a narrative that's uniquely mine. It's about believing that while moving in step with the accelerating pulse, I also hold a space within me for the stillness of an owl’s gaze, even if just for the length of an absurd dance.

Interested in supporting Theater of Yugen? Donate Now!