i spent a good part of the past year daydreaming about moving to taiwan. both times i visited, something about the city let me relax and let go of an uncertainty in my chest. i feel reflected and understood there in a way i never felt anywhere else. being there feels like living in my childhood dreams.

so on a whim last fall, i applied to graduate school on a fulbright there. i spent a few months studying chinese on pleco for chinese language exams, and got a couple chinese novels to read. my daydreaming intensified as the days passed to the point where i was hallucinating entire weeks and months there. when results started coming out for fulbright, i checked my email religiously every day hoping for good news.

then on one unassuming day, i got an email update. i closed my eyes tightly, pressed the record button on my camera, and opened them to a slap in the face. all the time i had spent rendering the imaginary days, gone in a moment. i was devastated.

my life moved on, and i rooted myself in arizona more. i went to the maker space every day, and began to learn everything i could. i revisited my hobbies, and spent more time hiking and going to the gym. my bucket list of places i’ve yet to see here started growing again.

then, like a miracle, i got a different scholarship from the taiwan government to the media / interaction design program i had applied for in taiwan. i stared at the email in complete disbelief.

my mind dove into the trash can of my daydreams, fishing them out again.
this time, i was nervous.

when something is finally real, it starts to feel scary. is this how my parents felt when they moved to america? just one year older than me, newly married, abandoning the life they knew for another?

i really don’t know if it’s the right decision, or if there is a right decision, yet i feel so drawn to be leaving the U.S., even for a little while.

being in arizona the past 2 years, especially as i get closer to the arts, has made me really tense. i don’t speak the american small talk, and no matter how hard i try, i just don’t fit into the culture. i enjoy it from the outside, but the closer i get, the farther i feel.

i’m really nervous but i’m looking forward to my life in asia! i’m moving there in mid-august and i’ll be there for the next two years for the program so let me know if you are around :)

what i’ve been up to

• made a video of my cutting board making process and my grandma’s reaction!

  

• been finally understanding the complications of being an international student now that i’m about to be one. first time i had to hire a person to come to the doctor with me to watch someone sign a paper. intense stuff lol

• making a nightstand out of the old stool legs i ripped off

• making chopsticks!!! i made a man’s head out of the wood shavings lol

• i’m going to siggraph in a few weeks in LA (july 18-23) so lmk if you are around!

the past few months, i’ve been learning how to work with wood. something about the material, perhaps my complete lack of going outside and touching grass, makes wood so meditative to work with.

the first project i made was a bench. i drew out a design and brought it to the woodshop.

after some planning, i decided to use poplar wood, and showed up to the woodshop with questions. so.... how do i cut it to the size i want? how do i attach the pieces together? slowly, over the course of 2 months, and a lot of patience from the staff showing me tools, the bench came together. i learned how to use a planar, jointer, table saw, miter saw, drill press, sand and glue with dowels, and finish with polyurethane.

i also learned out how to upholster the piece with foam, plywood, batting, and interfacing on youtube.

i used the leftover upholstery foam to make cushions for my dining chairs.

at the woodshop, i would run into an old man who makes clocks. one time he roasted me for being basic for deciding to make a cutting board. i told him i eventually want to make an old school radio back from the era when technology at home disguised itself like furniture and he told me he had one in his room growing up. one time he laughed at me for not wearing an apron and getting wood dust all over myself. ever since then, i’ve worn an apron to the woodshop.

to the old man’s disappointment, i decided to make a cutting board next out of maple and walnut. i gave one of them to my grandma, and the other one to my friend for her wedding.

now i’m learning to make a chopstick jig and chopsticks out of all the scrap wood i’ve accumulated from my past two projects.

as i go to the maker space more, i find myself in a much better headspace because i’m so focused on making. it’s so satisfying seeing my material transform into my vision. i’m not as worried about perfection when i’m making alongside others, and its a lot less isolating when i can see exactly what the people around me are doing. i’m inspired by them, and apparently i inspire them too.

the old man showed me a bench that he made. “you inspired me” he said. he gave me a piece of wood he had already glued and sanded together. “make something with it.”

arizona has been getting really hot and my work has been taking a break since it’s summer in schools now, so i started collecting indoor hobbies that don’t require staring at a computer all day :’)

what i’ve been up to

• shoutout to my friend connie’s inprogress.works! it’s such a lightweight way to track progress of projects!! been so fun to upload progress there and see what everyone’s making

• started learning throwing... so much harder than i thought. last week i learned to trim a bowl that i made. will see how much i improve the next few months

• started climbing again, and decided to make a little chalk bag out of a plushie

• started learning embroidery, yesterday i learned how to chain and link stitch

  

• finally finished my first corset

  

• went to my first wedding the past weekend, felt like a college reunion and was really wholesome. for many us there it was our first wedding and it was nice that all of us didn’t know what to expect and got to experience it together.

• finally got the guts to watch obsession. so traumatizing but it was so real in its commentary on our scary level of reliance on each other in relationships. i never seen an indie movie have so many full theaters a whole month after its release. absolutely incredible theater experience

every year in high school, i’d eagerly await my annual voyage to china for my digital plastic surgery fix.

one summer the procedure took place in a dark room with a fake piano, another summer in a 2 bedroom apartment on a window ledge, and yet another in a different dynasty.

after the session, the photos would arrive in an email where we could select our favorite photos to alter. we’d send them back and a few weeks later we’d see our transformation. my friends and i would crowd around our computer to see how we look with our facial features completed blurred out.

in place of dress up and fashion, these photoshoots were the only chance all year we’d feel beautiful. looking back, i’m not quite sure how healthy it was to desire getting digitally altered, but it sure was fun getting to experience being a vogue model for a day.

these days i still love photoshoots and the glamour of capturing a moment.

i guess it’s similar to the portraits we have of important people of the past. they probably didn’t look like that, but it’s still telling to see a close-enough image of how they would look given inspiration from their natural looks.

it’s really interesting now how much desire correlates to being something else. wanting features you don’t have, and desiring to be a different version of yourself.

i distinctly remember how every time i succeed in losing weight, i didn’t appreciate my body until i gain the weight all back. then i look back at photos and realize i didn’t even enjoy the moments that i worked so hard for.

it’s so strange how hard it is to appreciate moments as they are, fleeting, unedited and raw. it feels as if every moment now is so carefully curated and every beat is so scheduled it’s hard to enjoy the passing moments of time for themselves.

a few days after i turned 25, while fixing my hair in my car mirror at a stoplight, i found a strand of pearly white hair and completely freaked out

i pulled it off my scalp and inspected it thoroughly to confirm that it was in fact, mine T_T

am i getting old that fast?

it’s very weird that i can now say my early twenties were the past now and that i’m in my mid-twenties. on one hand, i feel like i’m still at a forgiving age, but on the other i feel like i’m still as baby still entering high school at 15. it’s very weird to imagine that in another 10 years i’ll be a full fledged mid-thirty year old.

i’m going to my friend’s wedding in a few weeks (my first wedding). the past few months i’ve been seeing people’s wedding instagram posts and it’s kind of terrifying.

maybe going to the wedding will make me feel less scared and more excited? it’s scary because i can’t even imagine getting married at my age now.

i know that everyone is on different timelines, but i’m just so scared of turning 35 and being the only one left. one of my favorite musicals, company, starts out exactly like that. watching that a few years ago scared the shit out of me. it’s weird there’s these soft deadlines in society that are implied.

the past few years have been me slowly losing guy friends because they would start acting weird. it’s also so awkward because it feels like there’s this shared pressure to like get together with someone to hide from the glaring judgmental society or something.

my favorite satirical romance movie is the lobster, and in the movie the main character, a single man, is sent to a hotel and has a time limit to find a partner. if individuals don’t find a partner there, they are turned into an animal of their choice. the basic choice is a dog, but the main character chooses a lobster because “they live to be 100 years” and “have blue blood.” people go on to desperately find reasons to relate to each other in hopes of finding love.

when i see couples now, this is exactly how i feel. it feels like a sort of fake codependence.

i don’t know, maybe i just haven’t met someone in real life i could actually see the other three quarters of a century with

so growing up, we had a chicken in my backyard
i don’t think i ever gave her a name
but i knew she really liked me
i could tell because she stopped running away from me when i showed up in front of her

she eventually let me pet her

every day i’d go outside and pick up her egg of the day and my grandma would cook it

one day, i heard a really loud scream from the backyard

my mom had killed her.

that night she was in the pot and i literally could not be in the same room. smelling my cooked friend felt like a crime.

anyways today i went to a farm and there were chickens and goats. the chickens were so happy. when they saw me they immediately started running towards me, and it reminded me of my pet chicken.

a few months ago in taiwan we walked into a restaurant by the fishing village. as we walked in, i noticed how sad the fish in the tanks looked.

we decided to order a rock fish. i didn’t really know what a rock fish was but quickly learned because as soon as we put in our order, the lady grabs a bucket and scoops up one of the depressed looking fish. my heart dropped. i thought about asking her to dunk the fish back in the tank, but each second i thought about it, i knew the fish was already dying. by the time i had thought it through, it had probably already died.

when the fish came to the table, it tasted really good.

mortality is such a weird thing because you can’t exactly feel something else’s suffering. you can only imagine and choose whether or not to care.

“it was going to die anyway!” i told myself. i still felt bad.

i’ve been really conscious about food the past 2 years because i’m around more vegan and vegetarian people. it’s weird because i grew up in a culture literally intertwined with eating meat. when my sister tried to become vegetarian, my mom thought there was seriously something wrong with her. in china, you literally bond by eating meat at hotpot or barbecue. i never thought about animals dying at all. the only thing that mattered was the taste. i didn’t even think about it as an animal. it was just food. but now that people around me care more, its made me a little more conscious about it. i still eat meat, i just think about it more, i guess.

the other thing i learned a few weeks ago is that cows can only have milk when they’re pregnant. so dairy farms keep the cows pregnant and basically take the milk that was for calves. when i learned that, i didn’t really know how to feel. i guess for eggs i feel a little less bad because one time i saw a duck lay an egg and literally abandon it. so it feels like more like taking the equivalent of the product of their period away.

to be honest, i just don’t know how to choose what to feel bad for anymore. there’s just so many problems in the world sometimes i think i should just think about it less.

i brought my friend steven to try sweet tomatoes for the first time last week. sweet tomatoes was my childhood, and i wanted him to experience it, too.

unfortunately during covid, all of the sweet tomatoes closed… except one, in tucson, arizona, where we went.

walking in, it looked exactly as i’d remembered it. the salad bar, the trays, the clear blue and transparent cups. we bought stickers and went off to forage some food to bring back to our table.

as steven takes the first bite of the chicken noodle soup amidst the hum-drum of conversations, he goes:
“you know what this feels like, nancy? this feels like a third space.”

my mind got foggy for a second. i saw friends at sweet tomatoes, friends of friends, friends of parents of friends... happy, smiling, enjoying all the yummy soup. sweet tomatoes is where we’d gather, where we would celebrate, where we’d push our dining tables into one.

as i bit into the blueberry muffin, i remembered all the other times i had bitten into the same muffin, over 500 miles away and over 10 years ago for the very first time. it tasted exactly the same, and i was sitting at a chair that looked no different than the one when i first ate it.

at sweet tomatoes, all the worries in the world melted away. there was no where else like this.

in freshman year of undergrad, everyone around me was like LUNAR GALA LUNAR GALA LUNAR GALA

and i was like what is that ? why is it called that and what was all the hype about?? all i knew was that it was good and i HAD TO GO and it was held in the gym.

anyways, covid happened that year so it got canceled. two years later, i saw tickets were on sale.

some of the posters had people posing like in a magazine, but i still didn’t get the cue. i didn’t know what it meant until i was literally sitting in the audience.1

as a giant countdown on the stage pulsated, lights dimmed, and people held their breath holding flower bouquets, people started walking out with garments.

i had stumbled into a fashion show.

my school didn’t have a fashion program (as with most universities). this was the first time i was ever exposed to this medium of art. as the models walked across the stage, i started crying. i had never seen something so beautiful.

at the end of the show, my jaw was sore from being dropped for so long. that day was life-changing. it was how me, an awkward girl who wore men’s nike shorts and free t-shirts, was indoctrinated into the world of fashion and costume design.

i grew up playing barbie dolls and dress up in online games like fantage and dressing my avatar, but i never imagined wearing those clothes in real life.

the next year, my friend and i went to the lunar gala model workshop to learn how to do a model walk. the modeling director, a model himself, watched as i wobbled down the auditorium floor, trying desperately to hide the fact that i had never worn heels in my life.

he smiled at my completely pink flushed face, and i immediately looked away. i couldn’t do it. i decided that i should start backstage.

fast forward to last year, i saw that the maker space at my graduate program had a sewing area and i pounced at the first opportunity to learn.

the workshop was led by a magical lady named emma. we hit it off immediately. i’d collect fabric and daydream about what it could be, and she’d make my dreams come true. i practically lived at the maker space that summer. all the troubles in the world seemed to melt away to the whirring of the serger.

one day, after i did the metal workshop i realized i now technically have the chops to try to make armor. i felt so powerful.

the next few weeks i learned to make a ditto plushie, bags, a shirt, pajamas, a dress, a blouse...

learning to sew truly feels like learning a superpower. i can’t look at clothing the same way knowing how much goes into shaping it to the way we want and how we express ourselves through our choices. it makes me appreciate nature, and how different fibers and materials in the world feel. its made me appreciate what we have and also resent how much we have of it.

its helped me understand how things translate between a flat 2D canvas to a 3D plane on our bodies. its made me feel the weight of all the knowledge before us, all the trial and error that has led us to today.

i also go thrift shopping in the XL section and don’t mind because i know i can fix it to my size ;)

i’m currently learning to sew a corset with boning, and my next victim is upholstering a bench that i learned how to make in the woodshop. home depot is my new home 🥲

it was really funny to see the tech / finance bro world juxtaposed to fashion in the devil wears prada 2

i haven’t really written an update about my life in a while.

if we don’t know each other in real life and you haven’t been following this whole time, hi, i’m nancy, and i grew up in silicon valley, around people who believe in technology more strongly than religious people believe in god. that’s what i believed, too, until i discovered that being human is more fun. it took a few years of detaching and writing about it, but i’m mostly recovered now.

as a result of growing up around engineers and tech workers, it took a really long time for me to get rid of feeling guilty enjoying things outside of technology, like watching plays and making things with my hands. i also used to fail to talk to anyone else but people who grew up like me.

so in the past two years, i frantically caught up by watching movies and plays and musicals. it took awhile to find my type of stories and there was a steep learning curve to loving things, but i finally now have enough cultural references to appreciate art and participate in a culture i was supposed to be a part of. even learning woodworking has felt american in a way, like i’m chopping campfire wood or hanging around some cool dad’s garage.

with my newly equipped cultural knowledge and references and fine taste in media, i’ve engaged with society more, and finally have artist friends. my hobbies and interests have helped carry me into communities outside of my childhood and college friends.

the more i catch up with old friends the more distant i feel now. i don’t really have as much dissonance between my job and my life, and its changed how i feel in everything i do every day. little things make me happy.

life now feels pretty chill for the most part. i work at a non-profit now with kids and it feels important and impactful. the projects on the walls at schools never fail to make me happy.

i’m much more aware of the type of energy of person i like to be around. i put myself first more, and know much better how to gauge my energy level. i’m much better at saying no.

i feel so much inertia in every direction, and sometimes i feel paralyzed thinking about where i’d like to be in 5 years.

do i want to make investigative documentaries? write a satirical play / musical? make my own fashion label? design and construct tiny homes? i don’t really know, but i hope to do them all before i’m old, and i’d die happy knowing i tried doing them.

my life goals get longer as i find more things that excite me. it’s quite overwhelming having this many interests, but it makes every day so fun because my curiosity never seems to end. life is so fulfilling when you’ve learned to find love and joy in learning everything.

i’ve found that once you learn to enjoy, you also become a pair of glasses, helping everyone else around you to see and appreciate everything the world has to offer.

Three friends I know on completely separate occasions applied for an EU passport through ancestry and got it and it sent me down a spiral and panic attack last month of “what is my backup plan for leaving the U.S.”

I learned a few years ago that China is impossible to immigrate to because I was not born there (and I wouldn’t really want to anyway). My parents aren’t Taiwanese so I wouldn’t be able to get a Taiwanese passport. I don’t know any Spanish to be able to be comfortable in Central or South America. Then I started looking into how to get residency and the standard method is moving somewhere and living there for at least five years. The shortcut to that is marriage, which grants you instant access or speeds up the process.

When I talk to friends about this their their eyes would sort of glaze over and I feel like a crazy person. But the fact that my very not European-cultured American friends now have an EU passport despite never caring before about their roots to their culture felt like a wake-up call to me.

I went to Renaissance Faire for the first time a few weeks ago and at first I was so confused why its such a big event. Then I realized it reminds me of the ancient Chinese streets where they have themes about history and you can dress like the palace people from different dynasties.

I also realized this is the culture white Americans left, so they still feel a connection to it so many generations later. It got me thinking about how white people in the U.S. are all actually all originally from Europe, just like how Taiwanese people are originally from China, yet they are not the same after years of living separately.

I also went to Lake Havasu City, and there they have a fake London Bridge. All I could think is: “wow they really do miss their roots.”

I’ve already lost a lot of Chinese culture despite my parents being from China just a generation before, so it would practically disappear a few generations later if I don’t do anything. I started to learn Chinese again just in case anything happens, and I’m eternally grateful to be at a level where I could survive if the world switched powers in my lifetime.

I met him at a fellowship in Miami. The type of fellowship that was ill-heartedly promoted by a group of people circle-jerking their own egos and flaunting their elite college statuses, gripping onto their college name like a pacifier.

He didn’t have an online profile, went by “Anonymous” on the fellowship website, and hung a default profile image in its place.

I didn’t think much of it, flying to Miami for the fellowship as a mental break to get away from my life. After landing, a storm of try-hard 20-something year olds clouded my consciousness, swaggering their internet education of the world. One guy gushed about Portugal’s victorious economic comeback to through fish murder. Another guy, draped in Fendi and Givenchy logos and a cartoonish gold chain, wearing sunglasses darker than his hair, shared his fixation of dolphins, a truly intelligent underdog that, he believed, held the secret to communication. He made sure everyone knew about his anonymous charitable crypto donation to the dolphins in an attempt to research and unlock their true potential. I rolled my eyes, attracting the attention of another guy who would not stop repeating that I’d really get along with his co-founder, Anonymous, who’d be arriving later that day. I doubted it.

We stayed in an Airbnb by the water, and for a week, floated between different colored walls in Miami. By the second day I wanted to explode at the sight of any other fellow who’d chant the proverbial words “special” and “exclusive.” Every time I opened my mouth to scream, I’d be met with the same blank stare, pressed lips, and darting gazes of disapproval, punctured by offerings of outlandish facts.

After Anonymous arrived, I no longer felt alone.

Anonymous and I shared a mutual hate over status symbols, opting for a quieter, gentler version of curiosity and slow-burning knowledge. While I’d grow frustrated and annoyed, he’d pry further and knowingly stab at the other fellows with his questions, holding back his reaction in character to ask more. I learned from him that by shifting my gaze to that of an anthropologist, I could redirect my feeling of hatred into humor. We’d hold back our smiles at the most outlandish statements people would make, and joke about all the weird characters around us. Sitting beside him, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel alone.

At parties that week, we’d stand awkwardly next to each other like a pair of separated chopsticks. I didn’t know much about him, but that we shared an understanding that we communicated through laughter.

After the fellowship ended I texted his friend, “I don’t know what you had in mind when you said I’d get along with Anonymous, but you were right.”

“I told you.”

I was inspired by this post “I friend dumped a Harvard Law nepo-baby” and figured I’d give my contribution to this genre. My friends have enjoyed hearing my stories from being blessed with the skill of attracting very wack nerdy men and I don’t really see this talked about in Hollywood so I figured I’d talk about it here.

i didn’t think of myself as pretty growing up.

my mom would send me to dance class and i’d feel self-conscious wearing a leotard. my stomach would stick out over my hip and i’d feel fat and ugly... unless i wore a skirt, which at least freed me from my desperately sucked-in stomach. i would look at my face, brush my bushy eyebrows into a shape i wanted, only for it to revert back instantly. i didn’t feel confident at all, and couldn’t look people in the eye when talking to them.

in middle school i’d eat a salad for lunch, then starve myself the rest of the day. then at night, i’d run on the treadmill for an hour before fainting on my bed. eventually, my stubborn body lost its baby fat, but i was still insecure about my face.

in high school, my friend and i evolved our stationary obsession to makeup. she got me everything to start – eyeshadow, liquid lipstick, concealer, eyeliner, blush. with my newly acquired skills, my face became a blank canvas. i’d scavenge my mom’s drawers for products to plaster on my face. my eyebrows looked sharpie-d in and my face tie-dyed with colored powders. i’d go to school with my blotchy makeup, not realizing until years later how bad it looked... but it didn’t matter, i was having fun.

in freshman year of college i had a part-time job on campus labeling data for a research lab that i had found through a bulletin board. i was cheap labor, but it was the first time i had an income. i’d clock in to dutifully bridge the gap between human intelligence and computer intelligence by labeling videos of men on construction sites in different positions and use my newfound wealth to buy bundles of sephora makeup samples on mercari so i could try different brands. they’d come in different plastic packets of different colors which i could apply to my face like watercolors. testing what worked and didn’t work on my skin tone, i’d get full sizes of used makeup on r/makeupexchange.

i followed makeup accounts on instagram that updated the latest available colors. eventually i knew every released product, how well it was doing, and every brand at sephora by heart. i knew what palettes would go out of stock and what colors were in trend. i knew what brands people sought out in other countries where they were not available.

on trips to china, i’d look on xiaohongshu and try new makeup styles. when i was in korea, i stopped at every olive young on the street and test out different colors. my makeup collection bloated out of my cabinets.

the really interesting thing about makeup is once you get better at it, it stops being about beauty and starts being about identity. you start having multiple identities because people don’t recognize you anymore. you can shift identities and be different versions of yourself on demand.

i did a makeup workshop at a camp and to my surprise, more men attended than women. we did everyone’s makeup and showed how to do a daily makeup look. they were so excited to be a different person, and it was so thrilling to see their smiles from seeing their transformation.

in college, one of my favorite books, disguised, talks about a young woman that dresses as an old lady with prosthetics and makeup and goes around the U.S. to expose how badly we treat the elderly, and how much we treat youth as a mark of beauty. some moments were really raw, her friendship with an age-agonistic kid she meets on the beach who asks her to collect seashells with her, an old man she meets at the park for picnics who gives her diabetic friendly candy. yet most of her experiences are unfortunately violent or hateful, and she saw how the elderly were no position to fight back. her personal experience and stories ended up changing accessibility laws in the U.S.

the other side of opting out of beauty is not being human. i used to think furries were crazy, but the more i think about it the more it makes sense. if we all pretend to be animals, then it won’t matter what race or ethnicity we are when we talk to each other.

yesterday, i watched slanted, which talks about a chinese girl who undergoes surgery to change into a white person. parts of the movie were kind of cringe, but some of the scenes were really relatable to my experiences from moving to white america arizona. it wasn’t until i moved here that i realized how much i don’t feel like i belong in the U.S., especially in entertainment. you have to work way harder for opportunities based on how you look. i realized only then that beauty isn’t all about being skinny or knowing how to do makeup, it’s also having confidence from feeling like you’re a part of it all.

a few days ago i was reading about yue-sai kan’s life, how she came to america from china, and made her wealth starting one of the first cosmetics brands in china. she now leads the annual shanghai film festival and beauty pageant. when china first opened up, people didn’t feel confident. she started her makeup brand as a way for women to feel confident and beautiful. it is with this same confidence, she says, that allows us to have the feeling that we can conquer the world.

in junior year, my friend M told me about the legendary professor golan levin. he was so legendary that for a year, i was scared shitless to talk to him.

i tried for 2 years to enroll in one of his classes, in hopes that his almighty the senpai would take notice. unable to retain my enthusiasm channeled from my suppressed creativity, i sent him desperate emails to gain his attention.

in a cold email, i gushed about my newfound admiration for cool websites and interactive media

to my disappointment, he replied:

I curtailed my sadness and replied:

it worked :D he asked me to stop by the studio and i became one of his disciples the following semester in his creative coding class.

on the first day of class, fall 2022, he projects on the screen

i stared, in awe. i had built a high wall defending software that had felt that way. for the first time, i felt my walls come down. i didn’t need them here.

he starts class, saying “this is the hardest class you will ever take. my goal is not to teach you how to program. you all already know how. my goal is to push you to your limit, to use what you know to make work that is beautiful and profound. to push the boundaries of what is possible.”

his class went on to completely shatter how i had previously viewed programming and art.

in each piece he showed in class, i felt my brain rewiring itself going “THIS IS ART” “THIS IS ART!!!” all the years of my art teacher mom and engineer dad spent screaming at each other over their differences started to find peace in my heart. all that time i spent agonizing over edge cases in my fundamentals of programming class and feeling stupid for not solving problems faded... i felt seen in the way beauty and feeling could be expressed through any medium. for every math equation i used in my compositions, controlling the shapes with numbers and parameters, i began to see math as art. i began to see code as poetry.

in class, he’d show us art pieces. he put them on the projector and we’d look at them. every class, he’d choose a few favorite student assignments to show on the big screen. i worked with all my heart to get my work shown in class. to get a word of approval from him.

i showed one of my pieces, kiss, to him during office hours to get his thoughts.

“nancy, I know you could do better.”

the words shot through me. the disappointment in his voice wounded me for days.

in class, we all took turns talking about our pieces. i sheepishly went to the podium, his words ringing in my mind.

to my shock, afterwards, he says:

“you know, nancy, this is actually really beautiful. I told you all to make something simple and you did. wonderful work.”

sometime last year i watched whiplash and it brought me back to his class. golan had the same passion and strive for greatness as the jazz band teacher, terrace fletcher. i’m conflicted because without golan, i would not have understood what made art great, and been able to see the beauty as i do now of what makes good art good.

for every idea i have and every art piece i see, he is still right there beside me. i can hear his voice of approval and disapproval. i feel a fire burning inside me when art isn’t good. when art isn’t good, the wasted opportunity hurts. i feel his pain.

my sewing teacher said something to me that stuck with me: “you’re mad because you care. because you know what is good. you wouldn’t be mad if you didn’t care.”

to me, art is about inspiring others. it’s about starting dialogue, communicating what might otherwise be hard to put to words. if that is not communicated, then the artist has failed. if artists don’t have a voice in their work, then who will?

on the first day of camp prep we pitched our ideas for what classes to teach. one of the other instructors goes, “i’ll teach estimation. math is fun.”

i winced.

i was surprised how instant my averse reaction was to it.

i realized this was my response because i had met so many people in college who also liked it but turned out to become gamblers, poker players, or quantitative traders. they predicted things because they liked to predict the market and be right. too many times they’ve made me feel bad when i knew less than them.

later that day, he asked me why i was so bothered by people who like to estimate things.

“i don’t get the point of estimation. why does it matter if i’m right or wrong about something if i could just measure it? i think things that can’t be measured are a lot more interesting anyway. things in this world don’t have to be reduced down to a number”

i asked him why he liked estimation.

“it’s fun to estimate things that i don’t know the answer to.”

i softened. “so you don’t care about prediction markets and poker?”

he was confused. “no? i’m really sorry that’s what you think when you think of estimation”

i’ve never met anyone up until that point who’d wholeheartedly found it fun.

his curiosity was contagious. as the days went on, i found joy in estimations. i brainstormed questions for his class like “what is the weight of a blue whale?” or “how many rice grains are in a bowl?” or “how wide is the earth?”

“look, nancy loves it!” he’d exclaim as i lit up with question after question, newly fascinated by an activity i had previously despised.

the more questions i asked, the more they started popping up. i’d look at a waterfall and wonder if fish would survive the fall, i’d look at a mountain and wonder how tall it is.

pretty soon i was looking at the world like a child again. the next weeks, i experienced taiwan fully, looking at the world with wonder and curiosity i had forgotten i could have.

estimation was so intertwined in my mind with the stock market that it had completely ruined the beauty, art, and fun of trying to understand the world. it was so healing to realize that at its core, estimation starts with curiosity.

It’s been almost half a decade and I haven’t written a reflection about this blog yet. So today, on the last day of 2025, I thought: “It’s time.”

If you haven’t talked to me in the last 4 years I would tell you that I took a leave from college, got some internships, became disillusioned, went back to college, graduated, moved to a new city, and learned how to be an adult.

But if you’ve been reading my Substack this whole time, I would tell you I still don’t feel that much more of a writer, I still have no idea what I’m doing, and “Yeah I know, this post isn’t in lowercase.”

August 2021

Confused, lost, opinionated, internet-addicted, and having only a vague idea of what Substack was from a vaguely tech community called Reboot during the height of COVID, I decided: “It’s time.” I wasn’t sure what this was going to be, what I was going to write about, or if it would last.

I knew I wouldn’t be alone because other people from Reboot also wrote on Substack.

So I swallowed my self-doubt, drew a chicken nugget, and this general zuo’s chicken was born.

I texted the link to a few of my online friends from Reboot. They subscribed.

“Yay.”

Having an audience made me feel compelled to write, because now I had my friends’ precious disappointment at stake. After I wrote a few posts, I worked up the courage to send my blog to my non-internet non-Reboot friends. I was scared because I had no idea what they would think of me. Was this cringe? What if they think it’s cringe and they tell everyone its cringe and now they have proof to make fun of how cringe I am?

I swallowed my self-doubt and continued writing.

Post-2021 to Now

Over the years, I’ve written about technology, art, culture, substack, my mom, china, my fear of ants, love... and so much more.

Writing about what I want has helped me find others who think about the same trails of thought, like a depth-first search for “why do I feel so insecure growing up Asian” or “why does this specific genre of Substack writing feel weird” or “why did visiting SF made me feel so weird.” Writing has helped me not only understand what I care about, but also ask myself why I care about those things. It’s led me to revisit the lowest and highest moments of my life, and find solace in others who’ve had similar episodes and realizations. It’s helped me find connections between seemingly random interests. Its brought me to new cities, where I’ve met readers and other writers, and be inspired by the way they think and view the world.

This January, I wrote my first post, “every substack girl’s writing” that went “viral.” By viral, I mean it got a lot more eyes on it than I had expected, reaching a significant number of strangers that I had not met before. This greatly propelled my Substack into the public eye for a few months, something I had neither anticipated or prepared for. It quickly made me realize the consequences of being taken out of context, and the pain Someone With a Different Opinion could have on you. The experience taught me to try my best not to take things too personally, and was a wake up call: my substack was changing into No Longer Just a Thing For Friends.

Over the years, its grown more and more daunting to hit the send button on my Substack, and littering an ever-growing amount of inboxes with my thoughts, knowing not everyone will be interested in everything I have to say. Every time I publish a post, I imagine a room full of 300+ pairs of eyes, holding a microphone and getting stage fright in front of the audience.

Sometimes when I meet a stranger and they say they’ve read my Substack, I’ll wonder how meeting and talking to me differs from my writing. Or when I meet someone and they go like “Oh! You’re general zuo’s chicken!” I feel immediately self-conscious from the asymmetry of how much they know about me vs. I know about them. Then I wonder if this was scaled up, this is what the Life of a Writer would feel like. I think of it now like: reading my blog = watching The Introduction Episodes of Nancy’s Life to fast forward to today.

Looking forward, I don’t want general zuo’s chicken to become diluted with its growth. I will try with all my heart to keep the magic of it feeling like a little newsletter I write for my friends.

If you told 2021 Nancy that she would one day see herself as a writer she would have thought you were crazy. But between 2021 and 2025, I can finally say I feel slightly more confident to call myself a writer. I’m so thankful for your readership, see you in 2026. 🫶

i think the reason i keep having identity crises is because i still haven’t fully accepted who i am in the U.S. i embrace my “chinese identity” in the U.S. just to visit china and realize how far i am from it. in china, it feels like i’m an american in a chinese body, having access by blending in. as soon as i stumble over my words, the illusion shatters.

i think it’s something people who aren’t from one place understand. it’s this dissonance of not really being a full part of a culture that’s disorienting.

the past few weeks i went to hong kong and shenzhen. i went to siggraph asia in hong kong for a week, to disneyland hong kong, then took the high speed rail across the border to china.

i spent 5 days there, the majority shopping in huaqiang electronics market and realizing how much of the world exports from there. i filled my suitcase with $2 phone cases for various models of phones. i met a man who praised each phone case i eyed like beautiful new outfits for my phone. “YOU HAVE A GOOD EYE. YOUR PHONE WILL BE BEAUTIFUL!!”

i was completely stunned by just how different shenzhen felt from hong kong despite being only 15 minutes away. shenzhen was like 1/3 the cost of hong kong. i realized a winning strategy to get hong kong people to eventually all come to china is by making shenzhen significantly more accessible and affordable.

my hotel came with a butler robot that delivered food delivery to my door in 15 minutes. i later realized i could also order other things than food, so i did a lot of shopping and he did a lot of delivering to my room. the first time i ordered takeout, the driver called and was like “the robot is delivering it up to your room~” and i froze for a few seconds before processing what he had said.

i was a little more confident to admit myself as an american during this trip, and to my surprise, the chinese opinion of america had gone up because people have a favorable opinion of elon and trump...

every time i come back from asia, my suitcase feels too small to bring everything back: the clothing and makeup that actually fit my skin tone, the hair stylists that know how to work with black hair, the voice of the delivery driver calling to tell me my food is here, the 24 hour cut fruit shops.

it did, however, have space for a labubu! i found him at hong kong airport’s pop mart (for normal price) and opening the box and holding him for the first time felt like magic. i did not expect to like him so much after all the hype and memes...

i miss asia for all the parts i feel are lacking in the U.S., including the answers to who i am. when i look at media there, it makes me feel like i could be a part of it. i see chinese people play all the roles in movies and tv shows. i see the culture fully expressed in every facet of life, instead of reduced down to “szechuan cuisine” or one stereotypical asian role or tv show. i feel understood looking at all the on sale signs of items always pretending to be on sale because chinese will only buy things on sale.

on the last day of my trip, i met with my grandma’s old student in shenzhen, a chinese traditional painter.

i told him about tyrus wong, the paper son from china, who defined the art style of bambi, one of the first disney movies, with his traditional chinese aesthetic. he scoffed, saying it wasn’t the most impressive chinese art.

i told him about the the adidas neo-chinese style that’s been overtaking the internet with its blend of east and west, and how beautiful i find the blend of culture.

he probably thought it was equally as unimpressive. just another diluted version of chinese culture.

as i walked through his studio and he picked out some nature paintings for me to bring back, he told me ‘you will be important one day because you understand both sides.’

i still don’t really know what i will add to the world, but i hope my perspective will be helpful or unique in some way. even if i may only have a vague understanding of china, i’d like to blend it with my vague understanding of america, and make artwork that is uniquely me.

i’m back home in the U.S., extremely jet lagged and writing this at 2am, and will be going to taiwan for another 2 weeks in january with the compass fellowship (please tell anyone you know between 18-23 to apply! i made the website)

brace yourselves for a post like this again in probably a month after i get more confused going to asia again.

hope you all are having a great end of the year, and i hope to write more in the new year :)

i grew up in places that were extremely asian. my high school was 70% asian and my undergrad was similar. the only times i experienced normal demographic america was when my family went on vacations. but since we were on vacation way less than at home, i thought asian american communities were america.

it wasn’t until i started going to see more theater and got deeper into film and art that i started to realize how culturally different actual america is from asian american america. during my senior year of undergrad, i told myself that if i ever want to succeed in art in america, i’ll have to first immerse myself outside the asian american community. so i moved to arizona.

going from very east asian american communities to being around no other east asians for months on end is a very stark change. i always wondered what the one white kid in my english class of all asians felt, and its like i’m finally getting a taste of what being the only person who looks like something feels like.

i remember reading about rosa parks and martin luther king and civil rights movement leaders and not really internalizing what prejudice felt like because everyone around me looked the same. but when everyone around me were people who talked differently from me and had a different childhood, i begin to wonder what i could do to fit in with people i may never fully understand.

when i go back home to california i get reverse culture shock. i sit at dinners, bewildered by the normalcy of delaying joys in life. i space out in conversations where happiness, joy, and wonder are never brought up. i observe my friends follow the footsteps of our parents, never truly finding joy in anything, repeating the same gossip about their high school classmates and communities they grew up in. i wonder if i’m the odd one out, leaving somewhere so familiar for a place where i may never belong.

i was taking an acting class this semester in the local community college’s black box theater. a few weeks into the class, i realized how bad i am at “being american.” acting was hard not because of acting, but because i didn’t know how to connect to others that didn’t understand me. it’s not natural explaining who you are when you never had to before.

i’m absolutely terrible at small talk, reading subtle gestures and facial cues, and find it extremely unnatural to express any form of extreme emotion. at first i thought there was something wrong with me (which there might be), but what i realized was that it was unnatural for me to express those emotions because others around me growing up didn’t either.1 i started wondering why my emotions are so subdued and what i could do to feel them stronger. the only way to get better at expressing those emotions has to be to feel them in the first place.

i started watching more movies, and realized that east asian movies express emotions in a much quieter way. it’s a lot less words and a lot more actions and staring at each other. i relate to this a lot more. i relate in the same way as when i started putting on asian makeup instead of trying to copy the american style of makeup. it simply felt more natural and looked better on me.

these days i’ve been embracing chinese culture more. i got a chinese painting book and have been inspired by the impressionistic style of the artwork. i got a knotting book and felt nostalgia looking at the chinese button knot. the knotted keychains brought me back to the stands in tourist shops all over china. i’m inspired looking at 1920’s shanghai clothing styles.

it’s freeing to finally accept the parts of myself i was ashamed of for so long. i realized that if i welcome who i am with open arms, i can more freely fuse it with the parts i like about american culture, and it would be uniquely me. i used to think becoming american meant letting go of being chinese, but i’m finally starting to realize that i can be both because they are both part of who i am.

"pu er tea is harvested from the mountains of yunan" the host breathes deeply,

"local villagers hike 3 days into the forest to these 800 year old trees and hand pick the leaves."

she pours the tea in a straight line, spilling the 800 year old tree's soul on the table for the price of magically "connecting us together"

pu er tea is a tea my mom drinks every day. its basically black tea. i didn’t understand the deal.

wincing, i sip the tea as people share their science fiction stories. when it was my turn, i share my satire about a fictional planet named starbucks where lucky guests try a very special type of tea brewed in a proprietary volcano

people laugh uncomfortably, then go silent.

i retreat upstairs, where i encounter a weird shaped chair that hypnotizes me for a good 10 minutes. i honor its role of a chair and make awkward eye contact with a guy who clearly didn't feel the same magic.

i walk over to the outdoor patio and hear some substack journalists pose as experts on china. i cringe as one of the panelists dismisses economic and political concerns with china as "non-humanistic" referencing buddhism as a solution to our world's issues.

i go for a stroll and come back with some takeout poke. i sit on a table warmly accompanied by three phallic wood structures, a cutting of a cherry tomato vine, and an ocean rock in resin. the girl next to me announces she was in hong kong a few weeks ago, where she met an 89 year old billionaire who told her to come to his hotel and showed her his wife's collection of labubus.

i take a detour to go to noisebridge, a communal maker space in the mission. looking at the piles of electronics, i see glimpses of what technology in san francisco used to be. i talk to an old moroccan man named mohammad about life. he asks if i think there's a creator of our universe. i'm not sure.

i attend a session titled "how to listen to unreleased music" and listen to grimes' unreleased album. she is dubbed “redacted” for the evening. we spend 40 minutes listening in silence, clearly about her past relationship with elon. i tolerate her yelling "liar liar liar" and how "he told her it was love," then cringe in the post-discussion as people dance around asking whether it's clearly about elon. they end the discussion before anyone brought up the elephant in the room.

the next day, my friend hypes me up for a matchmaking event that i signed up for. it was hosted by a prolific substack writer. i go by a pseudonym for the evening.

i suffocate as bodies of dozens of sweaty tech bros scramble to write name tags and find their matches. i make eye contact with early balding men asking for my age.

"what's the oldest you'd date?”

i mumble 30 and then immediately regret it.

oh! i'm right at your cutoff! i'm 29."

i meet a guy who found some other guys whose matches didn't show up. i meet two women who tell me that they're besties now because they found each other at another matchmaking event.

i talk to other people at the symposium but every person feels like another caricature. a tv show where i'm the only audience member and the only one laughing.

i stare into space, wondering how i might find more people to join the audience.

on the plane ride home, i look at the buildings below and they start to look like little computer chips. i wonder if mohammad was right.

the smell of spices overtook me as i entered my apartment. to the left, a 3-drawer cabinet. one for onions, one for garlic, one for potatoes. a cabinet of lentils, sorted like the rainbow. a spice bento box with garam masala, mustard seeds, tumeric, chili powder, cumin seeds, and coriander.

a few months ago, i moved in with indian international classmates. in this time, i've learned to materialize naan, paratha, roti, chicken tikka and paneer from scratch.

we've spent late nights riffing memey chinese music and bollywood music, watching life of pi, 3 idiots, slumdog millionaire, laughing at the way china and india stereotype each other in chandni chowk to china and kung fu yoga.

i've brought them to experience the fish section at 99 ranch. we've compared our cultural carbohydrates. i tried to be vegetarian for a week and failed. youtube thinks i'm indian.

we've laughed at the way yoga became so white-washed and prada plagiarism of indian kolhapuri sandals. i realized that the gilded age aesthetic was indian patterns.

they've given me an indian name – disha, or ‘direction.’ after the way my english name is pronounced in chinese, '左南西', or 'left south west.'

before living with my housemates, i didn't really understand indian culture because there wasn't much representation in the american media.

i began to realize how few spaces there are to immerse ourselves safely in another culture. not just only in the language, but in the smells and foods and music and emotions that we all share. its this same cultural difference i felt when i first left communities that i grew up in that were almost completely east asian.

i used to feel a lot of discomfort being around people that were very different from me, but these days i view it as a chance to grow. the only way to learn is by being around people not like you.

what i've been up to

• i'm taking a special effects makeup class this fall. on the first day of the class, the teacher took a picture of our face, printed it out, and told us to trace it. i've never looked at my face so closely and thought about what might change with age. i’m excited to pretend to be an older me and other variations of me

• i was brave enough to sign up for an acting class this semester... every thing else in life feels easier now that i'm taking an acting class. on the first day of class, the teacher was like 'by understanding acting, you're understanding humans' and i realized right on the first day of class that even if i never become an actor, i’m not going to be the same after this class

• i watched a lot of movies recently. singin' in the rain, the curious case of benjamin button, paper heart, anastasia, elio, the life of chuck, together... i'm starting to recognize movies on the bookshelves at stores and libraries. actors are starting to reappear in different movies. i’m starting to feel an obligation to write reviews on letterboxd

• i'm trying to figure out what to do with my life next year. i love to write and tell stories and write satire but i don't know how to convert these skills into something in the world on a larger scale that is still real and true to myself. i spend some days at a loss, and other days feeling extremely lucky i have a choice

i have a phd so listen to me

the safety issues can be resolved

before they evolve

we have smart people

the models won't eat us

(wrote this while listening to yet another ai timeline...)

last month at SPARC, we had a superlatives survey where people filled out "most likely to..."

to my surprise, i won the category for "most likely to not be replaced by ai"

i'm not quite sure exactly what about me gave that quality, but i feel really happy others think i have it.

maybe the defining quality of not being replaced by ai is simply lacking the fear of it happening, because you're still happy you're yourself either way.

anyways, some other crazy things happened at sparc this year.

like we wrote a musical.

yes a whole musical with six whole original songs. an opening number, a sad "i want song,” and more!

it's a satire about citadel, the quant company i like to make fun of.

i made a playbill (haha "paybill") and we casted students to perform it on the last day during the talent show.

to backtrack on why i was so adamant on writing a musical, last month when i was in new york, riley, one of the creators of the steakhouse sent a message in the mehran's steakhouse whatsapp group saying that some people at reputable musical writing workshop wrote a musical about the steakhouse. i knew i had to see it. i pushed my trip to new york back a few days to go and see this masterpiece.

i asked if i could film the behind the scenes and filmed an interview asking them about their process for writing the song and filmed the show. watching these crazy talented theater students materialize a musical from scratch gave me the confidence to do what they did. sitting on their fire escape, listening as they shared the secrets of musical writing, i realized i could do that, too.

backtrack some more, there was also i musical i reviewed for the cmu newspaper last year called emote performed by engineers (who were doing a vocal minors). the lyricist, tim, happened to be my downstairs neighbor. we went on a walk and i asked him how he wrote the musical. he told me he’s always loved watching them so he decided to jump in and do it for his final thesis. i realized then that the only real way to learn was by doing it.

fast forward to the first day of sparc, i met an amazing composer and friend of a friend, holden. meeting holden was like talking to a living version of mozart or beethoven. i've never met anyone who had the musical talent right before my eyes. the way holden creates and plays any piece of music felt like pure magic. i knew it was time. we had to write a musical.

over the next few days, we drafted lyrics and shared inside jokes. we rhymed and wrote with ai. we deleted and rewrote without ai. we banged our heads for inside jokes and sparc-themed pickup lines to add to our script.

in the end, we did it.

people laughed, people cried. people left comments on the recording.

if you want to watch the musical recordings (sparc and steakhouse) you may buy a ticket to watch them both here (and the behind-the-scenes) by buying a subscription ($7) to the substack.

i’ll also include some more personal reflections about it.

Read more

summer of 2022, in the midst of my existentialism of pretending to drag buttons on a screen for 8 hours a day at my internship, i called my friend j.

he said that i should quit if i hated it so much and that i should go to SPARC. they needed more counselors, he would introduce me to the organizer of the camp.

i had known j for the past year and over this year he would not stop talking about how much he liked this mysterious acronym. i met j through an eccentric neighbor i had in college who introduced me because we both took a leave from college around the same time. j also grew up in a hyper-competitive asian american immigrant setting and became disillusioned by all of it in college.

"i've never known anyone who regretted leaving something they hated. quit."

those words rang in my mind. it rang against all the voices that told me to stay. over the voice of my peers, parents, and boyfriend at the time who were making me feel miserable, gaslighting me to stay somewhere eating away at my soul. i thought about all the problems in the world, and how bad sitting and doing nothing in an office felt.

i trusted j. i quit my internship and went to SPARC. i still wasn't exactly sure what SPARC was, but i knew that i'd like it if he liked it.

on the first day of camp, we sat in a circle around a chair. the head of the camp told us to take turns going to the center of the circle and do something with the chair. i panicked, not knowing what i should do.

had i accidentally joined a cult? what is this?

thankfully, it wasn't a cult. it was like a creative retreat for people who usually did math. it was so refreshing to be somewhere where it was ok to discover who i was and what i liked, and be around high schoolers again and have a lens to look back on how i might have been like before going to college.

every afternoon, people self-hosted activities of what they liked, played board games, went to classes if we felt like it. the classes ranged from philosophy to theory to math. we were encouraged to meet each other in 1 on 1s, which were nice to get to know people and their interests.

most of the people at the camp had a blog and enjoyed writing and reflecting. something about being around other people who spent a lot of time in their head empowered me to do that more too, so that summer i wrote a lot. i sat on the grass and wrote. i sat on a chair and wrote. i wrote and wrote until my obsidian tabs shrunk into little slivers.

it was the first time i felt sure that thinking the way i did was ok and that it's okay to not stay somewhere i didn't like.

it's been three years since I went to SPARC, and each time I get involved, i remember what a pivotal time it was for me. i remember how much clearer and more confident my voice became after reflecting so much at SPARC, and am so grateful for all that its given me.

this week, i'll be going back to SPARC again and i'm so excited to be there again, this time a little less lost. i'm excited to meet and help other students who were in my shoes before, and help them find their way.