Did you know that if you search “jade” in Pleco (the best Chinese dictionary app) you get 33 different results? Thirty three words for a beautiful kind of jade. I'd like to imagine that people were so enamored with the stone that one, two, twenty words weren't enough to capture its beauty and its associated virtues, according to Confucius: benevolence, justice, propriety, truth, credibility, music, loyalty, heaven, earth, morality, and intelligence.
My Chinese name is 檬玢. The second character means a kind of beautiful jade. It has two pronunciations: bīn and fēn. It seems I have two pronunciations everywhere—as an Asian American, as an extroverted introvert, as a loving disobedient daughter; as a child-adult in her 20s, as a computer science graduate who is working on her first novel.
There aren't only two pronunciations to who I am. Maybe it's closer to thirty three. Maybe it's closer to infinity. Until then, I write the ones I know on A Beautiful Kind of Jade.
Advice from a bilingual ball of scallion pancake dough
I've been eating 葱油饼 (green onion pancakes) for forever, but it was only until my mom taught me how to make them that I developed a distinguished palate for rest and productivity.
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Why I'm disowning my once beloved value
To be authentic means to be genuine, to be real. But who decides if something is real? Pulling from authors Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Virginia Woolf, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, and German social theorist Max Weber, I tackle this question.
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How I learned English and how it inspires me today
Developing a sense of self and making your way through the world are parallel, simultaneous lanes. The narratives that are cornerstones of your identity: how many are self-constructed? How many were invented by others, even those with good intentions?
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A review of Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“I had held on for so long, and now, letting go, it surprised me how quickly mystery dissolves to dust. There was no wavering will, no fear. We are in love and then we are not in love. Where does love go when we stop loving?”
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Meet my ten classmates from my Asian American Literature course
I interviewed nine of my ten classmates over the course of two days, meeting many of them for the first time. Observing the intersections and juxtapositions between my classmates' stories and with my own, I felt a gradually increasing sense of sonder. Each interaction elicited different reactions and connections from me.
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Frames of reference of two 18th century German philosophers
Your computer is in front of you. But for speakers of a language with fixed directions, like many indigenous languages, it might be north of you. This demonstrates two frames of reference of approaching the world. An egocentric one sees the world relative to the self, whereas a geocentric one places the self in the context of the objective world. This essay applies these frames to bildung, the process of education and self formation.
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