Aging and Fossils
The following text is translated with the help of ChatGPT, and edited by me.
On the flight back to San Francisco from Hawaii, in this moment, I feel that I have to begin writing. I don’t yet know what I want to write, what exactly has moved me, but I think I must have sensed a fossil—something crystallized from so many moments of my past life—and I am so lucky to have the tools to excavate it. I don’t want to load it with too much meaning, because writing starts to feel heavier and heavier, until it presses on my chest and I can’t breathe; and yet I also have to give it so much meaning, because I can feel my life standing at a very special moment, and I want to seize it hard, to explore it with all my courage.
There are three things I want to do… I want to investigate how I arrived here—this place that feels like a turning point in my life. I want to respond to the love, the courage, and the pain I have received. And I want to speak with the me who once wrote, the earliest, most original writer in me. Maybe I need to say goodbye to her—or maybe she’ll keep me company. I don’t know yet.
At the tail end of twenty-six, it feels like I still haven’t fully accepted myself. I don’t even know whether I can be completely honest—but I want to try to record the storms I’ve felt, storms that break through boundaries.
In the past five years, I have been almost completely immersed in my research. My absolute surrender to it felt like a spell cast by an unquestionable loyalty—like some external force driving me to work without stopping. In truth, I don’t need to describe that state as miserable, because there was also a lot of joy in it—I just never stopped to think about what else life might be. I achieved a lot at my career stage, and over this past year, those achievements gradually became concrete on my CV, which somehow made the pain I went through feel so not worth mentioning. My advisor, my friends, my family—they were all pushing me forward along this road. Why not?
You’re in a lucky position.
You can make a unique contribution to this field.
You can get the faculty job you want.
You are a future superstar of our field.
You are on fire—keep going!
Think about all the exciting science you can do.
You will excel.
I would feel a brief, dewy sweet taste of happiness. I craved that happiness, while the cruel truth of my life was like a sun that never failed to rise each day. Gradually, I realized I couldn’t bring myself to believe a single one of those sentences. I never truly believed I could become a great scientist. Whether it was strangers or the people who know me best and love me most—no matter how warmly, how admiringly they told me “you’re amazing,” no matter how carefully they laid out their evidence—I couldn’t get from it any confidence that lasted.
I’ve always been a curious person, curious about almost everything across the humanities, the arts, and the natural sciences. But my relationship with the sciences has always been so intense.
Do I still remember? In elementary school, when I joined a gomoku tournament, how desperately I didn’t want to lose to that boy in my class—the one who was “quick-minded, just not hardworking.” And yet what made me, almost without thinking, explain my loss as “I’m not as smart as him, my logical reasoning isn’t as good”? Do I remember, too, that not-yet-ten-year-old me who couldn’t do binary or hexadecimal, got placed into the B-track of math olympiad class, and felt ashamed?
In middle school, our math teacher always announced everyone’s scores out loud from the podium. She would say in one class that the next class would begin with the midterm scores, and so at the start of the next class there was always an atmosphere of almost absurd solemnity. She was a short middle-aged woman, her glossy black hair cut short and permed into small curls. Even though there were many classmates from other places, she still spoke a Shanghai dialect so authentic it felt almost affected. But when she read scores, she used standard Mandarin: she would read the name first, pause, then pronounce the score clearly and evenly. I remember that restlessness wanting my name to be the next one called. Every name that wasn’t mine made my heart sink a little further.
All my life, there have been all kinds of voices telling me I have no talent for math and science—no “innate” logic, no natural intuition for the numbers. I could only make up for it by working hard, but I would never be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the “geniuses.” And these geniuses didn’t even have to be that genius—he could just be some classmate who usually didn’t study much, but suddenly got an unexpectedly great score, and because of that brief, accidental success everyone would look at him differently. These voices included my parents, my elders, every teacher I met in China, worming their way into my life from every opening. The first eighteen years of my life were never about “breaking a ceiling.” They were about being drowned by endless voices, being swept under, struggling to keep myself afloat so I wouldn’t drown.
When I was a child, all adults seemed huge and imposing. And now, thinking back on those scenes, it almost feels laughable. They understood nothing. They never studied how to be a good parent or a good teacher. But simply because they had lived a few more years, they possessed an unquestioned authority to judge you and shape you, and they never had to apologize for it. They didn’t even know why they did it. They didn’t know what criteria they were using, what assumptions their views rested on. And they never remembered what they had done. A naïve malice that never questions itself, disguised as jokes, as rules, as the most ordinary daily life, falling on us almost softly.
I interrogate myself: have I turned myself into a victim? Am I the fortunate one and they the unfortunate—and what moral high ground do I have to condemn them from the hill I’ve climbed? Could their ignorance itself have been well-intended, only indirectly harming me? Maybe my own sensitivity is the flaw, making me unable to defend myself from harm. Or maybe, more cruelly, what they said was simply true: I really do have no talent for science. This is where I always end up. My understanding of myself and their language converge.
The second time I went to Hawaii, I finally learned how to float in the ocean. My mom never gets tired of describing how stubborn I was as a child—for instance, crying and struggling for two hours in the ER and still refusing to get stitches; or refusing to hold my breath when learning to swim, until the coach pressed my head into the water and I thrashed and choked. But in the end I learned to swim, and I’m still deeply grateful for that.
In winter, the waves on the north shore of O‘ahu are huge. Once you immerse your body in the water, it feels as if you are completely controlled by the surf—especially near the shore, at the boundary where the incoming waves crash and the water pulls back out, as you get tugged and flipped by those two forces. I swallowed seawater a few times. But even though it was high tide and the waves were growing larger, I saw people floating farther out in deeper water, only their heads above the surface. When a wave came, they simply rose with it—effortlessly laughing, chatting. A middle-aged man lay on his back on the foam, eyes closed, limbs loose and open, floating on those massive waves like a miracle. His body and mine seemed made of two different materials.
When I entered the zone where one can’t stand—where one can only float—facing waves far higher than my head rolling toward me, I was immediately seized by fear. The first time, I tried to stay upright, treading water hard, but the water just slipped away weakly to either side, as if it wouldn’t help lift me at all. The second time, I tried to hold my breath as a wave hit, duck under, then float back up—but underwater I only became more panicked. I couldn’t find the right rhythm to let my head break the surface as the wave retreated, so I just swallowed more water. Carried by the surf, I managed to stand at that boundary and then fled the sea. Sitting on the beach, I couldn’t go back to reading the book I brought; I only kept watching that man floating offshore. The waves roared and rolled, and when we left, he was still there in the water.
The next day, on a calm beach, I began to learn to float. In fact, for floating upright, the most important thing is to breathe in fully and relax your muscles—the density of seawater will naturally buoy you up. Floating on your back is even simpler: you only need to defeat your fear and trust yourself enough to lie back. But I found that even though I understood, rationally, that I could float, the act itself still frightened me. I needed to practice again and again, lengthening my floating time little by little.
I still prefer swimming. Swimming is an action systematically broken down; I once mastered those movements step by step. Swimming is not play—not a spontaneous process. It can be an indirect way for me to find joy—so I can snorkel, so I can see a magnificent sunset at sea—or it can be exercise that relaxes body and mind. But swimming itself is only a procedure. Learning it requires effort and discipline, and only that kind of effort makes me feel safe, makes me assured that I can do this. Floating in the sea, I realized that most of what I’ve learned in life has been like learning to float: struggling against invisible forces until I overcome them psychologically and intellectually. For me, learning has never been play. It has been war.
In recent years I’ve met many people with glittering résumés—people who were top of their class from childhood, gold medalists in olympiads, who went on to the very best schools for a PhD. I imagine that for them, floating has become instinct. Even from where I stand now, I find that ninety percent of them don’t even know how to begin studying a scientific problem—yet I still carry my old posture, thinking, “If they had the same opportunities I had, they could surely produce what I produced—maybe even better.” I imagine some of them are far happier than I am: no matter the outcome, they are having fun at a playground, while I have been at war.
This year, I started reading seriously again, and I started writing. The process feels like, as if, after a long time of believing I was a land animal, I have finally returned to the sea. At first I only hovered at the shoreline, letting the cool seawater wash over my calves. I felt cold; goosebumps; the fear in the moment water takes your breath away. Yet I also remember vividly—the sensation of being gently embraced by water, of naturally stretching out my limbs in the sea—those memories guided and encouraged me.
At the beginning of this year, I told myself: no matter how tired I am, how busy I am, how much I want to rest, I must open a book every day and read—at least one page. Sometimes at 1:30 a.m. I would open a book in bed, read one page, and fall asleep. Other times I finished an entire book in one sitting… I really did keep my promise to myself, and I gained incomparable reading experiences. I felt as if I plunged into the sea and came back to life.
When research and writing papers became difficult, I began to ask what kind of life I actually wanted. When I have no worries, nothing I must do—what am I doing? I realized that memories of love are just as rich as memories of anxiety and pain. In elementary school I could always forget the moments of frustration in math olympiad classes, because on Friday nights, I could place a book under my pillow, and at dawn—when the whole family was sleeping in, when the world was the quietest—I could lie in bed and read with bliss.
In the Neapolitan novels, Lenù’s dream to become a writer begins with Little Women. My childhood experience was the same: I read Little Women over and over again, seven or eight times. That shared experience made me dizzy with joy. I still remember one afternoon: I sat on the floor of my parents' office and finished Notre-Dame de Paris. That feeling of being struck—the bones of Esmeralda and Quasimodo embracing; the dust on the wooden floor floating in sunlight—I can recall it all clearly. It has become wholly part of me.
My father says he will always remember, when I was in kindergarten, one autumn, we were walking down a street lined with plane trees, and I said, “The falling leaves look like little yellow butterflies dancing.” I told my mother I was going to start writing seriously again, and she said, “Yes—you’re good at that.” Hm. Why is it that now, with a little soreness and satisfaction, I believe what they said to me so easily—believe that I have some natural connection to literature? As I try to rebuild a self of my own, I can’t help asking questions to myself, one question after another, until the half-finished me is swept away.
Writing once was a kind of floating that belonged to me. Poetry was once my most intuitive language; everything around me could move me, could ignite expression; everyone could become a character in my stories. I don’t understand how the child I was could turn my boring school life and my classmates into novels, and I can no longer remember those stories at all. I only remember the natural, smooth feeling of writing. Or maybe that, too, is something I’m inventing now—a beautified nostalgia, turned into material for my writing… So what? As a writer, every fantasy is my reality, and I must believe in that reality.
But in my struggles I have lost that writer in me long ago. I can no longer find those fantasies, that floating joy. I don’t know why I never treated writing seriously, never envisioned the possibility of writing—almost as if the joy I gained from writing had no value, as if I never granted it meaning. And so I gradually lost the favor of the goddess of joy.
Instead, I fought more and more fiercely with external evaluations—scores, honors, rankings, the career ladder. These are narrow yardsticks; inside these bounded games, I demanded that I be the best, and I found self-accomplishment through that process. I want to know why I threw away my most free-flowing gift as if it were worthless, and why only the alchemy of harsh training can make me feel at peace—why it seems that only by doing things that are very, very hard, by enduring unnecessary pain, can I account for myself. Why can’t I accept mediocrity in anything, and believe that joy can be found in mediocrity?
This year, I began writing again like a toddler learning to walk. Like reading, I told myself to open my journal every day and write at least one sentence. Sometimes I simply recorded what I did that day. Sometimes I wrote my feelings in a mixture of Chinese and English, in sentences with completely incorrect grammar. Later I began writing poems and collecting ideas for stories. Somewhere along the way, a quiet magic started to happen. In the act of writing, it felt as if I cut open the shell of life, and my real self slipped out from inside it. The external evaluations that used to trouble me sounded like the rustling of plastic wrap shed from my body. I finally saw they weren’t part of me—yet it was I who had given them power, allowed them to define my life.
I was so annoyed at myself, because I always believed I was a “rebel.” I did many outrageous things to resist my parents’ and teachers’ authority; I looked down on the rule-following classmates. My sense of smell has always been sharp for the many irrational constructions of this society. And yet, in that rebellion, I fell into another, more secret trap.
It is precisely because I believed this world had already judged me as “not gifted in math and science,” I made myself work twice as hard, to prove to everyone that I could do well, too. Because I was judged as “not athletic,” I practiced volleyball and running every day before the high school entrance exam, to prove I could be the best, too. Later, no one cared anymore about those boring exams, no one cared to evaluate me—but I had already put that evaluation system on my own body, unconsciously binding myself tightly to those voices. After overthrowing a tyranny, what can you attach your life to? Only another system, another discipline, another power relation… I seem always to be on the powerless side. But if I don’t surrender myself to some system, I fear I could be lost in the meaning and value of my life. This dependence and symbiosis—is that we do not resist to discipline, why there will always be some power relation ruling. And as women—once as children—we are always objects of selection and evaluation. How can we break free and reclaim the power to define our own lives?
Maybe this will be a problem longer than life itself. Maybe I will never have a complete answer. It’s the experience of a true scientist: in a field no one has entered before, I find some dried remnants, and “the real question” feels like a fossil hidden just below, waiting to be excavated. That intuition alone is enough to make me ecstatic. And then perhaps I’ll spend five years, ten years, or a lifetime feeling for those questions, digging them out, defining them. For the scientist in me, these questions belong to the natural world and its 4.5 billion years of evolution. For the writer in me, these questions are about myself, the world I inhabit, and all of its historical memory.
I imagine a possibility where I don’t have to worry about anything, where I can squander the rest of my time on Earth freely. Then I open my eyes and nothing has changed: I am still me, still learning to walk—both in science and in writing. But it feels like I’ve finally learned how to dream again.
On January 1st this year, I wrote in my journal: “2024, I will treat you well.” It really was a year of many changes and a year in which I gained a lot… I felt a deep gratitude for everything I’ve experienced and read, and for the friends around me, and the conversations I’ve had with them. Together, this year has sparked so many beautiful hopes and longings. I’m still feeling my way carefully, still trying not to expect too much. But if I can just keep going like this—and I know that people who love me are accompanying me on this journey—maybe it would be enough.
I thought of Adrienne Rich’s poem that I once loved in college, “Diving into the Wreck.” Now I feel as if I truly understand what she meant.
“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail…
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.”