A personal update

On returning to China to study China

A personal update.

At the end of this month, I’ll be joining the Institute of Public Policy (IPP) at South China University of Technology as a Research Associate.

I had been thinking about how to announce this, and I realized it belongs to a much longer pattern in my life.

Almost every milestone that has shaped my adult life began as something other than my first choice.

When I took the Gaokao, I didn’t achieve the result I had hoped for. I enrolled at Jinan University instead. At the time, I saw it as a compromise. Looking back, I couldn’t have asked for a better place to begin. Guangzhou exposed me to a far more dynamic policy and international environment than I had imagined. It was there that I first entered the world of Chinese think tanks and began studying the United States from within China’s own policy community.

A few years later, I repeated the same mistake in prediction.

When I applied for graduate school, I pictured a very different future. I imagined myself in Washington, hoping to build a career inside the Beltway and understand China from the American policy establishment.

Instead, I went to Singapore.

Again, it felt like Plan B. Again, it turned out to be exactly where I needed to be.

RSIS gave me a year that fundamentally changed how I think. I stopped being an America watcher in China and became, almost without noticing it, a China watcher in Singapore. I wrote for international publications, met people from governments and militaries across the region, and learned to see China through perspectives that I would never have encountered had I stayed home.

By the time I graduated, I assumed the next step would also take place outside mainland China.

I applied broadly for policy research positions in Singapore and elsewhere. Most applications simply disappeared into silence. There was rarely any feedback and almost never an explanation. For a while, I tried to reconstruct what I might have done differently. Eventually I realized there wasn’t enough information to reconstruct anything at all.

That experience was frustrating, but it also forced me to confront an assumption I hadn’t noticed I was carrying.

Somewhere over the past year, I had come to believe that internationalization was a one-way journey. Once you left, adapted, and built a professional identity abroad, returning somehow meant going backwards.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Over the past year I’ve met many Chinese students who hope to build lives overseas. Some certainly will. Others will return. What I think many of us struggle with is not the practical question of where we work, but the psychological question of how to make sense of returning without feeling that we’ve somehow failed to keep moving.

I’ve come to see it differently.

A return is not a reset. It is not an erasure of what happened abroad. You don’t return as the person who left. You return with different questions, different instincts, different reference points. Distance changes the way you see home. Returning changes the way you understand distance.

There is another reason this move feels different from what I might have imagined a few years ago.

For a long time, my relationship with home was complicated. There were years when I found it difficult even to go back to my hometown during Spring Festival. Family illness and personal loss made home feel less like a place of comfort than a place carrying unfinished emotions.

Singapore changed that in ways I never expected.

My professors, classmates, colleagues, and friends gave me an extraordinary amount of generosity. So did many readers of New China Literacy. Some of you have been here since the first essays. Others joined much later. Across emails, comments, and conversations, you gave me something that is difficult to describe but easy to recognize when you need it: the confidence that my work mattered, regardless of where I happened to live.

That confidence made this return feel less like surrender and more like another beginning.

So I no longer see my life as a sequence of failed plans.

I see a pattern instead. The Gaokao brought me to Guangzhou when I thought I belonged somewhere else. Graduate admissions brought me to Singapore when I thought I belonged in Washington. Now, after believing my career would continue abroad, I find myself re-entering China’s research community.

Twice before, the path I hadn’t planned turned out to shape me more deeply than the one I had imagined.

I have no reason to assume this time will be different.

The writing will continue.

If New China Literacy has a single purpose, it is to understand China through its institutions, its people, and the movement between different worlds. That project doesn’t end because I’ve changed desks.

It simply enters another chapter.