What I’m Doing Here

A note to readers of Chinese Psychoanalytic Scene

I write about China in English, from Oxford, and my trainings are across from Los Angeles to Boston. This already tells you something about where I stand—or rather, where I don’t.

This newsletter started as a place to put things that didn’t fit anywhere else. Essays from my MA that I thought couldn’t be published. English writing with no home. Four hundred subscribers (and even a few paid subscribers!) later, I realize it has become something I didn’t plan: not a bridge between two worlds, but a place where I think differently than I can in either.

I need to say this carefully, because I’m wary of what I might be doing.

A lot of my colleagues do translation work. They bring Western psychoanalytic texts into Chinese, or introduce Chinese clinical material to English-speaking audiences. This is necessary. But it is also, structurally, the lowest rung of knowledge production—embedded in a colonial hierarchy where theory flows one way and “data” flows the other. I have written about this dynamic. I do not want to reproduce it.

So what am I actually doing here?

English is my academic language. It is the language of my psychoanalytic training, the language of my personal analysis, the language where I have learned to speak about difficult and intimate things. In some ways it is emotionally safer for me than Mandarin. And yet—English is not my first language, not the language I dream in, not the language of poetry or of the body. For a long time, it was not a language I could write in. I could write essays using English. I could produce academic prose. But I could not find a voice.

Writing here has been a slow process of reclaiming something. Not reclaiming Chinese—I never lost that. Reclaiming English as a place where I can actually think, not just perform competence.

The irony is that this happened by writing about China.

I write in two languages, but they are not two versions of the same voice. My Chinese writing is clinical. I am a psychoanalyst there, with all the constraints that entails—professional boundaries, institutional affiliations, the question of what I can reveal about myself without compromising my position. My English writing is where I am a scholar, a thinker, someone working out ideas that do not yet have a settled form. I have started calling this split, in my own work, a translational ego—a self that does not settle on either side of the border, but exists in the movement between.

This split is not just about audience. It is about what becomes thinkable.

Last year I wrote an essay on Black Myth: Wukong. Cultural analysis—nothing radical, I thought. WeChat deleted it for “criticizing the state.” I had not intended to criticize anything. I was trying to understand something. But in that context, understanding itself was dangerous.

In English, I could write it. Not because English is inherently safe—I have had academic work on China flagged and scrutinized even when written in English, even when published in Western journals. The surveillance does not stop at language borders. But the distance changed something. The same analysis, relocated, became more speakable. Not safe. Safer. There is a reason some of what I write here sits behind a paywall, and it is not only about monetization.

But safety is not the interesting part.

Here is what I did not expect. When I wrote about Chinese psychoanalytic institutions for this newsletter, I had to explain things that everyone in China already knows. The training structures, the power dynamics, the way certain institutes function—none of this is secret. It is ambient knowledge. You absorb it by being there. No one articulates it because no one needs to.

I remember explaining to a Western colleague why a particular training institute holds the power it does, and realizing mid-sentence that I had never asked myself that question before. I knew the answer—I had always known—but I had never thought it. The knowledge was implicit, built into how I moved through that world. It took an outsider’s confusion to make it explicit.

Writing it down turned out to be completely different from knowing it.

When I have to make these structures legible to someone who does not live inside them, I start seeing them myself. The obvious becomes strange. I notice what I had stopped noticing.

This is something psychoanalysis understands. You cannot analyze yourself—not because you lack information, but because you are too embedded in your own logic to see its shape. You need an other. Someone whose not-knowing forces you to externalize what you have kept implicit. We cannot see ourselves directly. We need a mirror.

English became that mirror for me. Not a clearer view—an angled one. A surface that reflects my Chinese thinking back at me from a position I cannot occupy from inside.

And it is specifically language that does this, not just distance. Language is not a transparent medium for thought. It shapes what can be thought. The syntax, the available concepts, the rhythm of sentences—these produce different possibilities. When I write in English about Chinese experience, I am not translating content from one container to another. I am discovering what this experience looks like when it has to exist in a different grammar.

This is why I think of what I am doing as a kind of translation—but not in the ordinary sense.

The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche built his entire metapsychology around translation. For Laplanche, the infant is confronted from the beginning with what he calls “enigmatic messages” from the adult: gestures, tones, touches that carry meaning the adult does not fully control and the infant cannot fully decode. These messages are too much. They exceed the child’s capacity to metabolize. And yet the child must do something with them. So she translates—not accurately, not completely, but generatively. She produces meaning from what remains opaque. The residue of what could not be translated becomes the unconscious.

What matters is that translation, in Laplanche’s sense, is not about carrying content from one place to another intact. It is about what happens in the gap. The failure to translate perfectly is productive. The translator does not decode—she generates something new, something that belongs fully to neither source nor destination.

I think of Chinese culture as having given me my own enigmatic messages. Ways of being, structures of feeling, assumptions about self and other that I absorbed before I could question them. I am not translating China for Western readers. I am translating those enigmatic messages for myself—trying to make sense of what I received but never fully understood.

This brings me to something I did not expect when I started writing here.

For a long time, I did not have confidence that what I knew counted as knowledge. I am Chinese. I am queer. I am Buddhist. I have lived inside certain experiences and structures that Western theory often gets wrong. I knew things. But I had internalized the hierarchy—the sense that real knowledge is produced elsewhere, by others, and my job was to learn it, apply it, maybe translate it. Not to generate it.

Writing here has slowly undone that.

When I articulate something about Chinese psychoanalytic culture, and readers respond with recognition or surprise, I am learning to claim a position: I know something someone might not. This is knowledge. I can produce theory, not just report data. This is a decolonizing move, though I hesitate to use that word because it has become empty. What I mean is: I am refusing the structure where Chinese experience is raw material for Western theorization. I am theorizing from inside.

Not many people occupy this position in psychoanalytic community, yet. I am hoping to see more, as I always encourage Chinese colleagues to write. Realizing this fact is not self-congratulation. It is a weight. And if we do it badly, we make it harder for others.

So what is coming in 2026?

I want to keep following this line. More essays on Chinese psychoanalytic culture, yes, but also more thinking about translation itself—about what it means to theorize from a diasporic position, about the space between languages as a site of production rather than just transmission. I will keep writing about queerness, about Buddhism, about institutional structures, about what psychoanalysis promises and what it actually delivers in different contexts.

But I want to know what you are curious about. At the end of this post, I have included a short survey—tell me what has landed, what is missing, what questions you are sitting with. This space exists in dialogue—that is part of what makes it different from a dissertation chapter or a notebook.

Thank you for being here. For those who have read from the beginning, and those who just arrived: I do not take the attention for granted. Every reader is a pressure—not to perform, but to keep thinking, to stay honest, to try to be worth the trust.

The mirror only works if someone is looking.

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