As a first-generation immigrant, English is not my mother tongue. Although I have lived in the United States for many years and can read and communicate in English at work without difficulty, the joy and naturalness of expressing oneself in one’s mother tongue cannot be fully replaced by a second language. Using a second language feels like eating a dish missing an essential spice—you can enjoy but not relish it, because a crucial flavor is absent.

Over the years, I’ve found myself torn between Chinese and English: my heart yearns to express itself in Chinese, while reality demands English in my work and daily life. During my early days in the U.S., I found solace in Chinese books, as I struggled in an all-English environment where I could neither understand others well nor express myself. Reading and writing in Chinese felt like coming home—the words flowed naturally, capturing the nuances of my thoughts and emotions.

Living in a new country brought countless fascinating experiences and observations that I longed to write about, yet I felt frustrated by the disconnect between my inner world and my limited ability to share it in English. When I was with American classmates, I remained the quiet Chinese girl, and this discomfort lingered. This challenging experience drove me to work hard on improving my English.

As my English improved, I transitioned from Chinese books to English books. Both languages have their own unique beauty - Chinese with its poetic elegance and English with its precise expressiveness. As a mom, I hope my son will grow up appreciating both languages better than I do. Previously, buying Chinese books in the U.S. meant waiting for lengthy overseas shipping, but English books were readily available. Over time, I found myself reading less Chinese books. This wasn’t by choice - I still deeply love Chinese literature and my native language. Chinese books help me stay connected to my culture, but they’re hard to get in the U.S. Between the difficulty of finding Chinese books and my growing English reading list, I’ve been reading less Chinese than I’d like.

While my sense of foreignness has largely faded, the gap between writing in English and Chinese persists—though now it flows both ways. Sometimes I struggle to express Chinese concepts in English, and other times, English ideas resist translation into Chinese. Initially, I attributed this gap purely to language differences and vocabulary limitation but I gradually realized that my inability to express something in either language sometimes stemmed from unclear thinking. Alternating between languages could help clarify thoughts and identifying confusion.

Inspired by this insight, I dreamed of writing everything in both languages. Yet while dreams are boundless, reality is limited. Consistent writing in one language was daunting enough, and my bilingual aspirations faded before they could start.

However, AI’s translation capabilities in recent years surpass anything I could have imagined when I first arrived in the U.S. Even when GPT emerged in 2022, my attempts at Chinese-to-English translation gave mediocre results....

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“There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is and to love it.” —Romain Rolland

I want to end today with this sentence.

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I added a photo gallery using this cool Gallery Generator, a Jekyll plugin that generates galleries from directories of images. I had been looking for a good way to embed photo galleries to a static site for a long time but didn’t succeed until I found this plugin. I really like the minimalist style of this plugin which fits my site (I am not an advocate for minimalism in life, but I...

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"Knowledge is what we know. Also, what we know we do not know. We discover what we do not know essentially by what we know. Thus knowledge expands. With more knowledge we come to know more of what we do not know. Thus knowledge expands endlessly. ------ C Radhakrishna Rao, STATISTICS AND TRUTH"

It is the end of 2018. My post about some of my thoughts in 2017 feels like yesterday. I...

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Sherlock Holmes is no doubt the most attractive fiction character for me (But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is not my favorite novelist, Milan Kundera is). I got “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” the second year in middle school, a book with 1000+ pages. I was so obsessed with it and the obsession filled my adolescent years. I used to put the book under my pillow and read it every night before bed (Yes,...

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