My mother wrote me a letter on every birthday before I turned 20. She always wanted me to have a perfect memory of each one. Those letters carried her love, her expectations, and her vision of the life she believed I should have. Reading them, I always felt warm inside.
But at some point, I started to dread spending my birthdays with my parents. Because it meant I had to go back to them, had to be a daughter they were satisfied with, otherwise I would be letting down my mother’s efforts and her good intentions. That contradiction: the love was real, and the fear was also real. I never knew where to begin to explain it. This is where this project truly starts.
I began to think back on works that could reflect these kinds of feelings. I wanted to know if anyone else felt the same way I did.
In Little Women, Jo sits in the attic and tells her mother: “I’m so lonely.” She has a warm home, loving sisters, people who care for her, and yet she is still lonely. Every time I reach that moment, I cry. That feeling of “having so much and still feeling something is missing” is very familiar to me.
Look Back touched me in a different way. That determination to give everything for the thing you love. I cried all the way through, but I couldn’t explain what moved me. Maybe because I can’t bring myself to be that all-in? Maybe I was mourning a version of myself I lost, or never really had? I don’t know. But it was precisely this inability to explain it that made me realise: some emotions are small, quiet, and unclear, yet very real. They deserve to be taken seriously.
Every time I encounter a work that truly moves me, I feel an enormous sense of happiness. Because in that moment I know: there are people in the world who share the same confusion, the same worries as me. To be seen, to be heard — that is a deep kind of happiness, and it makes me feel I am not alone.
There is a mechanism behind this feeling: you see yourself in the work, like looking in a mirror. That mirror reflects back the things you couldn’t quite explain or bring yourself to say out loud. So I want to make that kind of mirror for young Chinese women like me. I want to create more of these moments.
During the spring break, I talked with the young women around me. I didn’t do formal interviews, I just asked slowly and listened slowly, through everyday conversation. I found that what people cared about most fell into two areas: their future, and relationships. Some had just gotten their first job, and some had just graduated and were standing at the entrance to adult life, not knowing which way to go. Some had ended their first relationship, some had been betrayed, some were holding on to something painful and couldn’t let go. Every person’s story was different, but there was one thing in common: the roots of these confusions could almost always be traced back to the environment we grew up in, back to the process through which we were shaped into a certain kind of person, back to the invisible marks left by our families of origin.
This is the change I want to see — I want those emotions that have never been properly expressed to have the chance to be seen for the first time. I want young Chinese women to know that their small, quiet, tangled feelings deserve to be taken seriously. If someone encounters my work and says “this is exactly how I feel”, that will be enough. In that moment, the emotions that have been carried so quietly will no longer be lonely.
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