On Speaking Candidly

At a dinner party recently, the subject turned to new year's resolutions. The friend sitting to my left said his goal was to practice vulnerability. We all smiled and nodded and thanked him for his bravery, to even broach such a subject in the year 2026 of our Lord. Then we asked ourselves how one does practice vulnerability.

My goal this year has been to publish a blog post every week, no matter how bad. When I re-read the posts I've published this year in service of that goal I notice how little I share about my own life in them. I don't find it difficult to share much about my life with friends at a party, but the open internet has become a very terrifying place to be vulnerable. I have no doubt that from the moment Vercel publishes this blog post, a thousand ravenous crawlers will ingest its contents to train the next GPT. Any number of Thiel-backed surveillance dragnets are gobbling up my words, mining them for anything that could be used as pretext against my being in this country.

In college, I took a class on Post-Wall German Cinema. We explored how Germans processed the collapse of the Berlin Wall through filmmaking. The one theme that stands out to me constantly is the idea of "The Wall in Our Heads" falling. The physical manifestation of the Berlin Wall may have fallen, but to tear down the psyche of division could take generations. The wall was not just a concrete, but a metaphysical reality, existing in the heads of those that it divided.

I grew up behind the Great Firewall. I kept a Wordpress blog hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet where I wrote, in intimate detail, about my own struggles growing up as my family tore itself apart. I wrote about each college rejection I faced. I wrote about how to find happiness and joy underneath a sky that was so polluted that WHO particulate pollution standards had no way of describing it.

I did not struggle with vulnerability because I was so small. Sure, there was a massive censorship regime, but the thoughts of a foreign kid writing in English, a foreign language, on a tiny little Digital Ocean server hardly mattered to anyone. I blogged voraciously and with raw honesty, knowing that ultimately, my thoughts did not matter.

Most Americans are shocked to find out that all visa applicants to the United States have to disclose every single social media account and blog that we maintain. No doubt that everything I've ever posted or written online is being vacuumed into a system that determines my admissability to the United States. Let me absolutely clear: I love America. I spent my vacation days last year traveling to the Minnesota State Fair to eat corndogs and cheese curds. I dance swing. I have crossed the vastness of America four times by train and I've talked with people of all stripes in the dining car. I've driven through the deep South and walked across the Edmund Pattus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

In all my love for America, I know that context does not carry and meaning is murky. I know that somehow, anything I write will be misconstrued by a machine learning algorithm, determining my fate. I want you to know that today, as a non-immigrant skilled laborer here, the wall in my head feels thicker than when I was a bright-eyed young foreign boy in suburban Beijing under a regime of censorship.

I want to write more vulnerably. Maybe we can start here.