Soon after I moved to New York, I installed this Chrome extension, Just Not Sorry. As its name suggests, this software flags speculative phrases like just, sorry, and I am afraid, reminding the writer to speak in a firm voice. Only later did I understand, to move through the world without being diminished, one must remain unapologetic and affirmative. Perhaps this is the missing piece in my sense of professionalism. So I keep asking, have I truly grown up? Why does my confidence waver like a frightened girl’s? A friend called it regression[1]. Yet he added: It is not yours alone, but the shared experience of an entire generation. And not only in China, but across the world, we zillennials are all held in the same uneasy suspension.

From early childhood into adolescence, I was always apologetic—an adjective more decent than timid or craven. I navigated the adult world as vulnerable prey; in the face of time and grandeur I felt insignificant, turning even my loudest questions inward. From classrooms and books, I learned the vocabulary of monuments, revolution, and leftist theories. “You must address the nexus of ideologies and power,” they said. Yet these stories belonged to others. To tell the stories of others requires courage, ethics, and the audacity to place oneself appropriately. I was left with nothing but a heart heavy with introspection, a secret longing for a future where I could become a proper adult.

In the midst of struggles, I could only turn to my own story as an outlet. The teenage version of me remained passive in the face of cruelty, simply gazing upward at the imagined, ideal self—one who, after constant failures, would successfully become an idol, finding a place to pour out unreciprocated love. Yet to fixate on reenactments feels too self-indulgent and narcissistic. It risks the cementing of a prison of time within a narrative of self-victimization, keeping me from the sublime I longed for. My sense of the sublime existed in language, in the illusions of ideological premises, in the almost divine tranquility with which I scrutinized words and death, and in the ruins and dismantled symbols of globalization, where I examined promises that had never been fulfilled. At some point, perhaps driven by the anxieties of aging, my persistent numbness in the endless cycle of fight-or-flight[2] proved not innocence but careless folly. It was then that I resolved to become the grown-up girl capable of chronicling all stories. Before I can stand with full confidence in my actions, with enough leniency and discipline to tell others’ stories within ethical boundaries, or even to become an unreliable narrator[3], I can at least be a witness, a spectator.