A letter to all my friends

Dear friends:

I am happy to announce that in the next month, my first book Across the Sea will be published by CITIC Press Group. The book is a collection of columns I have written over the past five years, first for China Business Network, then for Tencent which have received a cumulative 2 billion page views. Topics include culture, education, feminism and career development in both China and America and my own journey living in and between both countries. In the past two months, after discussion with a number of experts and advisors, I have also added a chapter discussing the coronavirus and the resulting impacts on US-China relations pertaining to millennials like myself working to carve out a personal and professional life spanning the two countries. The current quarantine has given me space to reflect and time to distill the most meaningful takeaways from my lived experience.

As the youngest author CITIC Press Group has published to date, I hope this book will help people from both countries understand each other better during this difficult time. 

My mentor, author Peter Walker wrote in his book Powerful, Different, Equal: Overcoming the misconceptions and differences between China and the US

“I have included two quotations from David Sham-baugh’s book, China Goes Global. From the author: This suggests to me that it is not so much an aggressive or threatening China with which the world should be concerned, but rather an insecure, confused, frustrated, angry, dissatisfied, selfish, truculent, and lonely power.” 

Whereas Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying has a different take on the issue: “We don’t view ourselves as a superpower. You are not going to see a US or Soviet Union in China. You are going to see a culturally nourished country with a big population, being more content, being happy, being purposeful – and it will be a friend to the world. There is no reason to worry about China.”

The objective of the book is to promote cross-cultural understanding by sharing my experience coming to America for university and working between the US & China in the years since; the last ten years have opened my eyes to the ways China & the US fundamentally misunderstand and mistrust eachother due to limited interaction. I’ve called both the US & China home, have been educated in both countries, worked in both countries, and include citizens of both nations among my closest friends – I hope this book can help close the gap that I managed to ford.

The book will be available on Dangdang, JD, Alibaba Tmall and Amazon (Download link will be posted in 2 weeks); pre-order has already sold over 10,000 copies in China (top 10 bestseller in China)! 

Thank you for your support.