a collection of my writing and translation work, from science communication features to journal entries

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Entangled Life 菌络万象

Douban · Amazon · ISBN 9787559677754

My Chinese translation of Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (2020), published by Houlang Books. I adored Frodo as a child, and I think some old fondness for Farmer Maggot's mushroom field followed this project into my inbox. Translating Sheldrake meant finding Chinese for a prose style that thinks through analogy while staying scientifically exact; I owe thanks to my editor Yanxia, and to Cosmo Sheldrake, whose music I kept returning to while working on the manuscript.

2025 Pingshan Natural History Museum Book Award Scientific American China 2024 Best Science Reading Douban 2025 Top 10 Science & New Knowledge

Racing towards a Grand Theory of Consciousness

Scientific American China · March 2021 print issue

My print feature for Scientific American China, based on original interviews with Anil Seth, Hakwan Lau, David Rosenthal, and others. I wrote it while engulfing consciousness-adjacent books: Hofstadter, Melanie Mitchell on analogy and complexity, Dehaene on the global workspace. The piece traces three decades of research from Crick and Koch's neural-correlates programme through the Templeton adversarial collaborations, and asks whether rival theories can be tested against each other when they disagree about what kind of question consciousness is. The English version here has been revised and substantially expanded in 2026.

The Mind within the Brain 大脑中的心智

From 2023 to 2024, I worked on a Chinese translation of David Redish's The Mind within the Brain (2013), then scheduled to appear around the end of 2024. It was special to me because Redish's hippocampal work, and Beyond the Cognitive Map (1999), helped push me toward memory research. The book connects decision-making, reinforcement learning, neuroeconomics, and the ways neural computation breaks down in addiction and PTSD.

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digital

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essay / book review 28 Apr 2026 · 17 min read

Fires a Calculation; Hits a Coordinate: On Gravity's Rainbow

The V-2 enters Gravity’s Rainbow by breaking the order in which danger is usually recognised. A conventional bomber raid over London is already terror, but it is terror with stages: engines overhead, sirens, searchlights, the sky briefly turned into an object of fear. The rocket removes the

science 23 May 2022 · 48 min read

Just One Centimetre Deeper: Place Cells and the Brain's Cartography

‘I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the localisation of the memory trace, that the necessary conclusion is that learning just is not possible.’ Karl Lashley wrote this in 1950, after thirty-three years of cutting into the brains of rats and asking where memory lives. He had trained anima

journal 12 Jul 2019 · 8 min read

Two Freedoms

I finished work at half past five. At the department entrance a middle-aged man was showing two young children the plaque on the building, the one recording where Hodgkin and Huxley first measured a neuron’s action potential. On the way home there was a strange smell of paint, probably from the supe

essay / book review 29 Jan 2026 · 16 min read

Nothing Is Strange to a Child: On Solenoid

Lice came before the fourth dimension in Cărtărescu’s Solenoid. The novel opens at the protagonist’s scalp, where metaphysics touches skin. Before the buried solenoids and levitating bodies, there is a schoolteacher, over a sink, combing lice from his hair and noticing, with horrible calm,

journal 27 Jul 2020 · 4 min read

Shanwei

The shark meat was in my mouth before I remembered that sharks are cartilaginous fish. I chewed twice, crushing the soft bone and swallowing it. The bitter melon added during cooking had left the flesh loose and tender, carrying an astringent trace of bitterness that overpowered the salt of the beef

journal 26 Oct 2025 · 6 min read

Danya

I found him through a subreddit recommendation, some time during my first serious month of studying openings. The video was a Theory Speed Run episode on the Rubinstein Variation of the French Defence; I cannot say what drew me in first, but within three minutes I had stopped the video, reset to the

essay 11 Jun 2022 · 10 min read

The Abstract and the Concrete

Although I have heard it countless times, I still feel a strange surge of emotion whenever someone mentions the Christmas Truce between British and German troops during the First World War in 1914. Over the years I have seen many new clues, read reconstructed diaries from soldiers on both sides, and

science 2 Dec 2020 · 27 min read

AlphaFold, or how to fold graciously

A protein’s three-dimensional ribbon structure. AlphaFold predicts such structures from amino acid sequences alone, bypassing years of experimental crystallography. Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Consider a modest protein of 100 amino acid residues. If each residue can adopt r

science 6 Nov 2020 · 19 min read

Henrietta Lacks and the immortal cells

HeLa cells under multiphoton fluorescence microscopy: Golgi apparatus (orange), microtubules (green), DNA (cyan). These immortal cells, taken from Henrietta Lacks without her consent in 1951, have since underpinned over a hundred thousand published papers. NIH, public domain. She

science 16 Aug 2020 · 12 min read

Malice as Neuroscience

There is no need. Really, there is no need.Shanyi tossed me an article from Real Life Magazine, casually, saying the contents sounded a lot like quantum speed-reading, and that I should take a look when I had time. I said fine; I like debunking. I spent a long time finishing this work of li

fiction 29 Nov 2018 · 32 min read

Return to the Edge of the World

I was born in Guangzhou, before the millennium. Nobody knew the city back then. According to my mother, she and my father had come to work here only because it was the only sizeable city near their hometowns. ‘Otherwise, of course, Shanghai,’ my mother said. Yes, who wouldn’t want Shanghai? the slee

fiction 20 Oct 2018 · 14 min read

Him / Her / Ah Ming

Sometimes we fell asleep against the wall in a corner of the library. I would hold his arm; he contorted himself into some awkward posture, as though trying to make his height reachable for my shoulder. I always thought it was futile. Even if he shifted his waist forward a few centimetres, I still h

fiction 26 Sep 2018 · 26 min read

Tamako's Summer

The rear wheels of the bus flung up a spray of wind and rain, soaking Tamako’s shoes. In the sudden chill she lost focus, as though the bus had taken the surrounding scenery with it and left only her, standing in place.The world was still. The cicadas that should have been singing had been put away

journal 31 Aug 2018 · 6 min read

Shaking Hands with Humans

L was right: I am, by nature, a person who trusts easily. He brought this up while talking about when we first met. We were in Abu Dhabi together for the NYUAD Candidate Weekend. That year’s pool of Asian applicants was not large; he was from Afghanistan, and perhaps for that reason, on the bus back

fiction 27 Apr 2018 · 29 min read

Escape

From a distance, it was not much. Just a small hump, barely protruding from the brown sand. He came running down from its peak towards me, sitting by the drinks stand, eyes shining with an impossible light. I did not know what he had seen, but I knew that it had been a long time since he was this ex

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other writing

I’ve written some commissioned science communication pieces in Chinese, including my article with the highest readership, ‘The Persistence of ‘Neuromyths’ (不是人的脑子只用了10%，而是只有10%的人用了脑子)’, which was published on Guokr (果壳), China’s most popular digital pop-science platform. ‘Can We Manipulate Working Memory from Outside the Skull? (无须开颅，就能操控工作记忆？)’ was co-authored with Lindsay Li for Neu-Reality (神经现实), written at the invitation of Dr. Huan Luo, the paper’s corresponding author.

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translations

I’ve also translated and edited work by Alex Mar, Geoffrey Hinton, Jordana Cepelewicz, Michael Graziano, Timothy Lillicrap, and others into Chinese for Neu-Reality. The selected translations below are ordered by how proud I am of them.

• Alex Mar, ‘Love in the Times of Robots’ · WIRED · 赛博时期的爱情
• Jordana Cepelewicz, ‘In Brain’s Electrical Ripples, Markers for Memories Appear’ · Quanta Magazine · 海马波簇闪烁，照亮记忆幽林
• Timothy P. Lillicrap, Adam Santoro, Luke Marris, Colin J. Akerman and Geoffrey Hinton, ‘Backpropagation and the Brain’ · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · 大脑中的反向传播 (co-translated with Lindsay Li)
• Grigori Guitchounts, ‘An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience’ · Nautilus · 神经科学的存在危机
• Michael Graziano, ‘Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong’ · The Atlantic · 一些意识理论，让我们在理解意识的路上“开倒车”?
• Kevin Berger, ‘Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab’ · Nautilus · 美存在于观看者的神经系统之中
• Dyani Lewis, ‘Optogenetics: Understanding the Brain One Flash of Light at a Time’ · Cosmos Magazine · 光遗传学——大脑说：“要有光。”
• Steve Ayan, ‘The Brain’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness’ · Scientific American · 你的大脑在自动驾驶，而你一无所知