“Bie Si An Lao Sun La!"

(A line from the classic 1986 TV series Journey to the West, where Liu Xiaolingtong, playing the Monkey King (Sun Wukong), yells this in frustration. If you just “heard” his voice in your head when reading that—congrats, you’ve just revealed your age. Ha.)

These past few days, I’ve been trying to write a review of Joan Chen’s Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. To do that, I had to revisit nearly all of modern Chinese history—just so I could talk about the new wave of Chinese cinema that emerged after the Reform Era. This background writing gave me a headache. And on top of that, my parents told me not to reveal too much about our family online—they said it might affect my ability to enter or leave the country. I don’t fully buy it, but I still locked the website temporarily, since it involves their privacy too.

Honestly, it’s frustrating. It’s already 2025. I live in the U.S., in the Bay Area—and I still have to care about this kind of thing? I really question what the point of coming to America was. I’ve run this far and I’m still scared of offending someone? Please, I’m begging all you overlords—cut me some slack. I’m just a kid who loves spilling explosive tea.

China has both the capability and the habit of monitoring global internet activity—especially Chinese-language content and especially on social media. I’m not sure if it’s related, but I recently noticed that ChatGPT can no longer use crawlers to access webpages. A human has to be logged into the browser client to even load the site. I don’t know whether this is a countermeasure against AI models scraping public content, or against any kind of automated keyword surveillance. But even if you can track keywords, it still takes massive manpower and funding to actually engage in information wars. It’s probably not going to affect us that much—maybe we’ll just pick up some hints of what’s going on.

Recently, the U.S. has been announcing all kinds of aggressive tariffs. But in reality, there are huge differences in how these are applied to different countries. This kind of self-harming, drag-everyone-down approach is intense, violent, and anxiety-inducing. The news every day is just chaos—I can’t keep up. Feels like a lot is happening, but dig a little deeper and it’s still the same stuff being recycled.

On the surface, we see fake news being pushed aggressively—loud, flashy, designed to confuse. But the real battles—information wars, trade wars, financial wars, and yes, soybean wars (which are actually important)—don’t get as much attention. I’ve started reading about financial basics and futures trading. Business is war, too. It’s a matter of life and death. Honestly, I don’t think Trump is as stupid as people say. He’s aggressive, sure—but I doubt he makes decisions lightly.

I know some in the LGBTQ community have beef with Trump, but honestly I’m not super clear on the details. Most of the smear campaigns seem designed to trigger hostility toward him from queer folks and millennials. These groups tend to be idealistic, and Trump really does give off heavy cishet male energy, so it’s natural they’d dislike him. When you hear he’s targeting minority groups, of course you get mad—that’s understandable. But maybe don’t over-focus on the man himself. Think about who voted for him, and why. Look into it more deeply. Nobody’s denying the dude is misogynistic, but judge him by what he does—not just what he says.

Anyway, back to life lately.

April was honestly a good month. Every day I was eating, drinking, hanging out—playing until I was tired, sleeping, then waking up to do it all again. I say “playing,” but it was more like: calligraphy at home, talking about literature, wondering what it means to be an artist, discussing how disinformation has become more hidden, harder to spot, more mysterious. I’ve noticed ChatGPT often makes things up—like saying someone starred in a film when they didn’t, or inventing director credits. If I didn’t already know, I’d believe it. And every time I call it out, it apologizes politely, very humbly—like a kid who just got scolded and is now over-explaining. Honestly, it reminds me of myself as a child: lots of logic, lots of excuses, and my parents still had the last word.

Even though I had planned to push forward with some writing, I ended up failing—completely. An epic fail. So I gave up and just let myself have fun. Except for a few days when we all went super introvert mode and wanted to be left alone, I kept myself busy by writing a little here and there. Most of the time, I was either playing or resting so I could play more. So now that I’ve spent the whole month doing this… what did I actually do?

I started scrolling through my photo albums.