I was born in Fujian and grew up in Shenzhen, a city remade by Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up policy. The great tides of change — factories rising overnight, streets filling with new languages and goods — left an imprint on my generation. We grew up watching the world rush in, reshaping not only the city around us but also the way we imagined our own lives.
In Hangzhou, I studied at a time when e-commerce was blooming everywhere — in classrooms, in cafés, in conversations between friends who all wanted to build something new. I stepped into that current, first as a young professional, and later as a manager at Jinchan Curtain, helping a traditional brand push open its window to the world.
Books and films have always been my quiet companions. I love the delicate gaze of Éric Rohmer, who captures the subtle weight of a single choice, a glance, a hesitation. And I return again and again to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels — stories of women’s friendships that are at once tender and fierce, revealing how the private lives of women carry the echoes of entire eras.
At 25, when the world felt shut behind locked borders, I boarded a plane to New York. It was a clumsy, reckless step — youth’s courage, or perhaps its blindness — but it carried me here, to a city of ceaseless noise and endless solitude. From Fujian to Shenzhen, from Hangzhou to Manhattan, I have been moving through transformations both public and intimate, always searching for the words, the images, the gestures that might hold them together.
Biwen Su 