Light rain washed away 2022. The sun came out earlier than expected this morning. I stepped outside. It was as warm as an early spring day. With a sense of calmness, I walked slowly uptown toward the northern end of Manhattan. Very few people were around. Traffic was light. Was everyone still recovering from their late-night celebrations?
Having started my project on Chinese art song in autumn of 2020, I took the long detour to deal with Chinese cultural and literary heritage. During the last weeks of 2021, I rushed to finish writing about 20th-century Chinese poetry. I couldn’t wait to finally start writing about the musical works.
Life and works of Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 were the subject of my last article of the segment. Although I grew up knowing many of his poetic works, I wasn’t familiar with his critical writing. Reading and translating the preface of his final collection Fierce Tiger, I sympathized with his passions for poetry and his internal conflicts. He died a few months after the publication of Fierce Tiger. I wondered how much he would have wished to achieve. Strongly, I felt the need to grab every single moment.
For a few months, I worried about being behind—while there was no real deadline. Eventually, the weight of anxiety forced me to stop and rethink. I was able to calm down and focus on self-care. I continued working on everything that interested me but in a much slower pace. It seemed that I didn’t achieve much in 2022. However, after all these years, I finally learned to take small steps, one at a time.
I look forward to a productive year. I hope to share my time and skills with friends—old and news.