02.20 | may your year of the fire horse be fun~

✉️ letter #75

Hello! Welcome to the Year of the Fire Horse!

I’m not one to believe in horoscope-based superstitions, but something in the air truly does feel different this winter.

Maybe it’s the amount of ADHD meds and caffeine I’ve been ingesting since I regained medical insurance last September. Or maybe it’s just that enough irons I stuck in the fire near the tail end of Snake Year actually got hot. Or maybe New York City’s coldest winter ever has been enough of a shock to wake anyone up - like a Huberman ice bath for the soul. Whatever the reason, I find myself pleasantly surprised that I often have energy and hope and much, much less of that fog of malaise that plagued me through most of the last year.

Is the vibe coming from the astrological combination of an explosive element (FIRE!) coupled with an animal that represents vitality? It feels comforting to say yes!

🎼 the soundtrack | take your vibes and go - Kito

I will totally blow past how, Feng Shui-wise, my specific Zodiac animal - The Rat - actually “clashes” with the Horse, and so the stars are promising me endless challenges and stress in my near future. Girly needs a break from trials and tribulations, thank you very much, and will thus pointedly ignore any news that more are coming.

Instead, let’s talk about what’s made me happy in these months before Spring:

• Grad school has been intellectually interesting, but not hard. It feels great to not be bored, but also to breeze through becoming an A student.
• New York City got its young, progressive mayor and his first month in office was filled with good vibes and general competence. Compared to the deluge of disaster we’re otherwise inundated with federally, I can’t overstate how much of a relief it is that at least our city is managing governance okay.
• The Olympics has been a lot of fun to watch. I’ll admit that I’m mainly only paying attention to figure skating, but I have shed tears at the beauty of the programs, and I am so so so hyped that the woman who won Gold is a paragon of positive mental health. Alyssa Liu is inspiring both because her Donna Summers disco routine was immaculate, and because she has actively chosen to prioritize her own enjoyment and self expression.
• We, the world, are all apparently now in a very Chinese time of our lives.

On that last part, I have seen some reels from Chinese or Asian-American influencers salty about people Chinamaxxing now when we were all struggling to Stop Asian Hate yesterday, but YOU KNOW WHAT? As someone who has, for the last six years, had my career tied specifically to get anyone to care about China in any way that wasn’t overtly negative, I’m just relieved!

If it took a Tiktoker going to Chongqing to make the kids realize China’s kinda cool, if all the ladies are now touting “hot water = healthy,” if everyone suddenly can’t stop listening to Canto-rap, I say go for it. It is much, much preferable to when edgelord dorks were fearmongering about the PRC trying to control global currency.

And even my future (fingers crossed) career in combating climate change also needs a less alarmist, more nuanced view of the country. Yes, it’s a sometimes-cooperator/sometimes-competitor to be cautious around maybe, but I would much prefer caution to thinking it an outright threat to the “civilized world order.”

I mean, what does civilized mean these days anyway?

So originally, I was going to try and come up with some resolutions for this year - something I could never bring myself to do in 2025. But considering what my fortunes say, I don’t want to tempt fate. Instead, I’ll take a page from our Olympic Champion princess and focus on enjoying what I’m working at.

Right now, what I’m working at is amassing knowledge on green transitions. Considering who’s leading that right now globally, I hope the next entities to embrace a very Chinese time in their lives are other nation states.

🪢related threads

• I wanted to start by showcasing this gorgeous photo exhibition "Lighting the Future: People’s Hope and Power in China’s Green Energy Future," which contains awe-inspiring works like the one above. "Photographer Chu Weimin has spent the past three years documenting China’s clean energy transition using drones. His most striking images resemble Chinese traditional Shanshui ink paintings — mountains and clouds now joined by rows of turbines. In these surreal, poetic landscapes, wind farms rise from mountains like brushstrokes and an ancient temple stands quietly against a backdrop of renewable infrastructure." [GreenPeace]
• China has been building renewables at such a breakneck pace that, in just the last four years, it's newly built energy system is now bigger than the entire United States power grid. [Bloomberg]
• Part of the reason why is because renewables are just cheaper. But for those wondering why climate commitments from the country still seem modest, this interview with Ma Jun, the father of environmentalism in China, is illuminating: “In the west, the cultural tendency is that if you want to show that you’re serious, you need to set an ambitious target. Even if, at the end of the day, you fail, it doesn’t mean that you’re bad…But in China, the culture is that it is embarrassing if you set a target and you fail to fully honour that commitment.” [Carbon Brief]
• Speaking of which, about the time that I started my grad school climate program, my old colleague Kaiser Kuo wrote an excellent essay on China now as an exercise in understanding modernity. It was followed by another acquaintance's equally excellent supplement/rebuttal about how it feels to re-calibrate your own understanding of China as a modern Chinese citizen. Both were featured in The Ideas Letter.

✨enjoying: a piece of pop culture fun

Oh no, have I watched anything the past two weeks besides the Olympics?

Has anything brought me more empathetic joy than watching someone embracing their own love of the sport?

No. But beyond Liu, her fellow medalists were also also wonderful to watch. Kaori Sakamoto and Ami Nakai's short programs were stunning and equally self-assured. It bums me out a bit that the pressure got to them in the final free skate.

🗨️a final quote

...China has always required a certain tolerance for tension, a willingness to hold several truths at once without flattening them. Perhaps the reckoning is nothing grander than that: a small but deliberate adjustment of the lens, letting a more complicated country come into focus, one that is capable of immense promise and real harm at the same time. Not choosing which China is true, but allowing that all of them are. 
-- Afra Wang

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