Like a little bird

For the past month, I have been making an illustration with Yizha of a short film that the Zoige documentary group made called “Little bird”. It’s about a family with a 92-year-old grandmother and a 1-year-old child, all living from their van. The van hadn't moved for many days. Suddenly when they needed to go to a religious ceremony, they found a bird's nest in the engine with four baby birds. They didn't move the van for half a month, waiting until the birds flew away. The woman placed the nest in the highest spot, then drove away. This story illustrates Tibetan culture, how pastoralists view life, the willingness to sacrifice their livelihood or comfort for liveliness of the ecosystem that they are part of.

I think about the way Palsang describes the reasoning behind the seasonal migration lifestyle as “traceless on earth, like a little bird that comes and leaves”.

When I imagine it this way, it's so beautiful, really. In the past, you see, when we migrated seasonally like this, we had over six hundred households. People say we Gasha were one tribe, but now we've been divided into three villages. Gerden is one tribe too - say we had five or six hundred households, and in one day we'd all move, migrating, walking here, then walking there, then walking there. When we came back to this place the next year, you couldn't see where I had pitched my tent the year before - you couldn't find any trace. The grassland was always like this. A little bird flies away, then flies back. How beautiful. If humanity, if humans could live this way, the earth would also give us... right?

Black tents are made of yak hair. Modern people think black tents are uncomfortable because they leak wind and rain. But traditionally, black tents breathe - misfortune goes out, happiness comes in. Ecologically, black tents leave no trace. If an expert comes for one day, he thinks there are too many cattle and sheep. But if he stays one month, one year, after the cattle and sheep move on, like little birds, he can't find any traces. That is humility.

You can't just talk about ecology - actually everything is the same. Ecology is really difficult, you see. A person's true values, as a human being, are connected to all other values and concepts, including the next life. For a herder, or in our understanding, human life - whether in the next life you're an animal or human - continues moving through reincarnation, right? In this case, when I come to this world at this time, it's not a one-time thing. I have to come back. Even if I don't come back, other beings will come. So I can't be too ruthless. This is very important, extremely important. We can't do things as if they're one-time only. People nowadays all think it's one-time - who knows about the next life, who knows about now. Sometimes living in the present moment is also important, and within living in the present there are also values.

From survival to life requires beauty: Whether everything is happiness or not is decided by a person's culture."

Afraid I have nothing to give

The song 情非得已 by Harlem Yu has been making me cry. I teared up while listening to it as I meal prepped, as I walked, as I sang along to it. I wondered why. Maybe because it stirs a Chinese nostalgia. Maybe it captures how I feel about the interiority of a social human. I have been in this mood because I just moved to a new city where I negotiate new contracts of reciprocity with peers, work, and neighbors. I found myself becoming more active with inviting people to chat and to gather. I noticed this is motivated by how isolated I felt in my previous era. Luckily, I am not alone. The loneliness is what makes people more aware that it can feel so good to be included and so bad to be isolated. This i know and feel deeply softly.

I tried to translate the lyrics by hand, it’s interesting to see how some words sound more banal in english.

I can’t forget the first time I met you, a pair of mesmerizing eyes
In my head, your silhouette doesn’t dissolve
Holding your hand and experiencing your gentleness, I find it hard to breathe
Your innocence I want to cherish; Seeing you get hurt I would feel so sad
難以忘記初次見你 一雙迷人的眼睛
在我腦海裡 你的身影 揮散不去
握你的雙手感覺你的溫柔 真的有點透不過氣
你的天真 我想珍惜 看到你受委屈 我會傷心

I’m afraid to fall in love with you
Won’t let myself get too close
Afraid that I have nothing to give you
Loving you requires a lot of courage
只怕我自己會愛上你 不敢讓自己靠得太近
怕我沒什麼能夠給你 愛你也需要很大的勇氣

I’m afraid of falling in love with you
Maybe one day I can’t help but do
Longing results in nothing but self-harm
Loving you was not up to me
只怕我自己會愛上你 也許有天會情不自禁
想念只讓自己苦了自己 愛上你是我情非得已

I don’t have a cohesive conclusion except that both moments were visceral to me this week. They are about good relationships, long-term outlets for eternal loneliness. The “Little Bird” story was a treatment of how humans can feel less alone and more part of the revolutions of lifetimes from the Tibetan Buddhism cosmology. The illustration process was an exercise in being useful or paying attention to what we want to convey to the audience, whereas I usually draw to think or feel for myself. The song describes the mix of emotions I experience when connecting with people - fascination, fear, warmth, pre-emptive sadness, loneliness and belonging.

In the quantitative modeling class, we read opinion pieces about why math, physics, and biology should work together. Some felt dated; the 1997 Brenner piece arguing that biologists need more theory feels obvious now. But others had helpful examples, like Goldstein's 2018 walk-through of how a biologist might rediscover physics equations (diffusion) through biological phenomena (algae spreading), or Cohen's 20041 lists of biological problems inspiring mathematical frameworks. The similar argument that I want to make is how pastoralist knowledge could inform the physics of living systems. And more broadly, that academia and communities can benefit from working together.

Chats with allies

Over the first week of starting the program I talked to people at different stages of their projects. They share my interests in animal behavior, mechanics, ecology, sensors. I asked about their projects and for advice on my idea drafts.

B understands me the most. Like me, he doesn't see animals as materials or fluids. He genuinely sees cows and dogs as individuals. He's spent his PhD modeling whether active cattle could create the terraced hillsides we see in mountains (yes, but the model needs more experimental data), and collecting data on sled dogs pulling loads across snow. B told me that to convince people in this field, lead with physics and mechanism, not ecology or social impact. The key is showing how a specific biological behavior represents a more general physical mechanism. For example, mudskippers jump on water by making water splashes that have symmetric forces going both up and down. This spashing process exists across many systems and humans could potentially use it.

T works on how sheepdogs herd and split sheep flocks. He was trained in electrical engineering, a common background for people who want to apply control theory to living things. What excited me most was that T knows how to translate qualitative herder knowledge into quantitative models. He’d watched hours of sheepdog racing competitions and absorbed the commentary. When shepherds say "these sheep look light, so they'll probably follow other sheep," he turns that into a model parameter. This is exactly what I need to do with the knowledge I learned from pastoralists in Dzoge.

S studies bird biogeography on the other side of the Himalayas from where I worked. He understands why I wanted to get a more holistic view of the ecological and social processes behind a particular animal behavior. He got me started with the key ecological context: the Tibetan Plateau's moisture comes from Western Disturbances (winter storms from the west), snow and glacier melt, and rain-shadow effects. He's found that moderate grazing boosts bird diversity while overgrazing reduces it, which directly relates to my trampling questions.

Project taking shape

Through these conversations, my research direction has crystallized around how yaks affect grasslands. The hypothesis is that there's a "useful trampling" range where hoof-scale trampling and tongue-scale grazing increase seedling establishment and reduce soil crusting on the landscape scale, but too much becomes harmful. Concretely, this means I could use a bench-top hoof rig in the lab this semester to test different forces on soil analogs, then return to Dzoge in spring/summer with GPS collars and drone surveys to validate the mechanisms in real herds.

Mechanics of how yaks are farmers

I wonder what is the exact effect of the way yak hoofs walk on the soil and plants beneath the hoofs. I think it would look like some relationship between the yak weight and impact force and the inverse of the soil shear strength (resistance of a block of dirt to move when there is an applied force). I also suspsect there is a optimal seed burial depth that depends on the seed diameter and weight.

Based on S and Tachung Tsang observations, the reason why intermediate trampling intensities is best for seed burial could be reasoned by the optimal seed burial depth and soil compaction amount. There also needs to be a threshold beyond which excessive compaction kills germination or fragments the soil too much that the water and nutrient processes don’t work well (I’m not sure what the consensus here is).

Some say that trampling is good for breaking the soil crust and letting more things in and out. Crust fragmentation probably also has a maximum threshold before it either becomes neutral or negative. Maybe the water retention in those little pits could be higher than surrounding areas because there’s more absorption surface and less evaporation surface.

See also:

The many communities within sheepherding

I am thinking about the evening communal pasture sheep splitting in Dzoge.

There's fascinating physics around decision uncertainty in group movements2. Below some threshold group size, more individuals actually create more noise and disorder, but above that threshold, averaging effects induce more coordinated movement. Recently there are finally higher resolution experiments in fish schools and sheep flocks to check the role of noise. For grazing systems, maybe the uncertainty can explain why moderate herd sizes can optimize both trampling pressure and vegetation recovery patterns.

I think it would also depend on not just herd size, but also the herd grazing area and duration, which is determined by presence of fences and also shepherd decisions. I’m not sure how to captures these human decisions yet, but S suggested that I could have semi-quantitative structured surveys and interviews3, even if that’s not what my main mentors do.

See also:

Next

My key realization this week is that I can be genuinely excited by the community collaboration aspect while my lab mates get excited by the physical mechanisms, and we can still work together productively.

In the first days, I felt quite bad about myself, because my interests and skills are not as aligned with the consensus here. But now I think I can start from where I am, contribute my strengths, and learn from what I appreciate in them (that they can sit with problems and address them steadily). The best thing is that we have a lot of time.

I'm feeling more confident about my path forward. There are technical challenges around data protocols and building models. But I have some potential collaborators and places to go and learn. Most importantly, I'm learning that valuing things others don't doesn't make me wrong or out of place. It just means I need to find the overlaps where our different excitements can fuel the same research.

When I was researching about desertification solutions on the Tibetan plateau, the story that fascinated me the most was about how, in contrast to the state and expert and 20th century claim that pastoralists’ animals overgrazing is the blame for grassland degradation, actually when replanting grass on deserts animals could help in the grassland recovery.

“in contrast to the state and expert and 20th century claim that pastoralists’ animals overgrazing is the blame for grassland degradation” because there are still policies up to today, for about 40 years now, called 退牧还草 stop herding to recover the grass. These policies subsidize or mandate herders to limit their animal amount or stop grazing in a region completely (like a protected area) in the assumption that without overgrazing or with less grazing, the grass will naturally recover to the better ecological state that is diverse in species, dense in coverage, and robust in soil and water circulation.

The herders of course have their motivation to say that animals are good or not bad for the environment. They want to keep the herding lifestyle. The story of adaptation is about the herders who are working on their own on treating the degraded grasslands. Most grassland treatment projects from the past 40-50 years are government projects. They typically involve animal reduction and natural recovery. The herder treatment includes grazing, but also in a new style compared to normal grazing on grasslands that are healthy. Their grazing method is different from just letting animals roam, but a careful management. (Perhaps more like traditional grazing before market incentivized fencing and stocking.)

The story reads:

When people asked, “how can we achieve these goals?” They have found a solution. This solution came from an ordinary female herder. She told the villagers, “we should let the hooves of yaks push the seeds into the sand and the soil. Yaks’ hooves can be the best (frugal) technology because yaks also carry seeds in their hair. As yaks trample the soil where seeds are planted, all kinds of seeds from yaks’ hairs and hooves will mingle with one another. Yak dung is the best fertilizer for growth of many kinds of grasses and flowers. This will contribute to the biodiversity of the place.” From this practice, people learned the indispensible relationship between the pastoralists, animals and the future sustainability of their land."

When I asked who this herder is, Yizha said they don’t know. I suspect it’s a story technique but the hooves and seed carrying do work so that’s ok with me.

During replanting, the pasture is banned from grazing except in the spring when the soil melts. The one-year fast grasses have grown tall while the multi-year grasses are just beneath the surface, protectetd by the shade of the tall grasses. The pastoralists let a moderate amount of yaks into the pasture for a moderate amount of time, not maximizing on feed amount but more on grass health.

The yaks go in,

• eat the leaves of grass (carbon gets sent back to the roots for stronger growth, and tall grass gets eaten more to allow species succession),

• tramples with their hoofs over the old tall grass so that the new short grass has more sun (to photosynthesis and succeed as the new dominant or diverse species) and the old grass is a protective layer on the soil to prevent water erosion (slipping away without absorbing into the soil),

• poops and pees (feeding the soil and soil microbiome with nutrients),

• trample also over soil sheets (breaking the large dried sheets apart for more air and space for soil-microbiome clumps to form, water to stay in the soil in the little holes as puddles, instead of flow away on the surface).

In conclusion, having a moderate not too little not too much grazing intensity in a set season corresponding to grass growth is good for degraded grasslands in their transition to healthy grasslands. The outcomes that are measurable include soil coagulation, soil water retention, soil fragility or humility, grass biodiversity, grass coverage compared to bare soil, soil microbiome…

OK these points about which yak behaviors produce which beneficial outcome for soil and grass is a compilation of what I heard from Tachung Tsang and the book “The soil will save us”.

What is the limitation?

First I’m not sure how much case studies and scientific summaries we have of the alternative method (grazing-included degraded grassland remediation).

Second what is the exact mechanism that could be replicated for improved outcomes. E.g. the each year adjustments about how many cows, when, how long, where.

What is next? Global conversation (Allan Savory, rangeland management)…

“Once upon a time, a seed was snuggling in its mother’s pod with its siblings.

Suddenly a yak walked by and scrapped it off the pod.

The seed felt dizzy and was so scared to fall with the wind. It clung tightly to the yak’s hair as the yak walked day and night, past snowy mountains and yellow rivers.

Finally one afternoon the yak reached a land filled with little puddles. The yak sat down heavily. The seed fall off the hair and into the ground. It painfully lied beneath the yak’s butt.

After the yak had rested, it stumbled upright, pooped generously. The yak stomped around the soil for awhile while munching on dewy grass. Satisfied, it left to play with its family.

The seed was tucked by poop and flung dirt into the darkness of the soil.

The seed felt warm but worried. It had only known the world of daylight, never the world of darkness.

It was alone in this emptiness for a long time.

Until a voice vibrated nearby. “Who are you?”

The seed wiggled and squinted. There is another seed-looking creature!

“I am a seed! Who are you? Where are we?”

They started chatting.

The soil became less lonely and the waiting less slow.

The seed told its new friend all about its life. Mother, siblings, the dew, the yak, the mountains, the ride, the fall, the darkness.

They grew their roots and sprouts. They shared food and air. Day turned into night and back into day. They got out of the soil and into the sun. They each had more seeds. The seeds traveled by flying, by riding horses. The animals came and went. The yak poop melted and the grass that sheep ate recovered. The cycles went on.”

This is a story that Palsang has told for five, six years now. We will turn it into a small animation. As I prepared the animation, I spend time thinking about the story. It became a good scaffold for remembering the technicalities of herding how-to’s, as well as for making sense of my own connection to the pastoralists.

Transhumance as a logic

From all the different conversations with pastoralists of different styles, traditional to commercial, a recurrent theme is that while many things about pastoralism as a cultural lifestyle can change - from animal medicine to drought solution - what remains is a kind of essential logic of transhumance. From the PASTRES research group info it seems that there are commonalities (and differences) of the migration strategy across herders from Australia, West Africa, and Mongolia. The core commonality includes regulating animal behaviors such as trampling to maintain the plants and soil to a sustainable state. For example, if the soil is coagulating into plates, animals that move in groups concentrate their grazing and hoof impact that result in finer soil for seeds to germinate. While we discuss traditional herding wisdom, it’s also important to note that not all strategies remain fitting to the present. In the book “The Soil Will Save Us” there is a case study from a range manager called Savory who provided data on how prehistoric up to pre 1850 cultures were not necessarily sustainable in their forest and soil usage, at least with today’s per capita standards (an important difference).

I have a bit more discussion on animal-present grassland recovery in previous post on home mandala. And I haven’t organized the notes on hoof vs soil in various sources yet.

Transhumance as a life story

I can relate to the seed and its journey.

In the immediate sense that it is a sincere story with true emotions, which is a rare thing to encounter. Emotional truths often touch people. The fear of the unfamiliar, the craving of home, the warmth of friends, the awe of stories, the joy of accepting cycles of transformation.

Also in the sense that I as a human also experienced a lot of traveling. Learning a new lifestyle, making friends in a new place, the messiness of intimate families, feeling excluded in a culture, treating my origins with indifference or appreciation, discerning what is desirable as opposed to what is currently here.

Can I be a fitting inhabitant in these cycles of migration?

Outside is chilly but sunny. In front of me, the altar of the Labrang Llhama made from a bookshelf with golden silk lining. A plate of fresh pears from the truck outside the apartment complex, and 7 small bronze bowls of water. To my right, Qi’s university student’s older sister Yim from Xining city is pouring frozen milk into the pot to make milk tea. Qi’s fellow Tibetan Buddhist worshipper Shi from Canton is washing a big red radish, apparently a local breed.

I met Qi at the place where I stayed the past month. She came with her Labrang friend Ansan and an exhibit curator. The curator made Ansan connect her to her local friends and setup the local filming work, but did not include Ansan’s name as a collaborator, did not disclose any funding details and did not involve Ansan in the conversations with the funding agency. Ansan is determined to meet with the agency so that they can also know what it actually take to connect with trust to local groups. “Even if some people might not know how to give love and trust, and might not reciprocate me or might hurt me, I would still act out of the love that my grandma taught me.”

To my left, Ire and Dinzen click and drag on their monitor + keyboard + mouse + Terra Master data storage box set, on a small tea table with a pink and orange Tibetan cloth drape.

Ire is from Golo, from the place where land is so big and people are so few. Dinzen is from Litang, wearing fashionable pants with an US flag and a China flag on each of the butt cheeks. They are students from the film and media class at the famous innovative Tibetan school called Guolo County Jimenjianzan Ethnic Technical School (果洛州吉美堅贊民族職業學校), also known in Tibetan as the Snow Country Intelligent Norbu School.

In 1994, monk-intellectual Jimeijianzan started the school as the first civilian founded school in Qinghai Tibet. It was a school that students (monk or secular) from every Tibetan region want to get into, because it focuses on Tibetan language, culture, religion and medicine. It also treats the issue where monk students don’t have access to modern science and information, by providing courses in computer science, math, chemistry, biology. The school was closed by the government in July 2024. Tibetan scholar Gyalo thinks this is because the CCP wants to turn Tibetans into Han in their cultural identity and lifestyle, so as to prevent independence.

After the school closed, Qi hired Ire and Dinzen to film and make documentaries seasonally. They are currently editing a documentary about the event that happened a week ago in Kecai village of Xiahe county. It’s called the thousand sheep cliff, where, before the village moves from their summer to autumn pasture, each family bring the sheep in their ring that don’t belong to them, and the other families come to recognize their lost sheep. To take a sheep home, the claimer must swear to the greater beings they treasure, such as their lama, who is more precious than the sheep to the shepherds.

There were even nearby Mongolians who came with the Mongolian occupation some hundreds years ago and got Tibetan-fied in the years since. There are also local government officials who come with the TV crew to film this as a sign of multi-ethnicity collaboration. That is the party speak for preventing the ethnic groups with cultural and political coherence (such as Mongolians, Tibetans, Hui muslims, Kazakhs) from protesting or acting towards in dependence in the borderlands; allegedly the top priority of the northwestern China provinces, higher priority than economic productivity. The Chinese Communist Party members cannot hold prayer beads or swear to lamas. The party bans all members from entering temples, wearing religious symbols, or believing in any other religion than the CCP. So when it came to photo time, someone shouted for the party members to remove the prayer beads.

Yim is currently reading a novel about bleak bureaucracy. “If they joined the party while in school, maybe there is some idealism. If they joined the party after they started working, it is purely to rise up to higher positions. They live this severed life where they ascend to power in the day and pray secretly in the night, hoping no one sees and reports them.”

We have been chatting about related topics last night, on an hour walk back from the Labrang temple, after turning every prayer wheel around the temple grounds. Yan said that in northwestern China and with the current economy, there isn’t much jobs besides state-instated ones. So most people who were good at taking tests aka good students would opt to try for the 公务员 government employee position, since that provides stable income, even if low. The government entrance exam includes “common sense” questions like “how many eyes does a mosquito have?”

“The state employees always say things like, sorry I can’t help you at this level, I have already reported to the higher level up.” Qi said. I asked if this means the work they do would be easy to automate. Qi says no because someone need to be there as the scapegoat for responsibility. And if even the stablest government jobs are gone, maybe the rumors about planned economy food distribution centers will come back. The sixty year cycles of cold war she exclaims.

As I typed, Yim brought salty milk tea, the thin yellow milk skin wrinkling on top.

All of the above is fiction, and should not be attributed to any real person.

Further reading

Guoluo jimei school:

《不明白播客》EP-112 藏区教育（上）：藏语教学最后一座灯塔的熄灭

TCHRD：中国关闭声誉卓著的西藏私立学校，标志着其强制文化同化政策的加强

Advocacy about Shut down China's colonial boarding school system in Tibet

Below are some concrete instances and the nuance they bring up.

One afternoon, my friend’s brother Gerde took me to his uncle's pasture. The uncle's wife lay on the carpet, hurt from a fall two days prior, unable to reach the hospital because a biking contest had closed the roads. She held her prayer beads while we waited out the rain, drinking tea and feeding yak dung to the stove.

In that lazy, suspended time, Gerde told me what she had said about me: I don't seem like a gamo (རྒྱ་མོ), a Han woman. My skin wasn't pale, I didn't wear foundation, and I got close to the animals. Unlike the tourists who recoil from yak dung or the migrant workers who maintain careful distance.

I felt a small surge of happiness at this. Whether it meant looking like one of them or simply not looking like a tourist, fitting in felt good.

Besides happiness, I also felt confused. I somehow want to hide or change the fact that I am Han and from the city, like the people she is comparing me to. (Whether Han is a simple ethnicity is another conversation.)

Was I celebrating not being seen as a cultural invader? The thought had haunted me since learning that around 2020, Tibetan schools were forced to switch to Mandarin textbooks, leaving middle schoolers who only spoke Tibetan before struggling to catch up. And from seeing how K-pop and mainland media filled every young person's phone.

When I voiced my fears about being a "cultural invasion perpetrator" to a Han woman journalist friend, she shared her own initial concerns when she came to Tibet 4 years ago. But time had given her perspective.

First, Tibetans maintain strong cultural pride. We're not enough to dissolve it.

Second, it's possible to remain an outsider without fitting in entirely while still being good to each other. We are Han; we can't change that. But we can be good coworkers and friends.

Third, tradition isn't static. Sometimes Tibetan intellectuals overuse "Han cultural invasion" to critique any change. If someone drinks coffee instead of eating tsampa for breakfast, is this choice or brainwash? If a woman wants to lead organizations or be employed, is this Western propaganda or personal liberation? It's complicated.

The NGO leader often lamented how beauty standards were shifting. From the brown skin of herders to the pale skin of K-pop stars. He worried about souls living on grassland but dwelling elsewhere, in cities or screens.

The leader is also a mixture of old and new. Long hair, wild smile, riding his shiny Mongolian horse bought from a Russian in the US, making documentaries of black-necked cranes and wildlife dying on recently erected barbed wire fences. He embodied his own complex relationship with tradition and change.

I am hungry for more specific stories of change and constance, for myself as well.

There had been other Han women researchers in Tibetan NGO circles: doing fieldwork, interviews, soil samples, ecology, anthropology. The NGO leader told me that there was even an anthropology student who shares my first name. I found myself thinking about her on my solitary walks.

During her year of fieldwork on Tibetan mastiff dogs, she'd lived here continuously, visiting hundreds of herders with a local friend. I like how her writing possess an interior depth while describing people and scenes without excessive poetry. In photos, she appeared as an elegant figure moving through dog farms and forests.

The girl with my name wrote about being called gamo too. In the first days of her time in Amdo Tibet pastures, she couldn’t understand the conversations but could hear this word and know they were talking about her. She told her friend, “could you call me my Tibetan name instead of gamo? I feel disrespected. Like how if Han people called you "Tibetan civilian” (藏民) instead of your name.”

Her friend said they didn’t mean to disrespect, but she is a gamo! After two months though, add with another girl replacing her in being the unfamiliar gamo, she finally started getting called her Tibetan name. In her other fieldwork at a Sichuan dog farm, her name was also substituted with a tag, this time “Dr.” It’s a convenience, an impression.

Maybe as we get to know each other more on an individual basis, the titles go away.

For various reasons, I rarely am aware that I have a gender in my daily life. Here I see gender in people, including myself, more distinctly.

At Yaldun, the summer festival, I followed a little girl into the cooking tent to get flowers braided by her mother. The heat hit immediately. Women sitting on grass making momos while steam and smoke poured from the stove. Meanwhile, men gathered in the cooler tent, boys in monk robes playing video games. Later, women served beef noodle soup and cleaned up. Men played cards under a sky tent. In the evening, men rode to gather yaks and sheep while women cooked dinner.

My friend Dromei, while breastfeeding, told me about persistent gender bias. Her husband's grandmother preventing boys from any work while girls carried water buckets. Now that shepherding required less labor, men had more time but rarely helped with milking, cooking, childcare. Her family was rare in valuing daughters equally, not wanting her to leave for her husband's homeland.

Yet when Dromei called out to her uncle about his pregnant 21-year-old daughter, asking if he preferred a boy or girl, his smile said everything. "You see," she told me, "they don't lie when it comes to their own."

I sympathized with young Tibetan women in this position. I wouldn't want to do more work and be less acknowledged compared to other family members either.

During interviews, I noticed how men typically spoke while women interjected. This is partly because I asked about herding, traditionally men's work. But I'd seen women herding when men weren't around, living with yaks, milking them, feeding them. Didn't this give them different but equally important knowledge? I would be curious to talk to more women.

I don’t know where this positioning exercise concludes yet.

With time, people turn from tags to real people. Tradition can change beautifully. I am not an invisible observer. I look forward to playing a part in messy good stories.

I returned to Shangrire for 2 days to spend time and do interviews at Lanmuzhuoma's family members' pastures. Then I spent 3 days back at Zhaqiongcang center, hanging out with the extended family and synthesizing all the notes feelings and thoughts into what I want to discuss with them before I leave. It was really sweet to spend the afternoons, when hostel and restaurant is empty, around the cafe table. I am diagramming, Lemu is learning english vocabulary, Lanmuzhuoma is feeding the baby, Shutu is reviewing plant photos, Yimcuo is playing the virtual boyfriend game, Tenzin is playing chinese Minecraft. Finally I spent 2 days at Maqu, to go with my friend Tingting to do interviews at one of the rare communities that still manage their pasture collectively as a production team instead of as individual households.

I had waves of nervousness - before going to ShangReEr, before talking to Palsang/presenting, before going to Maqu. I think I am getting closer, with the 4 themes emerging that carry emotional as well as pragmatic and rich intellectual motivation. The four themes are: mental models, animal agency via trampling, commons tactics, and how nonequilibrium management can work.

Mental Models

The most revealing interviews came from comparing herders of different ages and experience levels. Ershu, now 47, started herding at age 7 when adults put him on a horse because they didn't want to herd anymore. His older brother was chosen to inherit the silversmith trade, so he was selected to inherit herding. He couldn't get down from the horse until dark when he returned home, learning by following neighboring grandfathers.

His emotional connection runs so deep that he'd rather eat one meal less to take his animals to the freshest grass in the morning. He takes pride when his autumn animals sell for higher prices than others, and the next year he gives other animals even better feed.

The contrast with his younger brother Zhezhe, who started herding in his teens, was striking. Their herding styles are completely different. Ershu uses less supplemental feed, buying dried grass instead of commercial feed because he thinks it makes animals rely less on fresh grass for weight gain. He maintains diverse livestock (sheep, cattle, and horses) while Zhezhe focuses purely on sheep because they mature faster economically.

Ershu used to rent premium pastures near Gire sacred mountain, expensive but the animals would grow fat and even become picky about regular grass when they returned. If they sold well, he'd treat his animals even better the next year. Zhezhe doesn't rent additional pastures.

There are other differences in style. For example, animals could get infectious diseases from waters and grasses or the weather. The deaths from diseases impact herder livelihood a lot a lot. While Zhezhe would use vaccines and medicines from the government, Ershu is more conservative in that he doesn’t give treatment as much and early, and he prefers traditional medicine rather than new medicines. There are also daily life efforts that can reduce diseseases. At Maqu which is filled with wetlands, they mentioned how in autumn they try not to let cattle and sheep drink wetland water because it doesn't circulate and causes illness. The practical knowledge about water, soil, and animal health is so specific and important.

The emotional difference was most striking. Ershu truly loves his animals deeply. He' will go hungry himself to ensure they get the best morning grass. Many people aren't willing to work harder and be more diligent to let their animals eat better. This might be because he started so young while others learned later when families already had someone to inherit herding responsibilities.

Tingting asked whether their different approaches related to whether they experienced collective versus divided pasture management. Since Shangreer only divided grassland this February, both experienced collective management, but the 7-year age gap and different starting ages shaped their mental models differently.

When I told Shutu there's so much I could model here - even the frequency process of people coming to the ecological cultural center - he said "do what you want to do the most." I said there's been so many moments of tears, surprise, resonance in the days past, and I recorded them. But I feel obstacles about reading through them all.

The living heuristics concept feels lovely. The multispecies system of herder-grass-herd(-wildlife) is beautiful. I feel safe in the thought that we are all learning to persist and adapt. The herders are biophysicists in that they understand how yak trampling affects seeds and vegetation. They control and shape how herds move in grassland to obtain desirable amounts of grass (sustained) and animal energy states. We should really learn how that works, just from the modeling perspective for more mechanisms to be elicited and translated to people who didn't learn from herders how herding works - a tangible implicit interactive knowledge.

Trampling

The animal trampling question kept surfacing across different contexts this week. During our conversation, Tingting said in the "the soil will save us" book, animal trampling of soil is good because it can break apart soil that otherwise might coagulate into large sheets which are harder to grow grass on.

But on the other hand, some herders say that sheep walk too much and break the soil/grass by walking so much.

Still yet, Palsang’s team use yaks to trample the seeds into the soil in the areas where grass is so sparse it turns to desert patches.

So what is it?

I think that if Prof Zhang (a soil and vegetation of grassland desertification researcher from Qinghai) follows through with the project to embed pressure sensors into the soil and see how exactly yaks unevenly trample to make the little soil beds for seeds, then come back to see how the grass growth pattern relates to this trampling, that would be good data.

I think this is modelable - active walker, forcing between hoof and soil, effect on seed/plant - then predict macro pattern.

BUT I had some difficulty in asking herders about trampling. For example, even though Ershu is so expreienced and loving about herding, when I asked him about whether sheep trampling was worse than cattle, he said there wasn't much difference, contrary to what I expected from the literature. Maybe I didn’t ask it in the words that they think about trampling in?

Commons

Maqu gave me the chance to see collective pasture management in action. Awancang is a village that still practices collective herding, so I was curious how they decided not to divide grassland, or how after dividing, the whole village returned to collective management. With deteriorating grassland and increasing market pressure, how do they update their collective management methods?

During the interview, I learned they have 30 households sharing all seasons. No arguments about when to move pastures. People who left rent 300 mu at 200 yuan per cattle per year. In 2002, they allocated livestock numbers, and if births exceed deaths, the numbers don't change. If births are many, selling becomes unprofitable. If deaths are many, renting land becomes unaffordable. But they maintain unity - no stealing grass.

The comparison with Team 4, which divided their grassland, was telling. Why did Team 4 divide while Team 6 didn't? The limits keep shrinking: pre-1980 people could have 20 head, then 15 head, then 5 head after 2002. In 2021, the government said even the 2002 numbers couldn't be maintained.

At night in Shangrire pasture, I watched the most fascinating part of collective herding - how herders split sheep from multiple families that had mixed together. Each family head calls "ker ker ker" and the sheep gradually recognize their owners and familiar companions, slowly separating into three families. Tingting mentioned there was a draft environmental law open for suggestions, where top experts like Luzhi and Tibetan environmental NGO leaders discussed whether collective pasture might be better for environment and social bonds, and if so, could it be put into law. The conclusion was that enforcement and implementation was the harder part. The fences are up, market pressure is there, and mentalities are shifting. How do you go back?

The people who most want to divide grassland are those who least want to stay in pastoral areas. When grassland was collectively used, people thought horses ate too much and damaged grassland. After dividing, people paid more attention to what actually affects grass and discovered sheep cause more damage through trampling.

The tragedy of commons discourse came up repeatedly in conversations with Tingting, and later with Ellie and Thiago. With Ellie and Thiago it was about how the tragedy of commons is wrong and Elinor Ostrom's managing the commons is better because it involves 8 rules - the community has rules that are reasonable for the community itself, and commons need to be monitored. Commons don't run on good will, but on accountability.

Nonequilibrium

I was excited when I found the book "Nonequilibrium, Commons and Locality: New Thinking on Grassland Management" in the office.

The first article was about nonequilibrium ecological systems, with an introduction by Zhang Qian: "Ecological Foundations of Grassland Management: Integration of Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Ecosystem Theory." This book articulated what I really wanted to say and do.

The policies to address grassland degradation over the past decades (reducing grazing livestock numbers and artificial grass planting) haven't been very effective based on evidence from 1999 to now. This might be because they assumed grassland is an equilibrium system. In statistical physics, an equilibrium system is a closed system where energy is conserved.

But these policies ignored several key points. First, the interaction between plants and animals isn't purely negatively correlated - sometimes livestock can help vegetation grow through light disturbance, like when cattle trample grassland and tall grass gets pressed down so new grass can grow. Second, there's evidence that livestock-vegetation relationships are affected by grazing historical time, and this historical time doesn't exist in equilibrium systems - it only exists in open, semi-open nonequilibrium systems with such complex relationships.

When Tingting and I discussed this, It was a bit hard to explain what nonequilibrium means and is useful for. I pointed to characteristics such as having multiple steady states - complete desert, half desert, and what else? - that could stay for some time whereas the "hills" in the energy landscape would quickly go to another situation. But I had trouble explaining what the book was actually meaning.

Tingting asked what nonequilibrium management would look like differently. I pointed to traditional methods of expanding/moving areas that actually fit the theory better than settlement and herding within fences. But that's quite obvious, so what other applications, predictions, suggestions can we make? Tingting said maybe I could partner with an on-ground team long-term. For example, I make suggestions, they test them out, they tell me what they want to monitor.

The Fernandez-Gimenez 2001 paper on Mongolia provided empirical grounding. They found that in arid, highly variable ecosystems, abiotic factors like precipitation have greater influence on vegetation biomass than grazing. But in moist, constant environments, grazing plays a greater role. The picture of ecosystem response is much more complicated than either model suggests.

During conversations about climate, I was surprised that herders didn't emphasize irregularity or randomness in weather patterns as much as I expected. They mainly talked about feed and pika problems, and human factors like grassland division. They said this year was windy, the rainy season came late, summer was short - but these things people can't change, you just watch the sky, and it doesn't change their herding methods.

Synthesis

After Tingting went through my mindmap, we discussed more on each point I found possibly modelable. The animal trampling effect on grass and soil, the interference and state transitions where sometimes moderate interference is better than no interference, the collective pasture techniques and mentalities.

We talked about how to make this research mutually beneficial. Like continuing research that supports me while what I do has dissemination meaning for them, or certain descriptive and proposal significance. Yesterday when going to black soil patches with Zhang laoshi, some ideas emerged - like the yak hoof seed-burying mechanism they consider successful research that could be refined into a model or data. Sheep separation is like a game that could be simulated, though simulation itself might not have practical use, but it's something that must be done during collective herding.

Tingting asked about the narrowness of research direction when I mentioned yak trampling and sheep separation. I'm not looking for narrow research directions - I'm most interested in the worldview and thinking perception patterns of people who have insight about herding, who patiently observe and adjust herding methods. Like Tingting said, many indigenous organizations now link themselves with environmental protection, but their sacred mountain work doesn't completely equal environmental protection - they're different concepts. So don't directly impose your own concepts on others' worldviews, but understand different ways of seeing the world.

What I feel most curious about is a holistic view of an experienced and loving herder. Their goals, decision-making methods, how they innovated during times when grass was sufficient and during droughts and disasters. From the perspective of people I know who do scientific modeling, humans manage grassland, animals shape grassland like engineers, humans use their understanding of biological and physical interactions to manage grassland.

They have deep knowledge of animal characteristics - how they walk, graze, and move in groups. How does grass grow? What happens when grass is trampled? How to predict unpredictable weather systems? Including the people in temples who calculate weather systems - how do they calculate? Is there scientific rationality in this? Why does dividing grassland and creating scenic areas weaken helping relationships between people? Why do different people always have different emotional connections to grassland?

The qualities of wanting to stay in pastoral areas: patience, gentleness, observation and perception of nature and surroundings. These are the mental models I want to understand and learn from.

Uncle Palsang (the organizer of Tachung Tsang) said, maybe what this land needs most now is for seeds to grow into people—or for people to continue growing on this land. I thought that metaphor of seeds and growth was really powerful. In many situations—like people from outside, or my own past experiences visiting different communities—I’ve felt like a seed blown in from somewhere else. But the soil never really covered me, so the wind blew me away again, before I could take root. So maybe we need some "yaks" to stomp the seed into the ground—or maybe the land itself needs to be more welcoming, less windy, or there need to be other seeds helping. After all, plants help each other grow. Maybe I am that drifting seed. Yeah... how can we grow people from the land? Instead of dropping things down like a helicopter, where they just come and go, like birds.

Leaving and returning home

(Uncle Palsang is sitting under a black yak hair tent in the courtyard reading a book. I come with some questions.

The village I just visited decided, this year, to shift from collective ownership of the pasture to private ownership where they put fences between different lots. I was curious how this change would affect the social and ecological community. Surprisingly, the conversation moved to be about leaving and returning, which I can relate to in my own life, even right now as a visitor to their land.)

Palsang: Seasonal relocation used to feel magical, at least in my childhood memory. When one range was grazed down and everyone felt restless, like travelers bored of scenery, my parents would hoist me onto a horse or yak. I fell asleep, they walked an hour or two, and I woke in a new world: grass at shoulder height, cattle and sheep half hidden in a sea of green. Moments like that planted deep seeds, pure beauty.

Back then our clan of more than six hundred households, three villages calling themselves Gasha, moved as one. We trekked here, then there, then farther on. Return the next spring and you could not find a trace of last year’s tent rings; the steppe looked untouched. A bird flew off and circled back, so beautiful. If humans lived that lightly, the Earth would always welcome us.

Ecology cannot be separated from everything else. A herder’s life and the idea of future lives both loop through samsara. Whether I return as human or animal, I will be back; others will be back. So I cannot be ruthless. One‑off exploitation makes no sense. People speak of living only once, yet fully inhabiting the present also carries its own values.

Travel lets us know the land and the wider world. It is natural, and vital, for a group to go out together, and just as vital that they come back together.

The first days herding on open grassland can feel thrilling, everything is novel. Stay long enough and boredom swells. That boredom is not permanent. After one, two, three dull days you start noticing: a little bird, what is it doing? It swoops in, plucks a worm. You recognize the bird, then the blade of grass, then the insect; each scene paints something new in your mind. Soon you spot a fox, a wolf, follow the changes through four seasons, and enjoyment returns. We are in that stage now; the wildlife may wander off, yet it keeps coming home.

Happiness depends on culture. I once believed my mountain was sacred because a deity lived there, and that sense of the sacred let me appreciate things. I saw beauty in my horse, my cattle, my sheep. When I really knew an animal, every movement—galloping, grazing, even sleeping—looked beautiful.

Lose that outlook and the horse becomes only a price tag. How much can I sell it for? Does it run fast enough to fetch more? Then even its “wings” or the way it drinks water loses all charm. If price is all you see, sacred peaks, flies, flowers, horses, none of them can be admired.

Life then evaporates into mere survival, and survival alone is painful drudgery. In the old pastoral way, survival and living beautifully were the same act.

After I finished talking with Uncle Palsang, I started tearing up.

He said, young people can’t see the beauty in their own fathers and mothers.

And there’s a saying: If a home is truly rich, even little birds would want to live there—everyone would stay, and everyone would have their place.
But if the young people, the wise ones, all leave—then it can never rise again.
That’s why wise people must return.

And then I started to feel... maybe all of my family has left, they just keep leaving.
Does that mean I’m one of those young people who can’t see what’s good about their own home?
That I don’t have a home—and if I don’t, where would I return to?
But I also feel like... I can’t really go back.

I don’t quite dare to open up to Uncle Palsang or the others here in Dzorge.
I want to hear their stories.
I don’t know—when I came here, when I left for here—where exactly is the place I’m returning to? And again, what am I going out toward?

In their homes, I see similarities with others’ homes. I see things in their homes that remind me of how I feel—about Indigenous people, about certain theories of indigeneity—I’m just a guest.
If I were them, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to make those connections across similarities.
But for me, I do. I feel a little lonely. Where am I? Where am I going? How can I see the beauty of home? How do I, after going through a period of dullness, return again to a life of appreciation—of continuously appreciating?

Embodied knowledge wakes up in interactions

(We then talked about how in the privatized pastures where grasses were degrading, their grass-planting group still allow grazing, in certain times. This is in contrast to many grass-planting projects that ban animal grazing in the recovering region for at least five years. Palsang speaks of these decisions by herders as quite fluid and situational.)

Fei: The first question is about yaks on the restored grassland—the place where you started sowing grass. After how many years can it go back to being “normal desert,” or will it never revert?

Palsang: That’s really hard to determine.

First, altitude might play a role. The specific restoration conditions matter too. So, compared with the original desert, it’s been about 17 years now, and it looks okay, but they themselves haven’t made a decision yet. There’s no timeline for when it will be ready.

But on our side, one thing is clear: you can graze in the very first year. When grazing is allowed the first year, we also impose a grazing ban. After sowing the grass and finishing everything, we ban grazing—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Before the Lunar New Year, if conditions allow, we still don’t graze. After the New Year, when the soil slowly thaws, we have to graze. Our logic is: grazing is mandatory.

That grazing pattern changes every year. For example, if the rainfall is good this summer and the grass grows well, they’ll graze—starting a bit earlier, with more animals, for a longer period, that sort of thing.

Then they self‑adjust—like eating: once you’re almost full, you stop. When it looks about right—after they’ve eaten off the dense dry grass, some pulled down flat, some still standing—that’s it.

Once roughly 80 % is eaten, they stop and close it again. That’s how the closure works. And when we do graze, we usually try—especially on sandy land—to keep cattle, sheep, and horses to a minimum, mainly using yaks, because yaks don’t pull up the roots. More or less like that.

It’s different every year, but in our own experience, if it’s well managed, the turf gradually firms up, becomes harder, the grassland turns more normal. In sandy areas you can’t even stick a wooden pole in—far too loose. After sowing, the grass adds a bit of firmness, right? But if you never let livestock step on it, it’s still soft.

Without trampling, there may still be gaps, or the roots don’t grow well.

Anyway—yes—grazing is very important, but its timing, scale, and intensity are even more important, got it? So from another angle, allowing grazing in the first year means our model for grassland ecological repair, sand control, or black‑soil rehabilitation is completely different from others’. Some companies schedule three or five years of total rest—no grazing—under their “plans”; we simply don’t do that. That’s the first difference.

A second difference is that even where others allow grazing after five years, it’s still not full grazing; our approach is more complicated, something like that. So later on it’s still not “normal” grazing.

Fei: So when the herders—and you—sense how hard and for how long you can graze, the thinking you use is different from when there wasn’t this sand‑desertification problem and you had to decide what level was suitable. These two situations feel different, right?

Palsang: Yes, exactly.

The second point is that these practices aren’t new. Transhumant grazing has always been a grassland‑management pattern in the larger environment.

We’re just shrinking it—the old moving‑camp approach is scaled down to the smallest space. Even when each family has its own parcel, they can still rotate within that parcel.

My point is, the grazing concepts we’re talking about weren’t invented by me or them, but they do have a feel for them. What kind of feel?

Basically everyone is willing—if someone takes the lead. Old herders all know: too much grazing is no good, too little is no good, not grazing is no good. They have that instinct.

It’s like sandy land with no seeds: once we sow grass and spread fertilizer, there’s an interaction and the surrounding area starts to grow too—exactly the same idea. Herders are the root of grassland management. They simply hadn’t been doing it. But once we organize the sowing, that interaction kicks in, and their old ideas and perceptions come back into play—you see what I mean?

Fei: People have always had herding knowledge; now we face new, modern problems, but some of the old knowledge can still be used.

Palsang: Right—only that knowledge is invisible; it looks as if they don’t know, and maybe they themselves aren’t very clear. But once there’s that interaction, they start thinking, “Yes, yes, we should do this, do that.”

That’s very, very important—I personally think it’s crucial. For example, when the grassland turns sandy or into black‑soil patches, we assume there are no seeds. Say there’s nothing at all—but once we sow grass, add fertilizer, and it rains, that grass grows, and other seeds kick in, play a supporting role, and germinate too, right?

It’s a bit like that—just an analogy. So our current issue is that we can start grazing in the first year, yes, but not like before—you can’t just graze indiscriminately. You must consider timing, timing, timing, timing, and the number of cattle and sheep.

Right, and there are two dimensions of time: first, the four seasons in a year; second, the grazing period—how many days. All of that changes.

Mm‑hmm, yes. So each person—they might have something; if I asked you or someone else, they might not say, but they know. When I chat with them, the meaning is definitely there, though they may not express it clearly. I believe that’s how it is—they all have it; it’s real.

Fei: You figure that out by spending lots of time together.

Yes, yes, yes—pretty much. That’s more or less how I see it. So now on the grassland, I think it’s not about sowing grass by the tens of thousands of acres; it’s about their—and the land’s—understanding, perception, habits, and relationships gradually playing other roles, mutually supporting each other so the land recovers. That, I think, is extremely, extremely important. Without that, the elders can’t explain it, the young don’t ask, there’s no interaction, everything is separated, and a traditional management model is basically imposed as a separate system, right?

Mandala

(My friend Tonglen was drawing a mandala-like diagram.)

At Zhaqiongcang where I am, they made this mandala, a traditional Tibetan sacred symbol. They created an adapted version to document specific plants and animals, but it still has four quadrants, four seasons.

You’ve probably seen something like this mandala in different settings already. But yeah, I feel it really strongly connects with the kind of diagram you wanted to describe. It also reminds me of the Navajo concept hozho—beauty, or the state in which one lives daily in balance with the deities.

In that new mandala, there is a section on protecting the waters.

Some of the more Bon-influenced lamas knew how to communicate with water and perform rituals. One young lama saw water coming out from under a stone. If he hadn’t seen it—or if others hadn’t seen it in the video—maybe no one would believe it. So, a lot of things... really do need to be shared with others in different ways, again and again.

Yesterday a Nyingma boy from Golog came and we were talking about the mythology of water deities. He said that some of the local gods saw how human desire had grown too large, destroying other life. So they sent water spirits to bring illness to humans. But later, seeing humans on the brink of death, they remembered that human wisdom was also something they cherished. So they allowed humans to limit their desires and live in harmony with other beings.

The boy said that many of his family members used to hunt in the mountains, and his father once shot a mother brown bear. The bear ran into a sacred forest on a holy mountain. After that, many people in his family—and even their yaks—were struck by misfortune and died.

In the end, a lama had to go plead with the mountain spirit and say:

There are still a lot of the animal and spirit descriptions that I am not mentally and physically familiar with.

But I think what I personally can really feel—the moments that make me want to cry—are still very much about human life, about this world.

For example, there are still many people staying on the ancestral grasslands, but the things that made them sad were… how all the young people have left, or how their values have been changed by the mainland or other places. So even if their bodies remain here, their souls are no longer here.

Then I heard someone say—if all the people in a family leave and no one comes back, then... it’s just empty. There won’t be richness or fullness anymore. And that really made me feel heartbroken.

Part of it is the uncertainty—like whether one day everything will become nationalized, and their land will be taken away.

And part of it is just because I was staying in someone else’s home, and I... I still haven’t really figured out how my own home connects to all of this. Especially yesterday, some people from the mainland were also saying—it’s so hard for us mainlanders to find our way home. Because so much traditional culture and family history has been erased, or it's become something unspeakable, or simply forgotten.

In contrast, here, there are still so many people living with those stories, or people who still remember them. For example, some elders here remember things they really witnessed—some even bad things. Like how the government once thought there was too much water here, so they used explosives to blow it up and dry it out. These kinds of things—things people weren’t allowed to talk about, or didn’t think were worth remembering—end up carrying so much meaning.

And I also heard... I heard this man from Golog say that their family's bulls—like the male ones—are often kept up in the mountains. And they themselves would migrate along with the seasons, or sometimes they’d go ahead a few days early because they just couldn’t wait. Even the old bulls that had been released would wait from a distance... and follow them.

Mother’s homeland

I spent about two hours translating a documentary called “Mother’s homeland” filmed in 2021.

It’s about Uncle Palsang and his mother. Her father had left the Machu tribe a long time ago and came to the other side of the Yellow River, to Gasha tribe. Palsang took his mother back to that village to meet her half-brothers. It tells the story of Uncle Palsang taking his mother back to her father’s hometown.

It was the documentary that made me cry the hardest of the ones I watched here.

The documentary is 20 minutes long. That day, I watched it with some new friends—both Han and Tibetan. I cried the whole way through.

Uncle Palsang mother kept saying, “I don’t know why I’m always looking toward the other side of the river.” And her half-brother said, “I often find myself looking your way too.” And I just thought—oh my god….

They also said they were in their 80s, and didn’t want to get dementia or have surgery. And then they said something like, “This is probably the first and last time we’ll ever meet. I just hope to die peacefully, cleanly, without becoming a burden on my children.” And I thought of my grandma and my maternal grandmother... They have said similar things, so when I heard Palsang mother speak those words, all those emotions flooded up again.

Transcribing 20 minutes of subtitles took much longer than I expected—an hour and a half. But this time, I didn’t feel as emotionally overwhelmed.

There were already Tibetan-to-Chinese subtitles, but no Chinese-to-English subtitles, and the Chinese subtitles weren’t in a document—they were embedded in the video. So I manually transcribed each line, noting phrases in Chinese that were unclear or culturally specific, and also keeping track of proper nouns so I could reference them in the English translation. Then, I used AI to translate each line into English and reviewed them myself. Because the subtitles didn’t say who was speaking, many of the English lines defaulted to third person, though they should have been first person.

The translation is basically done now, though there are still a few terms I’m unsure of. For example: “ནང་སེམས་ཀྱི་ཕ་ཡུལ” (homeland) is my “ཚེ་བླ་སྲོག་གསུམ།” (three lives/souls). I suspect this is a Buddhist concept, but I’m not sure how to express it in English.

While translating I was in the office. Yizha was next to me watching a live horse race on his computer, taking calls and helping guests at the guesthouse. Yizha said that helping him translate this film counts as helping him out—I thought that was kind of nice.

I also hope that friends who don’t understand Chinese or Tibetan can watch this film. Yizha said when I leave, I can take a copy of all the local films with me to screen elsewhere. I think that would be a beautiful gift.

Over here they really love filming documentaries. Even though a lot of the content can’t be released, that day we were watching some footage—some that might never be shared publicly, and maybe some that could be. I was just watching... and listening to people around me quietly sobbing. And it wasn’t just the local guys—though several local guys were crying—but also people from the mainland, the ones working together with them on these documentaries.

There is so much intense sorrow and grief. But I do feel there is a lot of hope. They’ve filmed so much. They cry while watching their own footage, and yet they keep going, keep creating. Their tribes and everything are still here, so I think... anyway, from what I see, even when they joke about it or brush things off, I still feel there is hope. There are so many cracks and openings, and there are brave and experienced people still holding the space.

Even though I myself am someone who’s just beginning to see everything, just beginning to observe, because they’re beside me, I feel like this isn’t a kind of passive witnessing, like just seeing and then accepting and dying. There are still many, many spaces, many openings left to be filled.

On July 12th the entire clan went to celebrate དབྱར་སྟོན། (Yarden), the village summer festival, which featured dancing, singing, horse racing, beauty contests, dress-up games, ant games, and meetings between village leaders.

Last month, Shangreer and Xiareer villages finally transitioned from collective pastures to individual family plots, and they've begun building fences. This festival was the first time the two villages held it together, as they worried that dividing the pastures might create distance between people.

During the festival, I mostly hang out with Langmuzhuoma’s 11 year-old niece Sang Mo and her cousins.

We picked wolfsbane flowers for Sang Mo's mother, who was making momo dumplings in the kitchen tent, to make flower crowns for us.

We also played the traditional plant identification game together - all the little monks, girls, mothers, uncles, and grandfathers participated. It was intense: each group went out for 10 minutes to collect plants, then returned to spread them on the red cloth of monk robes, holding up plants to see if other groups had them, debating whether two types of leaves were the same species.

We had three or five races that day, running wildly over dried cow dung patties, pika holes and small hills, and various flowers and grasses. Running and shouting on the grassland felt really comfortable. After running, everyone collapsed in the tent, panting heavily.

While resting in the tent between the dance performances and dinner, Langmuzhuoma helped me translate and chat with her uncle, Sangmo’s father, who is a herder around 40 years old.

Sangmo's father learned herding at age 10, following his second uncle (his much older brother, the dark-faced one, the most skilled and diligent herder). Sangmo’s father herded both sheep and cattle but never horses.

In the past, herders needed to walk animals to grazing areas in the morning and stay with them all day before bringing them back in the afternoon. Now, with convenient transportation, they generally drive the animals to grazing areas in the morning, leave the herd there to graze, then return in the afternoon to bring them home. This change to driving happened over ten years ago when living conditions improved. When living conditions improved, thefts became rarer. Herders can relax, visiting teahouses, resting, or playing basketball during the day before collecting animals in the afternoon.

Herders choose grazing locations based on good grass and water, driving animals there to slowly spread out and graze. Winter grazing happens on plains, while summer pastures are in the mountains - there's no choice if pastures are in mountainous areas. They divided pastures because when grazing together, different families' sheep and cattle would mix, requiring manual separation. With divided pastures and fences, each household eliminates this separation work and reduces labor from moving between pastures.

Cattle herds do have leadership and social structure, though Langmuzhuoma couldn't translate the professional term for it. Some cattle are more diligent or selective, leading others in eating.

The grassland has deteriorated since his childhood - more (pika and groundhog) holes and bare patches have appeared. Cattle and sheep numbers have increased, and while pikas are the primary cause of grass deterioration, increased livestock also plays a role. When pikas dig holes and rain fills them, the drying process causes greater grassland destruction. The holes themselves greatly impact grass, separating grass roots that can't fuse back together.

Under collective ownership, individuals wouldn't fill holes since the land wasn't theirs, even though conditions were poor. Now with divided pastures belonging to families for 30 years or permanently, people invest effort in blocking holes and gradually repairing them, having hope for their pastures. With personal ownership comes personal protection of grassland, since families depend on grass to raise livestock.

Sangmo’s father has two older sons who both entered the monastery, and three younger children, who each stayed for a while with their aunt in Chengdu for school. The younger children mostly live with their grandparents when the parents stay at the pasture. For his children's future, Sangmo’s father hopes they continue studying and accomplish something outside. He'd be very supportive of that. But if they can't study well or have various problems preventing them from establishing themselves in society, he'd still hope they return to use herding as their main livelihood.

I am currently staying with Langmuzhuoma because I wanted to learn about how yaks shape grassland, how pastoralists can stay on the grassland. I was grateful that Zhuoma helped me translate for her family. It is much better than if I immediately started asking people interrogating questions without any relationship-building process. It felt good to spend days just getting along, playing, chatting, eating, preparing food. It feels more like friendliness.

Yizha and Barang are both charismatic speakers (seasoned in telling stories that general Han as well as government audience can understand and support).

Below is Yizha’s talk translated from Mandarin to english:

June 5, 2024, Nanjing

“Hello everyone, my name is Zhaqiong Yizha. I'm a local documentary filmmaker, environmentalist, and also a herdsman. I was born on the Ruoergai Grassland, and the grassland is my home.

My hometown, the Ruoergai Wetland, has three characteristics: first, it's one of China's three major wetlands; second, 30% of the Yellow River's water comes from here; and the Ruoergai Grassland is also the largest grassland in northwest Sichuan.

As a herdsman's child, I grew up herding cattle and sheep with my parents. When I was little, the Ruoergai Grassland was incredibly beautiful, with many lakes. My friends and I often played in the lakes. From the day I started school, I gradually drifted away from the herdsman's life and my hometown. In 2010, my parents moved to a herdsmen's settlement, which became our new home. From then on, I was even further removed from the pastoral area.

▲ Herdsmen's settlement (Note: A fixed residence established by people in pastoral areas in specific zones. Image source: Internet)

It wasn't until 2012 that my life underwent a dramatic change.

Following in Uncle's Footsteps

In 2012, I dropped out of school, wanting to work outside and not stay in my hometown. At that time, even if you achieved nothing, staying in the city would still earn you respect.

That year, I also happened to meet my uncle, Zhaqiong Barong. During the Spring Festival, he came to our house and said, "Yizha, you don't have anything to do right now, why don't you come work with me?"

I didn't know what to say or do, so I just agreed.

▲ Yizha and his uncle, Zhaqiong Barong

At that time, he had been working with local herdsmen in our hometown for two years, dedicated to desertification control and ecological restoration. My hometown is the most severely desertified area in Sichuan Province. This is a short film we documented at the time. (Click to view full video)

In 2012, I followed my uncle to interview and film local herdsmen. They all said, "Herdsmen rely on cattle and sheep, cattle and sheep rely on grass, and grass relies on this land. What will we do when this land turns into desert?"

One of the herdsmen told me, "I can live on the grassland this lifetime, but my descendants might not be able to stay on the grassland. Look, the desert is about to cover my house, and my bowl is full of sand."

This statement made me think deeply. When I was in school, I used to go home every holiday, but before 2012, I never realized the severity of desertification in my hometown. If desertification continued like this, herdsmen would lose their homes, and so would I.

So I decided to follow my uncle and these herdsmen to do something for the ecological restoration of the grassland

.

"Overgrazing"

When I was in school, my textbooks always mentioned that the cause of grassland degradation was overgrazing. For example, some multiple-choice questions would ask, "What is the cause of grassland degradation?" The option "overgrazing" was considered very correct.

But when I worked on desertification control with herdsmen and my uncle, I found that it wasn't entirely true. Wetland drainage, mining, cultivation, as well as eliminating pikas, overgrazing, and fences, all contribute to grassland degradation.

So what is the relationship between wetland drainage and grassland degradation?

Forty or fifty years ago, people didn't discuss environmental protection; they discussed improving people's quality of life and feeding themselves. At that time, many people felt that the main economic source for herdsmen was yaks, and yaks survived by eating grass.

But when these people came in June and July, the Ruoergai Wetland was rich in water, with water everywhere. They thought there was too much water, which was a problem. More pasture could support more yaks, so they directly dug ditches to drain the wetland water into the Yellow River. After the wetland dried up, it turned into black soil, and the land slowly desertified.

▲ Ruoergai Wetland

The second factor is mining, which has a history of fifty or sixty years. Mining is most afraid of rain; once it rains, the mine tunnels are prone to collapse, and water will accumulate in the tunnels. So, to prevent rain, people would directly fire shells into the sky to disperse the clouds, preventing rainfall for ten or even five years.

After this, all the mountains in our hometown cracked open. When cattle and sheep walked on them, sand would spill out. If you didn't know this background, you would think that cattle and sheep caused grassland degradation.

Cultivation is the same. People felt that it took too long, one or two or even three years, for herdsmen's cattle and sheep to grow large enough to be sold, which was too slow from an economic perspective. It would be better to directly convert part of the grassland into cultivated land, which would provide annual income.

After cultivation, the turf of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau becomes very thin, and the ground is full of sand. Once it's turned over, it takes about 300 years to recover.

All of these are examples of bringing agricultural ideas into nomadic culture, causing grassland degradation.

The Role of Yaks

We have been working on desertification control for 14 years, and in this process, we have found that anyone can do desertification control, but to truly turn the desert into grassland, herdsmen and their cattle and sheep are indispensable.

My uncle and I are not ecological experts. When we first started desertification control, we invited many experts for guidance. They said that trees and grass should be planted in the desert. So our first step was to plant grass, and the second step was to plant trees.

▲ Planting trees

When planting grass, we used two methods: one was row sowing, like plowing a field;

▲ Row sowing

The other was broadcast sowing, directly scattering seeds in the desert. But when the seeds were scattered, problems would arise: either the wind would blow the seeds away, or the intense sunlight of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau would heat the sand, killing all the seeds.

▲ Broadcast sowing of grass seeds

So what method did we use? The local herdsmen discussed it and said that the seeds just needed to be buried a bit in the desert. They suggested driving yaks over to trample the seeds into the ground.

This was an excellent method, and broadcast sowing became very easy. We just scattered the seeds and brought in the yaks to trample them. In the herdsmen's tradition, they have always protected the grassland through the trampling of yaks.

▲ Traces of yak trampling

In addition, yak dung is also excellent fertilizer. According to our statistics, one yak produces two dung piles overnight, with each pile weighing over three catties (approx. 1.5 kg). We enclose the yaks in the desertification control area, and 1,000 yaks can produce 6,000 catties (approx. 3,000 kg) of yak dung in one night. Therefore, we don't need to spend too much money buying fertilizer or manually spreading it.

▲ Yaks in the control area and yak dung beneficial for grass growth.

With yaks, the work of burying seeds became very easy. Let's look at the results of this simple work.

▲ Swipe left to view the comparison between 2010 and 2012.

We now have over 20 sites showing these changes. If we didn't have the old photos, others wouldn't believe it when they saw it: "How could it be this good?"

I just mentioned that anyone can do desertification control, but for the desert to turn into grassland, subsequent management is very important. For example, there is now a saying about returning pasture to grassland. What kind of problems would arise if there were suddenly no cattle or sheep on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau? In the first and second years, the grass would grow exceptionally well, and everyone would say, "Look, without cattle and sheep, the grass grows so well."

But by the third, fourth, fifth, or even tenth year, when you enter the grassland again, you'll find that your shoes sink in. This is because the roots of the grassland have all degraded, and the grassland has become as soft as steamed buns.

▲ Degraded pasture

So what is our management model? After we plant grass in the desert in the first year, we must moderately graze in it in the second year.

Many people don't understand why, after finally planting grass, they should put yaks in it. The reason is actually very simple: cities have gardens and parks, and they need to be mowed and fertilized every spring. But the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has not been mowed or fertilized for thousands of years; it has relied on cattle and sheep eating grass and depositing yak dung.

So why only yaks, and not horses or sheep? We were also curious and asked the herdsmen.

They said that a sheep's mouth is very pointed, and it pulls out grass along with its roots when it eats. A horse's mouth is even more destructive, and when it can't eat grass, it will dig out the roots with its hooves.

In contrast, yaks don't have upper teeth, so when they eat grass, they don't constantly pull upwards like other animals. When a yak can't eat grass, it never digs out the roots with its hooves; instead, it licks the grass with its tongue as it moves.

So, if I were to choose the gentlest animal on the grassland now, I would definitely choose the yak. For so many years, we have unfairly blamed yaks.

Don't Start from Scratch

In the 14 years we've been working on desertification control in our hometown, we've successfully transformed 14,000 acres of desert into grassland. However, in 14 years, we've actually done very little, but our work has influenced many herdsmen.

When we started in 2010, we had no cases of desertification control, not even tools. At that time, row sowing required tools, so we customized one ourselves.

In the first year, when the customized tool arrived, the handle was too short, and the herdsmen all said it hurt their backs. In the second year, the handle was made longer, but they said the head was too big. In the third year, the head was too small. It wasn't until the fourth year that we finally made the best tool for row sowing in desertification control.

▲ Changes in row sowing tools. From left to right: first year to fourth year.

Later, we put all these tools and our experience into the ecological restoration team's base.

It's very important to centralize experience. Whenever desertification control is needed, we can set off immediately, building on 14 years of experience instead of starting from scratch. Now the country is also vigorously promoting ecological restoration, investing a lot of funds, and there are many ecological restoration projects. However, the project leaders this year and next year are often different, lacking experience accumulation, which often leads to starting work from scratch.

Therefore, experienced local people are particularly important. They can use our 14 years of experience to continue the work, achieving twice the results with half the effort.

▲ Ruoergai Ecological Restoration Team

Years of desertification control have made me more sensitive to the grassland, just like the issue of garbage. When I come to the city, many of my friends say that throwing garbage in the trash can is the end of it. Because they don't know where the garbage goes, they don't care too much.

But on the vast grassland, if a wind suddenly blows and a piece of garbage is blown over, I am very sensitive; I can see its harm to the grassland. Grassland desertification is the same; I can always see it with my own eyes.

Viewing Hometown Through the Lens

Regarding the desertification control measures I just mentioned, my uncle has already perfected them. So what else can I do? At this point, I thought, perhaps I can spread these things to more people.

So, starting in 2013, I picked up a camera and began to view my hometown through the lens, protect my hometown through the lens, and record my hometown with this philosophy.

▲ Zhaqiong Yizha in 2013

For example, I filmed a documentary about the entire process of desertification control and showed it to the local herdsmen. Because the wisdom of desertification control comes from them, when I gather this wisdom and show it back to them, they feel that they already have yaks, they can collect seeds themselves, and this method is their own.

So they will take action and do something for the grassland; this is the educational function of film.

▲ Screening desertification control documentary for herdsmen

Another example is when people talk about grassland desertification, they often say it has a lot to do with pikas. So I started to focus my lens on pikas.

Through the lens, I gradually saw black-necked cranes eating pikas and foxes eating pikas. Later, as I filmed more deeply, I discovered that there are more than 30 species of animals that fly in the sky and run on the ground that survive by eating pikas on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Why are there so many pikas? In fact, there has been a history of killing pikas on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for over 40 years. Initially, people thought pikas ate grass, so they used poison. The poison at that time was imported from developed countries and was very strong. When pikas ate the poison, their natural predators ate the pikas and were poisoned, and so on, destroying the entire food chain.

However, pikas have a very strong resistance to poison. If they survive this year's poison, then next year's poison will be useless. Moreover, their breeding speed is very fast; they breed twice a year, giving birth to 3 to 6 pups each time. Coupled with the slow growth rate of their natural predators, their numbers gradually increased.

These are all things I learned through the lens. It's very important to pick up a camera and document.

So in 2015, we began to encourage 15 local herdsmen to pick up cameras and document their hometowns. You don't need to understand any language, but through a camera, you can show what you want to say to the whole world.

We have now made over 40 documentaries, all about our hometown. I myself have filmed seven documentaries, and among them, I really like "Little Bird."

The story of "Little Bird" is about a poor herding family whose entire transportation relied on one car. Once, the car was left unused for about 7 days. When the owner wanted to drive it again, a small bird suddenly flew away from the front.

He was curious, so he opened the hood and found a bird's nest with 4 little birds inside.

▲ Swipe left to view (Image source: Documentary "Little Bird")

His family was relatively poor, with not many cattle or sheep, and with a 92-year-old elder and a child less than one year old, there were five people in total, all relying on this car for transportation and livelihood. Yet, he left the car parked for another month and a half until the little birds flew away, and only then did he drive the car.

▲ Image source: Documentary "Little Bird"

So, people online often say Tibetans are very kind, but I don't need to elaborate on the kindness of Tibetans; a film like this can convey that message. "Little Bird" precisely tells how the herdsmen in this place view life, and such things are very common around me. I hope to show the Tibetan respect for life and reverence for nature by documenting real life.

After these documentaries are filmed, they are screened locally. When we ask herdsmen what kind of films they like, some say films about horses, others say Westerns. So when we show them documentaries about herdsmen, they say to each other, "Wow, you're handsome," "Your horse is beautiful," "Our hometown is so beautiful." They feel that I am good, my horse is good, and the grassland is good.

Everyone thinks herdsmen are uncultured, but we give them confidence and dignity through the lens, and we give back their efforts for the grassland to them. This is the true meaning of documentation.

▲ Screening documentaries for herdsmen

The Earth is Vast; Only Home and Kinship Remain

Finally, I want to summarize with two Tibetan proverbs.

The first saying is that this Earth is incredibly vast, and each of us, similarly, will never finish exploring all its places in our lifetime. Yet, everyone's home is so small. My hometown, Gasha Village, is hard to even find on a map, and I only have this one home.

The second saying is that there are many people who walk on two feet, people are everywhere, but each person's relatives, friends, and parents, when added up, number only a dozen or so.

So, the world lacks nothing but two things: a home and loved ones. And if there's one more thing missing, it's the love for them.

I have walked alongside them for the past 12 years, and I will continue to walk alongside them in the future.

Thank you!”

“Seventy-five to eighty-five is the best time to go,” my nainai (paternal grandma) said. “That way you don’t have this illness or that illness. No one needs to be responsible for you. No pain.” She had picked that up from some short video online.

“Small sickness you treat yourself. Big sickness you end yourself,” my laolao (maternal grandma) said while walking cheerfully. She had taken care of my grandfather for more than a decade. Three years in the ICU, ten years bedridden before that. She knew what big sickness meant. My grandpa used to sing about little grasses while he lay there, unable to move, saying, “I’m dragging you down. I’ve wasted your time.” I could understand why she didn’t want to be bedridden.

There was my second uncle, who said that when he died, he didn’t want a grave, didn’t want his ashes kept, didn’t want his kids to sweep tombs. “Why would I force them to follow my beliefs after I’m gone? They might be busy working in another city, I cannot force them to come back to my grave.” He added that “We live 200 years. 100 physically, 100 in our children and grandchildren’s hearts. Keeping the passed ones in our hearts is the most important place. As we sat there around the hotpot, he started crying. “I still think about my father all the time,” he said. “I still remember him.” I felt confused why he no longer follows ancestor worship traditions that I assumed is so common in the Buddhist-Daoist culture. I wonder if there is a historical gap.

We visited his mother who is 92 years old in the hospital. There were three beds to a room in the senior section. Most of the elders lay with mouths slightly open, some with tubes in their noses, knit hats covering their heads. The complications chart on the wall each had checkmarks: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, gallstones. She held my nainai’s hand and rubbed her eye with her other hand. She became blind in that eye. “I can’t see. I can’t hear. I want to go, but I can’t,” she kept saying. My grandma didn’t really understand her Sichuan dialect, just tried to comfort her in her Changzhounese, half to comfort her own anxiety about indignant slow death.

After we left the hospital room, my uncle said lightly: “Once you’ve seen the old people’s ward, you think more clearly. Life is for playing.”

Later, I was in a somatics class. The teacher said to let the pelvis guide the body like it’s a child: gently, encouraging it to go somewhere new. I was following along, then I drifted into memory.

I began mimicking that elder in the hospital, the way she rubbed her blind eye back and forth. And then, in that moment, I imagined my grandma, lying next to me. Maybe sad from how I’ve been shouting at her because of her hard of hearing. I hugged her in my imagination. Slowly. I imagined someone bigger than both of us wrapping us in a giant warm blanket, holding us. And I started to cry.

I don’t know if I was distracted from the meditation or if that was the meditation. But I felt relief, like I had finally let the contradiction exist.

When I told this to my friend Tonglen, they said it reminds them of the Zhuang tribe song, “Old People Don’t Worry”.

The song was recorded in Qingshuijiang, a village by the river. Qian Zhanglan sang it with her friend. They were in their 60s, sitting under a tree with a group of other elders. When asked about the song, she said she learned it from the old people when she was a girl, while herding cows. She invented her own lyrics later when she moved to her husband’s village. She sings it when she misses her mother.

The lyrics go:

Old people don’t worry

There is still joy

When you die, you become a bird

You fly above the earth

And see everything.

Before I was confused why older people in my family see death in this way that feels distant from spiritualities and cultures closer to nature. For now, I think both are seeing ourselves in the ecology of death, we like animals will die. We like animals want to live and play in this living, dying world.

I see my family face death anxiety by walking in the park. My nainai finds wild greens to stuff into dumplings, and nudges me to dance with the old ladies, who made me nervous and warm. My laolao grows broken philohedron in old plastic buckets rescued from trash piles, and ate flowers from the tree mixed in soups during the famine. I love all the park moments with them. Park is their make-do nature. Dying like plants, joy, pain, birth, food are part of living to them.

I talked with artists and conservationists, revisited my own projects, and gathered tools for turning interviews and lived experiences into comics.

Structure: From Conversation to Comic

I’ve been interested in comic as medium of vulnerable and powerful stories since 2023. This week I visited two comic artists: Anusman and Erteng. They taught me how to build comics from interviews and daily conversations.

Anusman creates comics based on everyday people. At his exhibition, elders featured in his book came, ate buns, and chatted.

The project that stood out to me was his book for "The Lullaby Project" in Beijing, where he revisited the elders who sang lullabies, listened to their stories, and made really nuanced daily life comics of their lives.

I was interested to learn what his process is for going from other people’s life histories to polished comics. He was kind to share. What he shared with a local elementary school gives the gist of how he works:

"I think it’s best if everyone can use a pen to document stories themselves. But many people may not know how to do it—what to do, what to ask, how to get it onto paper. So let me share one method. It’s not the only way.

[Earlier, a child shared a lullaby her grandmother sang to her, called 'Cross-Leg Toe Tap.' Everyone sits cross-legged on the heated brick bed. You sing a line and tap someone’s foot, then that person pulls their foot back. Each person has two feet. When the song ends, the person with the most feet still out loses.]

Let’s take this example. First, ask the grandmother if you can play the 'Cross-Leg Toe Tap' game again. Focus on playing—don’t stop to ask questions or take notes. Pay full attention to watching. How is the game played? Which foot is tapped first? How is the lullaby sung? What’s the melody? After playing it through once, then write it down from memory. If you forget parts, you can play again. But never interrupt or stop the game midway—that breaks the experience.

Next, draw what the people looked like while playing. Don’t use your phone to take pictures—observe with your own eyes. Only through observing and drawing can you capture the necessary details.

Then, ask the grandmother about her childhood. What was it like? How did they play this game? Did her own grandmother tell her stories? What was life like then? Ask as much as you can, and write it all down by hand—don’t rely on recording or photos.

The final step is to organize everything. Sequence the events, and weave the materials together into a story."

After our discussion I understood that my main obstacle is structure: to face the massive amount of materials and synthesize them into a story that others can also understand, feel, retell.

The structuring decisions include when to use drawing as opposed to writing, photo, audio, or other media. Comic is slow like writing so it holds a different power from photos and videos. There are memories, thoughts and emotions that are hard to capture with words or photos so comic has the unique role to fill in the gaps.

He reminded me that the structure step comes after fieldwork. When I go to Zoige Marsh (my fieldsite in July), I can talk, observe, draw, record, and write. Later, I can review materials, choose one narrative thread, and refine it with help from people like him, and inspirations from comics like “The Photographer”.

Erteng, the second artist, reinforces this with his teaching. He runs a traditional chinese drawing class for children. A recent homework was:

• Observe your own hand

• Write 50-100 words about it

• Sketch a draft

• Refine the sketch

• Ink the final version

His 8-12 year old students helped me think about how to turn sentences into images. One told me, "If your sentence says, 'My hand is darker than Yanyan's,' then just draw one hand up and one down, and paint one hand totally ink dark!" The kids teach me I can be a lot more straight-forward and funny in my drawing.

Steps to make comics from oral stories:

1. Collect: Spend time with people. Talk. Listen. Take notes. Draw. Record only when appropriate. Visit archives or museums if relevant.

2. Structure: Choose a focus. Organize the story. Discard what doesn't fit.

3. Sketch: Start with fragments. Draw rough drafts.

4. Finish: Iterate. Work with editors if making a book.

Service: what stories need telling?

I also spoke with conservationists working in Tibetan villages like Sayong and Nanren. Sayong recently relocated from the mountain down to the river due to ecological redlining. Nanren is trying to stay in the mountains by developing new income sources like eco-tourism, local products, and conservation programs.

Before speaking with them, I spent a few days reading and listening to articles by Cicheng, a local writer from Sayong. He writes concretely about personal experiences, village legends, and ecological changes. One story that stood out described "Lu," a sacred tree spirit. To move a household or cut a Lu tree, villagers must invite a ritual specialist to transfer the spirit using a five-colored thread tied between the old and new trees. If this fails, they would feel physical pain and soreness in their own limbs when they chop the tree. This is a sign that the spirit hasn’t yet moved. These stories hold both cultural and ecological meaning.

The conservation staff told me that while they see Lu as ecological tradition, government oversight in the region treats anything remotely religious as sensitive. They warned that any story involving belief systems might be censored or require review. This tension between telling community stories and navigating censorship is something I need to consider carefully.

When I asked what kinds of stories would actually serve their needs, the team focused on three areas:

1. Drawing Together

First, they really liked the idea of having local kids draw together to produce their own perspectives. That’s something I had been enjoying intuitively in different places. When I draw alone, kids and elders naturally want to join, or ask questions, or bring in leaves, flowers, burnt tree branches. Drawing becomes a shared activity. The team said they hope to try something like that when the kids return for summer break.

2. Livelihood

They were interested in how comics or other media could support livelihood: through tourism, mountain tours, local products, conservation fundraising. I still hold questions about why tourism is expected to fill the role of sustaining communities when the economy is struggling and there could be subsidies. But it’s clear they want stories that show how people care for land and how that care could support income too.

3. Authorship

They emphasized that young people in the villages should decide what stories to tell and what direction to take. Sayong is not as focused on tourism as Nanren, but is located in a conservation zone for endangered species. A lot of the youth are now in college, and some do want to stay near their ancestral land while remaining economically sustained.

My Next Steps

I hope to keep practicing and improving on the clarity and reciprocity aspects. Many people told me my comics feel lively but unfinished. I agree. I want to keep the liveliness but improve the structure and clarity. I want to be better at completing stories so others can understand and connect with them.

And when I am in Zoige in July, I will focus on openly listening, observing, and sketching.

Lastly, throughout the week, while learning from others’ comics and community stories, I enjoyed compiling exercises from past experiences where I drew and wrote with or for others. It felt good to recognize that this practice is meaningful to me and might also be useful to others.

Further Reading

• Nonfiction comic recs from Guilingongyuan: they categorize into comics about story from self, others. There is the history of the Vietnam war nonfiction movement. The recentering of nonfiction doesn’t mean there is no fiction, rather there requires research, interviews, artifacts. Comic is often very private in the expression and storytelling, but to center on real stories mean to be present.

  

• Oral history resources: Voice of Witness (recommended by Shenghan), Robert Karl applied history reading list

• From the FoodThink bookshelf: Soil zen (让梦想扎根 page 68-88)

• From the Inner Mongolia translation group: The animalification of nationalist sentiments: horse, herder and homeland relations in the construction of nationalism in Mongolia

中文

上周，我专注于非虚构漫画：探索如何以视觉方式讲述口述历史和社区故事，并对分享故事的人保持责任感。

我与艺术家和生态保护者交流，回顾了自己的项目，整理出一些将访谈和生活经验转化为漫画的工具。

结构：从对话到漫画

自 2023 年以来，我就对漫画作为一个讲述脆弱又强大故事的媒介感兴趣。本周我拜访了两位漫画艺术家：Anusman 和 二藤。他们教我如何从日常对话和访谈中构建漫画。

Anusman 创作的漫画取材于普通人的生活。他的展览上，书中的老人亲自到场，吃包子、聊天。

最令我印象深刻的是他在北京参与的“寻谣记（The Lullaby Project）”项目。他重新拜访了唱摇篮曲的老人，倾听他们的故事，创作出细腻描绘日常的生活漫画。

我很好奇他如何把他人的人生历史转化为成熟的漫画作品。他很乐意分享。他曾在本地小学中分享了他的创作方法，大致如下：

我想大家如果能自己用笔记录故事就最好了，但大家可能不知道具体该怎么操作，该做什么，问什么问题，如何落到纸面，我来说一个方法，不一定是唯一的。

【前面有一位小朋友说了一个奶奶给她唱的童谣，叫盘腿捻，做法是大家盘腿在炕上，然后唱一句点一个人的脚，点完就缩回去，一人有两支脚，童谣唱完，谁的脚剩的最多，谁就输了】

以这位小朋友刚刚讲的为例，我们应该先和奶奶说，奶奶我们能否再玩一次盘腿捻，这里专心的玩，不要说玩一下就停下问问题，记录。所有注意力都要集中在观看上，看游戏怎么做，先点哪里，童谣怎么唱的，什么曲调的。完整玩完一次，再去记录，凭着记忆去记。如果没记住可以再玩一次。但千万不要在游戏中途打扰和停止。这样童谣游戏就不完整了。

接着，去绘制玩的人的样子，不要用手机去拍，要自己观察，因为只有观察和记录才能记下需要的细节。

再之后去问奶奶，她小时候是什么样子的，怎么玩的，她的奶奶给她讲了什么故事吗。当时是什么样子的。等等，能有多少就记多少，同样也是用笔去记，不用录音和拍照。

最后一步，整合前面的内容，开始编故事的顺序，将上面的内容融合到一起。

通过我们的对话，我意识到我目前面临的主要障碍是“结构”：如何面对海量材料并提炼出一个能被他人理解、感受、转述的故事。

结构上的选择还包括何时使用绘画而不是文字、照片、音频或其他媒介。漫画和写作一样是“慢”的媒介，它具备不同于照片和视频的力量。有些记忆、思绪与情感很难用文字或影像捕捉，漫画恰好能填补这些空白。

他提醒我：结构是田野之后的事。我在 7 月去若尔盖湿地田调时，可以先说话、观察、画画、记录、写作。回来后再回顾资料，选择一个叙事线，借助像他这样的人和一些漫画作品（如《摄影师》）来精炼它。

第二位艺术家“二藤”，在教学中进一步印证了这一过程。他为儿童开设了传统中国画课程。最近的一次作业如下：

• 观察自己的手

• 写 50-100 字的描述

• 起草草图

• 精修草图

• 上墨完成

他那些 8-12 岁的学生让我思考如何将句子转化为图像。一个孩子告诉我：“如果你写‘我的手比燕燕的手黑’，那你就画一只手在上、一只手在下，然后把其中一只画得黑乎乎的就行了！”这些孩子让我明白，画画其实可以更直接、更有趣。

如何将口述故事变成漫画：

1. 收集： 花时间与人相处。交谈、倾听、笔记、绘画。适时录音。如有需要，访问档案馆或博物馆。

2. 结构： 选定重点，组织故事，舍弃无关内容。

3. 草图： 从碎片开始，起草粗略图画。

完成： 多次修改。如果是出版书籍，可与编辑协作。

服务： 什么样的故事是需要被讲述的？

我还与一些在藏区村庄（如萨勇、南仁）工作的生态保护者进行了交流。萨勇因生态红线的规定从山上搬迁至河边，而南仁则努力通过生态旅游、山货、保护项目等方式留在原地。

在和他们交谈之前，我花了几天时间阅读和聆听了本地作家此称的文章。他具体描述了个人经历、村庄传说与生态变化。其中有一篇讲“Lu 树神”的故事令人印象深刻：若要迁家或砍伐 Lu 树，村民必须请来仪式师，通过五色线将树神从旧树引到新树。如果仪式失败，村民在砍树时会感觉自己四肢酸痛，这是树神尚未迁移的信号。这些故事承载着文化和生态双重意义。

保护工作人员告诉我，他们将“Lu”视为生态传统，但政府将所有与宗教信仰有关的内容视为敏感，可能会被审查。他们提醒我，讲述社区故事时要认真权衡信仰内容与审查的张力。

当我询问他们最需要怎样的故事时，团队提到三点：

1. 一起画画

他们非常喜欢让本地孩子们一起画画的想法。这正是我在多个地方直觉上也在做的事。当我独自画画时，孩子和老人会主动加入、提问，或拿来树叶、花朵、烧过的木枝等参与。画画变成了一个共享活动。团队表示希望暑假孩子们回来时能尝试类似的活动。

2. 生计支持

他们关心如何通过漫画或其他媒介支持生计发展：如旅游、山地导览、本地产品、生态筹资等。我仍然有疑问：为何旅游被视为社区可持续的主力方式？当经济困顿时，是否也该有补贴？但显然，他们希望故事能展示人们对土地的照料，以及这种照料如何可能转化为收入。

3. 作者权属

他们强调，村里的年轻人应该决定要讲什么故事、走什么方向。萨勇不像南仁那样注重旅游，但位于濒危物种保护区内。许多年轻人已在大学就读，有些希望今后能在祖地附近生活并获得经济保障。

我的下一步

我希望继续练习“清晰表达”和“互惠”的能力。许多人说我的漫画“有生命力，但不完整”——我同意。我希望保持活力，但提升结构与清晰度。我想更好地完成故事，以便让更多人理解和产生共鸣。

7 月我将在若尔盖，重点将放在聆听、观察与绘画。

这一周，学习他人漫画与社区故事的同时，我也整理出以往自己与他人共绘、共写的练习。这让我意识到，这种实践对我有意义，也可能对他人有用。

延伸阅读

• 来自桂林公园的非虚构漫画推荐：他们将漫画分为“讲述自我”与“讲述他人”的两类。提到了越战期间非虚构漫画的兴起。非虚构的重心并不排斥虚构，而是要求调研、访谈与资料搜集。漫画常常非常私密，但若想讲真实的故事，就必须“在场”。

  

• 口述史资源：Voice of Witness （盛寒推荐）、罗伯特·卡尔加收的应用历史阅读书单

• 食通社书架：《土地禅》（《让梦想扎根》第68-88页）

• 内蒙古翻译小组：《民族主义情感的动物化：马、牧人与家园关系在蒙古国民族主义建构中的作用》

The work was organized by Shanshui Conservation Center, an NGO focused on biodiversity and local community collaboration. This site near Qianjiangyuan (a proposed national park) is a pilot for integrating biodiversity monitoring with rice and tea farming.

ecological monitoring

Our main task was maintaining infrared camera traps placed at key points in rice paddies and forest edges. Camera traps are motion-triggered devices that automatically capture photos or videos of wildlife. They're useful for monitoring shy or nocturnal animals without needing a person to be present. We checked the traps, replaced batteries and memory cards, and adjusted their angles. Some traps had been knocked off target by cows grazing in the fields overnight.

The goal of this setup was to record species presence, activity patterns, and potential differences in biodiversity between fields that use chemical pesticides and fertilizers and those that don’t. The paired plots are part of a pilot experiment to assess how ecological farming impacts wild animal presence.

Who owns the land

One of the background policies at play is the use of conservation easements (地役权) in the region. Farmers receive subsidies in exchange for not using pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and only planting subsistence crops like rice instead of commercial crops like tea.

China’s conservation easement policies grow from a unique land system. Unlike in countries where national parks are set on federally owned land, most of China’s rural and forested land remains collectively owned by village-level groups. To implement conservation while respecting this collective ownership, the government relies on contract-based “use restrictions” rather than expropriation. 地役权 (conservation easement) agreements compensate villagers in exchange for limits on land use—like switching from tea to rice, or stopping pesticide use. But who negotiates these contracts, and how the benefits are distributed, remains a complex question.

Only large-scale farmers or cooperatives can negotiate with the government for this ecological subsidy, because the central government prefers easier management. The large entities increasingly leased land from individual households.

Who gets to burn

The ban on burning crop residues is another point of tension. The traditional method of using ash as a natural fertilizer was cheap and effective for many households. One local farmer told us: “bunds and irrigation channels and the lack of fuel serve as natural firebreaks, even if I take a nap the fire will not cross to the forest.”

However, national regulations since the late 1980s have enforced strict bans on open burning during designated fire prevention seasons. After a catastrophic forest fire in Daxing’anling in 1987, laws like the 1993 nationwide prohibition of straw burning and the updated 2015 Air Pollution Control Law were implemented, mandating fines and even criminal charges for violations. These rules apply regardless of local geography or traditional practices.

Yet, long before 1987, villagers in this region practiced what might now be called “prescribed burning.” They burned crop residues, tree litter, and even forest edge brush under controlled conditions, timed around wind direction, rain, and soil cycles. Ash from these burns was considered one of the best fertilizers. Several older residents spoke about these practices with pride, even as they admitted they’re no longer allowed.

While prescribed burning is allowed under special conditions in forest areas, it is almost never permitted for agricultural land. Farmers in Tangtou expressed frustration that their knowledge of controlled burning was dismissed. They felt the bans were overly generalized, disconnected from the low-risk reality of their terraced paddies, and failed to consider the role of ash in soil fertility. One also described how quickly the fire brigade arrives now if any smoke is seen—reflecting high surveillance levels in the region.

The local ecosystem includes forest edges, terraced rice fields, irrigation ditches, and mixed-use hillsides. These areas support amphibians, small mammals, birds, and reptiles. Some species only appear when water is available or crops are present, complicating efforts to define what counts as “farmland biodiversity.” Volunteers noted that even common species like frogs or sparrows were indicators of pesticide use or habitat change. Meanwhile, forest health is also a concern, as pine trees in the area have been widely affected by a disease (松材线虫病), prompting government-controlled burns to prevent spread.

The villagers we spoke with seemed most focused on how these policies affect income and land use. Some found the restrictions burdensome or the compensation insufficient. Others were curious but not opposed. I noticed that most decisions about how to manage land or apply restrictions still feel top-down, even when participatory language is used.

personal emotions

One night we were out for a casual amphibian survey. I couldn’t spot and name as many species as my colleagues, but I felt fulfilled as I stood to fully soak in. In my voice diary that night I said, "maybe right now I'm feeling a bit sleepy, and what I really want to do is just stand in the paddies and listen to the frogs and sense and maybe sing."

I played songs from Zhuang tribe and Miao tribe on my phone. I heard these songs from Yunnan in 2023. One of the songs was about lovers parting. One stays like soil, one leaves like flowing water. I listened to it while watching moonlight ripple across the paddies, thinking about how cultures move and blend. I remembered a podcast I’d heard earlier that day about syncretism—how traditions were never pure, how they moved through conflict and contact. It reminded me of myself: always between places, always wondering whether I can stay long enough to belong.

At the same time, I felt awe for my fellow volunteers. Many were university students or young professionals who had spent years learning bird calls or reptile patterns. Some could identify frogs by ear and birds by silhouette in motion. They had deep affection for the creatures we encountered. Their joy was contagious. But I also noticed my own draw more toward local systems, policy logic, and community stories.

what’s next

Friends, I am learning how someone like me can connect with practitioner communities that adapt and coexist in dynamic harmony with each other, the ecosystem, in the long term.

I started this project in March as a PhD focused on the fieldwork-to-modeling pipeline for collective animal behavior. Then I went to Black Mesa in Arizona to support the Lanes Family, who are Diné and resisting relocation from their ancestral herding ground.

The sheepherding attracted me from a scientific perspective. But the Lanes helped me see that their herding cannot be separated from their ways of life and cosmologies. The traditions always change, mix and adapt.

My brief stay left me both moved and unsure. I was drawn to the indigenous way of relating to land, but I don't have that ancestry. My family has always been migrating - into cities, factories, money, displaced by war, by family divisions. I've had the privilege of traveling during college while others stayed and committed to their homes in ways I haven't learned to commit to mine. I really do enjoy talking with elders and herders. I love walking with animals and winds. But am I just a visitor commodifying their struggles?

I remembered my seven years in Hawaiʻi feeling like a tourist, then revisiting the Mauna Kea protest and finally understanding what the elders were protecting.

I remembered returning to China after four years of COVID separation, crying when I listened to local elders in Yunnan jam with young musicians over songs about fleeing and love and seasonal insects.

The feeling surprised me with its intensity. If I hadn't left, I wouldn't feel this particular tension and release of reconnection. This is how migration shapes feeling. How do I follow through on this feeling?

The follow-through is an ongoing exploration. I was reading what the Lanes mother, Rena Babbit-Lanes, was saying at one of the Black Mesa gatherings. She spoke of humans as “just little babies, already causing trouble”, how one of the elders to learn from is Mother Earth, because “we sleep on the same Mother Earth, she nourish us with plenty food”. And most of all she spoke of what we need to do.

This is how it is, my children.
You need to think about it very carefully.
You need to realize it fully and totally.
You need to make an offering and pray about it as hard as you can.
And then you need to do it.

Her words accepted both my yearning for connection and my fear of causing harm. They positioned me as a little baby with much to learn and a long time to learn it. This felt honest.

The project addresses a pattern I've noticed in myself: I start with genuine excitement and connect with people and ideas readily. But when obstacles arise or things get complex, I tend to float away to new projects instead of staying through the difficult parts. I'm learning that real contribution requires staying long enough for relationships and understanding to mature.

This work is teaching me to ground myself through relationships with people, places, and practices so I can remain committed when things get challenging. Instead of disappearing when I face obstacles, I would like to maintain a network of people who can witness me and remind me why this matters when I forget.1

I'm also sharing this story because I think others might recognize similar questions: How do we act on the awe and responsibility we feel toward places and people? How do we develop genuine connections across difference? How do we stay committed to what we love when the work gets difficult?

Current phase

The project name 感生组 (gǎn shēng zǔ) captures this desire for feeling to become action with people and ecosystems:

• 感 (gǎn): to sense, feel, respond

• 生 (shēng): to grow, live, sustain

• 组 (zǔ): a group, a gathering

I'm currently in China from May to July engaging with community-based conservation groups. In August I'll start the research phase within a PhD program. I hope this project becomes more entangled with other lives in the coming years. During May I focused on getting involved with conservation groups and their work in the Chinese context. I also listened to more people talk about spiritual lineages, economic trends, and the gaps between central policies and local realities that academic frameworks often miss.

Several themes are emerging from this time:

• Agriculture: How can farming support both wildlife and community resilience? (inspired also by Chinese Felind Alliance, Maya, Ellie)

• Spirits: How do spiritual traditions mix with each other and with new circumstances to let people adapt to the changes in the land? (inspired by Tonglen, Cicheng, Yutaro)

• Nomads: Can herding lifestyles survive desertification and policy changes? (Inspired by Ting, Yizha, Lanes)

• Elders and ancestors: What supports good elderly life in rural areas? Many rural communities are aging as young people migrate to cities. How do I relate to experienced elders as a young outsider? (Inspired by Shreya and my grandmas)

I'm developing practices that integrate different ways of knowing:

• Body: How do movement, emotion, and sensing inform research? I'm working with somatic practices that help me stay present with what I'm learning rather than immediately analyzing it. (inspired by Juusho, Mango)

• Science: How can modeling and observation serve eco-cultural life? I want to develop scientific tools that are useful to the communities I'm learning from, not just extractive. (inspired by Yinong, Li Li, Magali)

• Art: How do stories, drawings, and oral histories invite co-existence? Creative expression seems to capture aspects of ecological relationships that data alone cannot hold. (inspired by Diba, Nana, Ujeza, Anusman)

Open call

If you have resonance, stories, questions, or recommendations about any of this, I'd love to listen or collaborate. This is meant to be a group effort - a way of learning together how to live well with the land and each other.

中文

朋友们，我正在学习如何与一片土地-生态系统-社区长久共处。

我从三月开始这个项目，作为我的博士研究，专注于集体动物行为的实地考察到建模的流程。随后我去了亚利桑那州的黑山（Black Mesa），支持Lanes一家，他们是迪内族（Diné），正在抵制从他们祖传的牧场搬迁。

放牧最初从科学角度吸引了我。但Lanes让我明白，他们的放牧与他们的生活方式和宇宙观密不可分。传统总是在变化、融合和适应。

我短暂的逗留让我既感动又迷茫。我被那种与土地相连的本土方式所吸引，但我没有那样的血统。我的家人一直在迁徙——进入城市、工厂、追逐金钱，被战争、家庭分裂所流离失所。我在大学期间有幸旅行，而其他人则留守并坚守他们的家园，这是我尚未学会的对我的家园的承诺。我确实很喜欢和长者、牧民交谈。我喜欢与动物和风同行。但我仅仅是一个为了自身利益而利用他们困境的访客吗？

我回想起在夏威夷的七年，感觉像个游客，然后再次到访莫纳克亚（Mauna Kea）抗议现场，最终才明白长者们在守护什么。

我回想起在中国经历四年新冠隔离后回到中国，当我在云南听到当地长者与年轻乐手一起演奏关于逃离、爱情和季节性昆虫的歌曲时，我哭了。

那种感觉以其强度让我感到惊讶。如果我没有离开，我就不会感受到这种特殊的重新连接的张力与释放。这就是迁徙如何塑造感受。我该如何将这种感受付诸行动呢？

将这种感受付诸行动是一个持续的探索。我读到了Lanes母亲，Rena Babbit-Lanes，在一次黑山聚会上的讲话。她谈到人类“只是小婴儿，已经制造了麻烦”，以及地球母亲是我们应该学习的长者之一，因为“我们睡在同一个地球母亲身上，她用充足的食物滋养我们”。最重要的是，她谈到了我们需要做的事情：

“孩子们，事情就是这样。 你们需要非常仔细地思考。 你们需要完全、彻底地认识到这一点。 你们需要尽最大努力进行供奉和祈祷。 然后，你们需要去做。”

她的话语同时接受了我对连接的渴望和对造成伤害的恐惧。它们将我定位为一个有许多东西要学习，并且需要很长时间来学习的小婴儿。这让我觉得很真实。

这个项目解决了我自己身上注意到的一个模式：我一开始充满真正的热情，并且很容易与人和想法建立联系。但当出现障碍或事情变得复杂时，我倾向于转向新项目，而不是坚持度过困难的部分。我正在学习，真正的贡献需要足够长久的坚持，以便关系和理解得以成熟。

这项工作正在教我通过与人、地方和实践的关系来扎根，这样我才能在事情变得具有挑战性时保持承诺。我希望在面对障碍时，不是消失，而是维持一个能够见证我，并在我忘记时提醒我为什么这很重要的人际网络。

我分享这个故事也是因为我认为其他人可能也会有类似的问题：我们如何将对地方和人民感受到的敬畏和责任付诸行动？我们如何跨越差异发展真诚的联系？当工作变得困难时，我们如何坚持我们所热爱的一切？

当前阶段

项目名称感生组 (gǎn shēng zǔ) 抓住了这种希望感受能转化为与人与生态系统共同行动的愿望：

• 感 (gǎn): 感知、感受、回应

• 生 (shēng): 生长、生存、维持

• 组 (zǔ): 团体、聚集

我目前在五月至七月期间在中国，与社区保护团体合作。八月，我将在一个博士项目中开始研究阶段。我希望这个项目在未来几年能与其他生命更加紧密地交织在一起。五月期间，我专注于参与中国的保护团体及其工作。我还听更多人谈论精神传承、经济趋势以及学术框架经常遗漏的中央政策与地方现实之间的差距。

这段时间涌现出几个主题：

• 农业： 农业如何同时支持野生动物和社区韧性？

• 精神： 精神传统如何相互融合并与新环境结合，使人们适应土地的变化？

• 游牧： 放牧生活方式能否在荒漠化和政策变化中生存下来？

• 长者与祖先： 什么支持农村地区的老年人过上好生活？许多农村社区正在老龄化，因为年轻人迁移到城市。作为一个年轻的外来者，我如何与经验丰富的长者建立关系？

我正在发展整合不同认知方式的实践：

• 身体： 运动、情感和感知如何为研究提供信息？我正在练习身体实践，帮助我保持当下，专注于我正在学习的内容，而不是立即分析它。

• 科学： 建模和观察如何服务于生态文化生活？我希望开发对所学习的社区有用的科学工具，而不仅仅是掠夺性的。（受到尹农、李丽、玛格丽的启发）

• 艺术： 故事、绘画和口述历史如何促进共存？创意表达似乎能捕捉到仅凭数据无法容纳的生态关系方面。

开放征集

如果你对其中任何内容有共鸣、故事、问题或建议，我都很乐意倾听或合作。

The following interview was conducted and transcribed by Yiqing Wang, Yufei Xiao, Shiyu Hu, Xiaohe, Sanyang, Zixian Yang, Xin Wang as part of the 寻谣计划 Lullaby Search project.

Family

Shaogang He was born in 1956 in Pingzhai stockade (平寨乡), a big village in the Qiubei county of Wenshan autonomous prefecture of Zhuang and Miao tribes (文山壮族苗族自治州) in Yunnan province.

He went to school from 7 to 19 years old — Elementary school, middle school, and two years of farming school. Because his family was classified as “upper middle farmer” 中上农1, after graduating he could only go home to farm. When he was around 30 years old, he took over his parents’ restaurant in Pingzhai stockade.

When he was 22 years old, he met his wife during a village market2. There are many men and women at the market. If they found each other fitting, they would sit on the river levees together. However, it was not until He was 32 that the two were married. During these 10 years, they rarely meet. Usually the woman cannot live in the man’s home. These were the older marriage traditions in Zhuang tribe, specifically the Black Sha sect, as the other Sha sects and other Zhuang sects have different traditions.

He has 3 children who are now around 27 to 30 years old. Back in the day, the third child is counted as extra birth3. Hence shortly before the child was born, the mom went into the mountain to live for a period to not be spotted by neighbors and the town birth control committee. After the third child was born, they still had to pay 10,000 RMB as the extra birth penalty.

Of the 3 children, one now still lives in Qiubei county, two now work as migrant worker4 in Guangzhou, Guangdong. He has 5 grandchildren. All the grandchildren live with their parents, so He doesn’t need to help out with taking care of grandchildren. He and his wife split their work equally in farming and running the restaurant.

When do people play Bawu

When I first heard Shaogang He play the Bawu, I cried.

My teammate Sanyang and Hu Shiyu later told me they also almost cried. Sanyang shared that night when we gathered with the entire project group: “When the Bawu starts, it is primal. You can only cry. Everyone will die, disappearing is no big deal. That moment you are pierced. When you recall it later, it can help you cross the bridge. Feeling touched like this everyday makes this work worth enough for me.”

An 82 year-old woman we met on the street came to listen to Bawu with us. When I told her I cried she laughed at me: “Bawu doesn’t make tears, it makes laughter. It’s about dating!5”

“Bawu is actually an instrument to attract the opposite sex.” Said He.

Back in the day Zhuang tribe were poor. In the night there is no electricity or lamp, only 明子 (the inflammable core of pine wood). The only entertainment activity everyone can do is to come out at night to play the Bawu. When the girls hear the boys play bawu, they get out of their house to the river bed to sing love songs.

Many people learned the Bawu to find a wife. He has dated someone by playing the Bawu, but his current wife wasn’t found through Bawu.

How did he learn the Bawu

When He was 16, he started learning the Bawu. He followed Wang Yunxiang as his teacher for a year. The main practice was cyclical breathing 循环呼吸法. He spent a few months to acquire the skill. He practiced by blowing into a bowl of water through a reed stalk. At first He didn’t have his own Bawu, so he had to borrow his teacher’s. After he has learned how to play it, his teacher gifted him one.

Now In Pingzhai Stockade there are only 4 people who can play the Bawu. Young people don’t want to learn it anymore. He has no students. Bawu might 失传 (become no longer passed down).

According to his memory, Bawu learning and playing was not affected during the cultural revolution, when he was about 10 years old.

The origin story of Bawu

He Shaogang formed a Zhuang Tribe Dongjing 洞经 band. One of the bandmembers, Zhang Bingguang, told the following story about how Bawu was invented in Zhuang language. Zhang Yunguang and Zhang Guofen then retold the story into Mandarin:

Once upon a time, there was a boy whose parents left. He lived with his uncle’s family and herded cattles for them. One day his cattle was naughty and ate the rice shoots in a neighbor’s paddies. The neighbor ran after the boy to beat him. The boy escapes into the mountain, and accidentally fall into a big hole. He stayed in that hole for 10 years. He ate all the grass in the hole and was starving. Then a reed from the river fell into the hole. When he blew on the reed, all the birds of the woods came to listen. The birds all sat on the tree branches above the hole. There were so many birds that the branch bent down. The boy hurriedly held onto the branch. When the birds flied away, the branch catapulted him out of the hole. He returned to his uncle’s home. (There was more to the story, but the translation stopped here.)

How to make a Bawu

The traditional Bawu comprises of a pair of insect pupa (the mouthpiece), a pair of bamboo stanza (the sounding tube), and copper wires. The pupa inserts into the bamboo stanza, which is tied together by the copper wire. No glue is required.

The insect pupa grows naturally as a pair, not stuck together by humans. The pupa grow on leaves of a bush. The bush is called Guzhi in Zhuang language (this is our Mandarin transliteration, not the Zhuang language spelling). It has green fruits and black seeds. The leaves are the size of thumbs. We are not sure what the Mandarin or Latin name for this bush is.

People used to be able to collect them from rivers near PingZhai. But there are less and less recently. The nearest ones might be all the way down in QingShuiJiang and more south.

To listen to the concert and read more about the lullaby-search project, check out their Wechat blog.

Yeast mother

Materials: Agar-agar, Apple juice, Yeast, Dish, Brush

How to Play:

1. Recall the ancient flower petal fortune-telling game

2. Take agar-agar and apple juice, heat to melt, cool to solidify into small dishes to become agar

3. Dissolve yeast onto the agar (you can spit saliva to mix in your bacteria, or draw out the structure of your question)

4. Let it sit for N days in your home, observing the yeast growth and agar drying

5. You can also try bullying it, watering or feeding it, and see how it reacts

6. When you feel the time is ripe, let the combined growth pattern of the yeast and agar be your fortune-telling

7. If your question is about making a choice, murmur (yes, no) into each branch until the last fork makes the final decision

8. If your question is about ordering or implication, then ponder the structure and interpret it yourself. It can't really be called fortune-telling, just helping you make up your mind.

Process Notes

二十面体 (Icosahedron) is a group in China that makes monthly themed mail packages. In March, they hosted their first game jam. For seven days, people can come and make a game, but it has to use physical materials instead of just being digital, since that was a trend in previous game fairs. They partnered with a wood workshop, a weaving studio and their own printing space in Canton. Although I am participating online, over the week I can see the energy offline in the chat. Messages like “can someone open the gate?” at 10PM, and “we left fruits on first floor for anyone to take!” On the last day, about 50 people squeezed into the small print space and demo’ed their games. From the videos, the energy of the crowd is pure fun. There was an intense ping pong battle where the paddles had big holes in the middle. The next day they took the paddles to the park and battled with the master grandpas. There was another person who made up many games as they played through the city.

I was inspired by the pragmatic and improvised approach that these makers took, because I joined the game jam to explore ways in which I can convert the exciting but abstract papers I’m reading into fun things that I can hold and give to other people. I’ll recap my own process in this jam.

I. Curious

I'm currently working in a cell biology lab, watching how fruit fly embryos bend and fold every day. Zooming in, the cells that make up the embryo skin jostle to switch positions and deform. Zooming further, the proteins that make up the cells can sense signals and tension, rapidly aggregating and dissipating. Can you believe that 60% of embryos die? Birth requires all of these scales to occur delicately and simultaneously in a fluctuating environment. "Life in this world is really material, but also extremely intelligent," I feel when my eyes go blurry from watching.

I want to continue observing and understanding the wondrous material properties of living systems (such as softness, bending, development, exploration, self-organization, robustness, multi-scale feedback). The experimental and theoretical modeling methods in biophysics research can yield interesting photos and patterns. When I saw the game jam introduction, I thought of a fun challenge: to turn research findings from biophysics of life into games, so that I and others (whether or not they understand evolutionary theory and statistical physics) can develop a sense of wonder and association with the miraculous material properties of ourselves and other living things.

II. Game

When I started thinking about games from the lofty concept of "biomaterials," I suddenly realized I couldn't remember what games I loved playing when I was little (maybe I wasn't very brave). So I went and asked my relatives and friends: "Have you played any games with living things before?"

• Trang: Mocking the neighbor's dog, stealing fish from the neighbor's pond to sell, catching crickets/chickens/dogs and making them fight, buffalo fighting on New Year (the losing and winning buffalos both die), making the cat think you're speaking cat language

• Ellie: Riding two goats running side by side, catching tadpoles and frogs, (throwing stones) directing flocks of birds

• Ujeza: Fighting with dogs, playing hide-and-seek with chickens; if the human wins there are eggs to eat, if the chicken wins there are chicks, chickens learn to hide their eggs

• Gaurish: Accidentally putting a bat in the pocket thinking it’s a wallet

• Yutaro: Shaping mud into shiny round balls and hiding them from kids who search and destroy them. Mud is full of life!

• Leo: Building stone dams in small streams (never succeeded but that's where the fun lies), building sandcastles

• Grandma: When we were little we made small animals by weaving dog-tail grass, played the "pull root" competition with birch leaves, used flower petals to "fortune tell" endlessly. With those common flowers with more than seven petals 🌸, we'd pluck one petal at a time while muttering (yes, no, good, bad, want, don't want, go, don't go...) until the last petal made the final decision.

Listening to them I feel alive, and interestingly we identified a few patterns: participating in or promoting fights, doing construction and weaving, communicating or consulting. And we started wondering about some questions too. Like Trang said "Are there non-animal cruelty ways to play?" Ellie and I wondered "These are all quick games, can we play with longer growth processes?" Grandma's petal fortune-telling made Nana and I think about our creative decision-making difficulties, "Is there any structure in nature that can assist us in making decisions about creative questions?"

III. Research Questions

The petal fortune-telling game Grandma played is what fascinates me most. She said "It can't really be called fortune-telling, just helping you make up your mind." This made me think of the process of making this game, as well as doing conceptual modeling in the lab. I often go "Oh, there are so many material options which one should I choose?" or "I have many thoughts after observing but how do I order them?" or "There's not enough information to confirm which option is better, which one should I pick?" Making decisions with incomplete information is a necessary part of research. Even systems with definite rules can be deduced to appear completely random and hard to predict. Not to mention life and projects influenced by many biological and social factors. Moreover, due to the observer effect and viewpoint bias, obtaining complete information is also impossible.1

In the analytical methods course in college, I was exposed to the idea of "treating research as a stochastic decision process."2

I find this definition quite apt, because research is like other creative endeavors - a project with multiple parts and uncertainties. So how do you make decisions in the random process of creative work or research with incomplete information? This paper felt that the most naive method is to simply order the parts from simple to difficult and complete them one by one. But the problem with this is that the most difficult part may make you realize you need to completely change the other parts and start over, wasting a lot of time and effort. It felt a smarter method, within the limits of available information, is to order by "how much information will be gained by completing this part." This way, although you may have to do the hardest task first, it will reduce the tragedy of getting to the end only to find you have to start over. This method emphasizes efficiency and is suitable for quickly grasping the key and making improvements when encountering trouble in the lab. I feel that fortune-telling and using analogies to make interpretations and decisions based on external structures rather than reasoning is also a way to deal with randomness and unknowns. Analogy projects the similar structure of a problem onto something else that has already been solved, and then adjusts to derive possible solutions to the original problem. In this process, you need to find targets to project meaning onto, you need to explore, but exploration also needs to be balanced with verification.

I thought of a recent theoretical question I read: "How do organisms modify their microscopic environments to buffer against harmful environmental fluctuations while still allowing exchange of energy, matter and information with the macroscopic world? Examples include maintaining intact protein assemblies under different external mechanical and chemical stimuli, insects navigating using variable celestial cues, and colonies changing shape to withstand mechanical stress and regulate overall temperature. These are all complex systems where individual building blocks (proteins, cells, plants, insects, etc.) can sense their microscopic environments and react in life-preserving ways; typically, this response alters the macroscopic environment of the individual, thereby creating persistent coupling between individuals, collectives and environments. In active bio-physical systems, disorder may confer an advantage: ordered systems are stable and predictable but have limited exploratory capacity — a critically important trait for life in fluctuating environments. So what is the optimal degree of disorder for each system?"3

I chose the yeast system because in our lab we use agar plated with yeast to feed fruit flies. I privately kept some discarded agar plates, and found that when the agar dried out too much it would crack, while the yeast would grow in strange patterns on the surface. (Though actually in my pictures the patterns are just dehydration patterns in the agar, not yeast growth!) Yeast growth and the food and environmental information it can explore at its tips form a feedback loop. Yeast is a multi-cellular colony integrated from single cells, with cooperative behaviors like flocculation and sharing digested sugars.4

I feel its patterns resemble a graph, branching out from the center or multiple intersecting points. Drying is a physical process, but the elastic agar has randomness in where it cracks. Human creative problems (with unknown ordering or trade-offs) could perhaps be projected onto a graph, achieving an suitable degree of chaos/order/rhythm in the non-logical regions based on time and quantity constraints. The types of problems suited to this structure are limited, likely not reasoning or efficacy problems, but rather problems needing new metaphorical carriers and rhythm control. What kinds of questions do or don't fit this shape?

Next Steps

The more I explore this topic, the bigger it gets, with many open directions waiting to be tried. I hope to have the opportunity to focus on compiling more fun research projects to share with everyone skilled at expression and play. This game jam forced me to quickly come up with a game mechanism, and I took the opportunity to organize notes on related literature, which was very rewarding. Watching everyone's games also taught me a lot: the crowd energy at the live demos was so strong. Kerrui went straight out onto the street and played out a game as he went, eliminating the gap between mental planning and actual testing. This made me feel that first principles and hands-on work can happen in many ways.

Footnotes

The flaws I noticed in past work environments are mostly related to distractedness. I make mistakes because I forget a step, underestimate time and rush, or tried to multitask. I deliver late or don’t deliver what I promised because I pivoted the plan midway through. I avoided spending time on it because of psychological difficulty related to perfectionism, and doubt. I didn’t decompose the tasks into tractable parts, or didn’t choose which one to execute by when. I sometimes spend time unproductively doing stuff that doesn’t contribute to the goal (eg. reading or reflecting).

I want to improve my reliability because I want to collaborate with good people and that means I need to be responsible for my part. The framing that structures can compensate for tendencies is helpful. I can improve without genetically engineering my lossy brain, I can improve by letting lists and computers remember on behalf of me. That is a relief and direction to me.

Flaws can become harmless. The characteristic that causes the flaws can turn into strengths. I noticed that the distractedness also makes me ask questions, relay connectable ideas, and express why something is interesting — actions that teammates or mentors have treated as valuable. When I resolve the baseline issues, I have more energy to develop these skills.

For the past week, the most useful structure has been weekly feedback sessions. Before the session, I tend to prepare the task list and schedule for the upcoming week and summarize the results and issues of the past week. During the session, someone better at project management and the task itself than me helps me tweak my plans and interpret the results.

In this sense, I am grateful for my living conditions. I really appreciate the access to mentorship, ideas and how-tos, knowledge-making instruments, and the time to fully work on learning/researching all while having money to eat and emotional support to live.

Besides the feedback session, I have found that I needed to keep the todos in one place and let them roll over when I haven’t done them that day. Also, I needed one place to record and mark all metadata, because I had a hard time remembering which data files interpreted in previous meetings needed to be fixed.

When writing and reading to contextualize the current experiments or ideate next steps, by default I vomit concepts onto lists without clear logical connections. Based on feedback, it is helpful to follow structures such as gap analysis and the scientific article-specific style of definitions, who cares, and what’s new.

I am still iterating on these strategies. I would love to discuss and learn how to use structures to improve work tendencies!

What I did this week

Eat food

I grouped two weeks in one because I forgot to edit the first one, then had a full second week with Yutaro visiting Chapel Hill. When I’m alone sometimes I go into spirals of despair from an experiment issue or ecstacy from inspirations. But with a trusting company, I felt anchored to a fused lifestyle where we sort out things as a unit. I wish I can swing the unit less, and I savor the problem-lessness that is already here.

I learned a lot from how Yutaro cooks food for himself and people around him that is fast, tasty, nutritious. In contrast, my chaotic workflow envelopes my cooking: often I would combine 2+ seasoning from opposite cultures (eg gochujang and masala) and accidentally turn ingredients into undesirable phases of matter (eg mushy fried rice). To summarize my takeaways are:

1. texture: usually people like a desirable range of solidity in rice and eggs. they are easy to achieve: rice is best when water is half a finger nail above the rice etc.

2. taste: sample the taste while cooking to adjust on the go, to avoid a final reveal of disaster.

3. mentality: improving in quality and planning is easier than I imagined since I can already regularly make food that I tolerate now.

4. aim: what do you want the eater(s) to experience? psychological & physical satiety, health, surprise?

5. disclaimer: everyone is slightly different in their taste and texture preferences.

Epithelial Morphogenesis

Experiment: We have finished the first round of image data collection for mutant flies that have a part in a protein replaced by the mammal equivalent, compiled them into photoshop files, and started organizing them by developmental stages. I use a spreadsheet to track the edits that each file needs. I started turning a new set of mutant flies into data by bleaching and staining then taking pictures of their tissues. I pre-plan the week schedule to make sure the timing of multiple procedures doesn’t run into each other.

Writing: I spent two days updating the graphical summary. The mentor advised that I add more general context to situate our work.

Reading: While making the diagram, I read relevant reviews about disordered proteins (aka proteins that don’t have a fixed 3D shape) and what they do. "Multivalency emerges as a common feature of intrinsically disordered protein interactions” is a recent review by a group at UNC. They compile experiments about multivalency, which is when many parts of the same protein are binding to partner(s). In network terms, each node — protein — can have more than one edge — binding interaction. These protein networks also often update their edges, which is something disordered proteins are especially good at because they can contort their shape to bind to different partners, and they can wrap around ordered proteins to let them sit into right positions.

Swarm Intelligence

I’m naming this project 'swarm intelligence’ because it is a conference this year that I want to go to or watch. It has many animal collective behaviorists that I like. Swarm intelligence as a field works on questions like “how do living things interact with each other to form groups that solve problems and move through the world in ways that the individuals alone cannot?” and “what can humans learn from these natural world examples to inspire application such as optimization algorithms, robot or artificial swarms, internet collaboration or harm-reduction, and other decentralized systems?” Of course there is a degree of high untestable claim to importance and difficulty to empirically test effectiveness. It feels like a sufficiently accurate and fun title now.

For the literature review of the project, I organized 46 papers, 50 concepts and 3 aims into my database. It is currently a bag of words, but I am excited to string together a chain to show to people, hammer out the integrated aims and synthesized evidence (post coming). Synthesis and agenda making in general research is a skill I look forward to gain because it can be so useful in any problem that lacks an answer.

Last spring when I worked on a group project that involved literature review and hypothesis generation, I struggled because I half-read papers and couldn’t turn outline into prose. This time, setting an outline template to fill out helped me with getting information from papers.

Another takeaway was that reading the papers and tagging them also helped me fully go into the big picture mode. I realize that previously when I thought I was too broad, it was actually because I was reading narrow scopes that I did not personally understand or get interested by.

This time, reading the opinion piece “Ecology for bankers” stirred arguments around the power and premise of system models in me. I saw that the field of collective dynamics and swarm intelligence doesn’t stop at modeling, it can be potentiated for animals, robots or farming or philosophical assumptions.

Reading the introduction and organization of a theme issue (e.g. “Solid Brain, Liquid Brain” in Royal Society Biology) gave me the big picture view that was comprehensive and simple enough to digest. While I initially thought the metaphor of brains to solid (e.g. neuronal groups) and liquid (e.g. immune cells in blood vessels or fish school) phases was attractive, I mistakenly defined the distinction just to be that the liquid brain components are in motion, converting environmental energy into mechanical work. However, when I read closer I realized that an important feature to the analogy is that liquid phase brains also have no stable connection over time. And that to be a “brain”, the system is assumed to have sensory, processing, memory capabilities. The flashy word of solid vs liquid brain became more concrete and evaluable.

Haibao asked me. He is one of the art classmates who chatted with me last week as part of their illustrated interview series to learn about the possibilities in life from college and beyond.

Haibao had attended a demo talk I gave to an online chinese project community where I presented an overview of the collective information processing field of research; its examples, questions, methods, findings. During the interview we talked more about our value in interpersonal relationships, be it being a plant rooted in the place you live or the worries and excitements around being of help or importance to someone else. Haibao told me that he understands why I value relationships, but it was less clear why I value this research topic about biophysics — “why am I interested in seeing the connection between different biological scales? why are other researchers interested?”

My immediate answer was “it’s pretty, it’s something I want to understand but don’t, it’s an important extension to evolutionary theory, it’s useful for interacting with ecology via drone farming etc.” But the answers don’t feel quite right yet. This question has been on my mind a lot as I write research interest statement and experience the obstacles and hypes in my research projects this past year.

Although I feel queasy about this difficult question, this busy week has been a good collection of new answers, discussions, and action-based discoveries around it.

What I did

Collective knowledge - with researchers

Monday-Tuesday: I finally wrote a proposal to revise my thesis manuscript into a report that would be valuable to someone else in the field. discussed the plan with a former mentor/collaborator. agreed upon a weekly progress and feedback meeting. decided to focus on writing the foundation section with biological and theoretical literature backing for the significance of a model that investigates modularity, perception constraint and information transfer.

This is a continuation from visiting friends in new york last year in that i see my friends cannot help me step by step to do the decisions and troubleshooting i must do. and that it is probably not as hard as my delay brain makes it. if others can work hard and repetitively I can probably do it too. the lowering of psychological barrier really helped.

Disorder protein

Monday-Tuesday: close-read “Zeno (2018). Synergy between intrinsically disordered domains and structured proteins amplifies membrane curvature sensing.“ Prepared a presentation of its background, experimental setup, main findings, potential connection to our project in journal club. documented the discussion outcomes, focusing on the parts that relate to the hypothesis tested in our next set of experiments. as well as the papers to read after this and the experiments / analysis we can potentially replicate in our setting. I will post the more in depth literature review and project thoughts later.

Collective knowledge - with the public

Wednesday-Friday: prepared a general audience facing presentation on collective information processing research, with some personal notes on my project’s preliminary results and my interest in learning about how social organizers can use these ideas. got to practice less stressful preparation and feedback cycles. received discussion of interest from community members who know more about chinese society. felt overall energized by the agency of a side project mutual help community. I can post more on this discussion with public later.

Informant, possibilities, college, meaning, holobiont

Wednesday-Friday: I had the interview with younger classmates of a chinese art class that was formative to me. talked about holobiont, university, interpersonal meaning, highschool social and science. i benefited from hearing about the things they are reading and the honest questions they ask after listening to me or our shared interests. they are going to make a comic or illustrated essay about this interview for younger people to see the possibilities in life partially exemplified by my experience. i had worries about my privileges that don’t apply to the difficulty of access, but i found that those privileges were not always beneficial or relevant in the context of our chat.

Body and emotion, awareness and care

For the past 2 weeks I doodle journal what i ate and how my body felt. This is a continuation from new york in that I showed my year reflection about how i dislike the way i look and the way i work to trang and maya. they gave me compassion and inspiration in thinking about the full cycles of food and body. The striking memories include seeing that so many people in the world don’t like themselves from various reasons… and the excitement from figuring out what kind of stretching can address which kind of pain or exhaustion in your own body.

Although not academic, I am considering my exploration into relationship with food and physical-emotioanl health as research. More specifically, the research has the sample size of 1 (me) and can benefit from experiments, evidence, and discussion: about the effect of sugar and other macromolecules on the body in short and long terms, about the social and personal levels of health and its many possibilities.

I posted some related drawings and thoughts onto a chinese platform that evoked a lot of resonance and response about low self esteem and self-denial, overly strict standards and the frustration with not being there yet.

I also shared an illustrated reaction to a comic I really like called “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness.” What I found most powerful was the strength of nuanced expression and brave attention to the sometimes disgusting or painful faces of loneliness and a need for love. For different people the circumstances vary, but it appears that at the similar core there is a deprivation of safety from self and others and the world. When many strangers from the internet commented and told me they feel the same, or they want to read the comic I was describing on these topics, or talk about their own numbness of bodily sensations … that makes me feel like it’s not just me who find this problematic or interesting or meaningful.

I also talked to family and friends about feeling ugly part more and got a lot of new adjectives to describe the dynamic and evocation of what my presence can do to others. “Lively, natural, energetic, cool, good, lovely.” So I don’t have to worry about people who I care about leaving me because of my present imperfection and chaos. That’s a big comfort.

After or while feeling more settled with the appearance bit I talked to friends about the health part of what to eat and how food affects the body more isolation from self image. a crisis from December getting socially and actively addressed.

Takeaway

I have come to accept that meaning for me comes from social resonance and is iteratively discovered from more attention and action.

Talking to people (through writing, presentations, questions, interviews, conversations) are beneficial. In my current stage it’s better to get feedback often than sitting and getting stuck. Although, it’s a fine balance of how much to make beforehand on my own in order to make the talking more valuable.

Big picture 2024

I enjoy thinking big picture so starting the year by putting my wishes down into elbaorations and timelines felt very satisfying and exciting.

You can keep me accountable! I will update you what I learn and experience along the way with you.

Choosing a program

The main timeline of the year is structured around the PhD application and related fellowships. I am in the process of keeping in touch with mentors who can help me criticize my application, suggest labs, and reach out to potential lab advisors to find a match.

Cell morphogenesis

My largest time commitment is to the current lab project surrounding the cytoskeleton-adhesion mechanism.

My biggest problem seems to be not executing and problem-solving the tasks at hand efficiently enough. That means the ideas and questions don’t get addressed.

Information swarming

My biggest interest would be to bring in my digestion and ideas to a young field that is easygoing to talk to and make this a discourse that also involves head down butt in chair kind of coding work.

Work from what I have

On a more meta level I strategized about how to go about these wishes. Besides coming up with goal states, I also faced the obstacles that have come my way in the past years surrounding these goals.

What I did this week

Chat with a comrade

I had a fun chat with my friend S this week. S is a friend who shares my interest in curiosity-driven science and the sustainable material lifecycle. Her approach is through chemistry and material engineering with a background in wildlife photography and a self-driven mindset. My approach is through modeling and a rhizome-like dispersion of interest and connections. As always I felt energized from a spontaneous texting hurricane with her.

She mentioned a game she is making up with her friend in which everything that is alive have spirits, not just humans. I shared with her the songs and stories that I heard from old people this summer, about people dying to become birds, and children lying to dungbeetles. Those songs have cultural origins.

That made me think about how I have little lived experience with real-world flocks of birds and fish, even though I am studying them through simulations. I wondered who in my network have more experiential knowledge about fish. Shuyi mentioned that the guide on a wildlife sighting trip could mimic bird calls and the birds respond. My friend Kyra is very good at catching fish and other creatures in the streams since she was little. I would like to consult her concrete knowledge about how they behave.

Shuyi and I thought about how ultimately what I want to know is what it really is like to be one of the fish in the shoal. Shuyi mentioned that she read a study about how a pair of magnetic proteins in a bird's eye triangulate the magnetic field. Since she is currently studying and working on a quantum chemistry project she was impressed by how the birds know quantum by instinct whereas she find the concepts quite foreign to internalize initially.

We also shared the buffet-like experience of attending conference or reading papers. The novelty satiates psychological hunger (before it becomes stuffing). For example, we are both interested in how fundamental research on material and ecological properties of biological matter can be useful for more sustainable manufacturing systems. She attended a talk from Prof. Markus Buehler’s lab for modeling and manufacturing of materials. They have compiled a database of biomaterials, their associated functions and processes to make them. My questions remaining about this direction is how does the net measures of sustainability add up for these materials, since just being synthesized from a natural thing doesn’t mean it’s better fitted into nature.

What I read this week

Visualizing Complexity workshop, Vienna

Last month there was a workshop that gathered complexity researchers and graphic designers / data visualization people in a workshop to share their works and collaborate briefly. I listened to the podcast of the workshop organizer. There were two things that interested me.

First the organizer Shu said that as she consult for more labs she sees the cliches in complexity studies. most studies have a time series plot that shows some kind of phase transition, or a bar graph that shows some kind of exponential distribution. Given the similar data type from experiments, she has also box cutter visualizations to communicate them. She felt stuck and wanted to get more ideas by bringing together different geographies and expertise. If the designers could understand the paper, data, model more, and the researcher gets inspired about more lines of inquiry or ways of representing and explaining their findings, then the hope is something nice.

I also found Dirk Brockmann’s commitment to making lengthy explanations of interactive simulations very nice. In static pdf papers the models are most often depicted with equations and then results. But in his complexity explainers, the reader can easily tune the parameters and see what happens.

I would want to make a thoughtful visualization for the flocking paper we are working on currently. I would like to read more from and get feedback by people who think about it a lot such as Shu.

Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.

This is a workshop paper that reviews theories and studies around how groups of human organize and make decisions. They propose to think of social phenomenon as a group adapting its network structure and integration strategy (how individual transforms social information into their own belief or behavior) to its environment or problem.

I have been wanting to understand what happened with COVID lockdown in China and what could have been done differently that considered the people. I found the framework too abstract to understand the nuances of COVID policy obedience, or rather I had difficulty generating new insights by applying this framework.

When I discussed this with my friends M Z E, there is some interesting insights. First is that the academic lens does not always provide an answer. Especially, one framework or model cannot explain everything usefully. Furthermore, the academic lens doesn’t help with finding new case studies and possibilities beyond the common characterized ones. What I learned most of all was that I am interested to learn more about how people achieve their goals together in the face of many structural problems.

Takeaways

Research can be like eating, it’s another human activity. It can be for many purposes, fun or necessary. To ask a question then get an answer through experimenting, reading or discussing is like getting a craving fulfilled. Getting an unsupported conclusion is like a not quite filling meal. To delay on trying for the core problem is to starve. To hear new ideas and broad horizons is to come to a harvest.

I benefit from having the urgency and time blcok to read a paper and annotate the figure for what the experiment and the answer is & how I respond to them They inspire discussions and new observations. I would like to do it more frequently.

How will it feel when I am dying?

Will I see “good memories, grateful memories, memories of summer afternoons, memories of having been loved, memories of having been given things, and gratitude that I had also given something back”, like Oliver Sacks?

Will I feel guilt for wasting the time of people who cared for me, who could have used that time to have a new life… as my grandpa felt for my grandma, for her staying with him through a decade in the hospital?

Will I look forward to what world is next?

Will I feel nothing, because there is no time for me to prepare or realize that it is happening?

Will I taste breath differently?

Will I be sad?

Will I be regretful?

Will I be in pain?

Will I be just like a leaf, whose dead body I step on and get transformed into nutrients by slime moulds?

After visiting New York during Friendsgiving, I returned to Chapel Hill in late November. In the Chinese 24 solstices, the time is called “Minor Snow” (小雪), when people usually start fermenting vegetables and sealing windows with paper.

The needles from the Long-Needle Pine mostly fell. They pile up in mountains between the lab and the microscope room. The cleaning aunties said there was too much to sweep. Any swept pile would soon get dispersed back by the wind.

After my imaging session, I went out and scooped the needles into shapes of people lying on the ground. There is a mother holding an egg, like how my mom used to cradle my sister on the sofa.

There is a fairy that fell from the tree.

There is a drunk guy who I remember from a photo of the Tokyo subway station in the morning.

The cleaning aunties kept this leaf person when they made another round of sweeping.

Over the course of a week, the person slowly melted.

When I am dying, will I feel like a leaf?