"If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own."

On my  last birthday, my sister gave me one of the best gifts I have ever received. It was a book titled "China in Ten Words" by Yu Hua, and ever since I unwrapped it, my nose has been buried in its pages every night by the light of a single lamp in my room. It's hard to describe how I feel reading it because Yu Hua writes of things that are both unfamiliar and too familiar to me. But if there was one thing I would want you--reader, seer, and thinker--to take away from my blog, I hope that it would even be the tiniest fraction of what Yu Hua thinks of literature.

So as I start my travels, studies, and wanderings to Shanghai and elsewhere, with this blog as my shadow, I hope that you might be able to discover unfamiliar things, recognize the familiar, and maybe set off to find the things about a place or yourself that you never knew existed--here, there, far and near.