A Life Reclaimed

For most of my life, I’ve lived in the world of logic and precision — in analysis, data, clinical research tools, and many years at Harvard. Life takes a turn that will allow me to say a bitter sweet goodbye to this meaningful work and to live my life in a completely different way.

As I prepare to step away from my bioinformatics career, I find myself rediscovering the passions that once shaped my childhood dreams — music, art, writing, and the search for beauty.

I’m training for something I once only dared to imagine: performing Yu Ji’s sword dance from the Beijing Opera classic Farewell My Concubine. It’s a role I’ve admired since I was a little girl, and to finally bring her to life at my age feels like meeting my younger self halfway across time.

At the same time, I’m continuing my work as an author and artist. My novels, Silent Inheritance and The Land of Sorrow , explore how history shapes human lives, and how courage, love, and moral clarity survive even under the weight of oppression. They are very different stories, but both ask the same question: what remains of us when ideology or circumstance strip everything else away?

My art, too, speak this same language of endurance — faces and landscapes caught between light and shadow, moments of stillness that hold whole histories inside them. My art captures those same emotions in another language — the language of shadow, light, and silence.

Some might call this a “retirement plan.” But for me, it’s the opposite — it’s a return to life itself.

I want my adult children to see this and understand that life isn’t just about routine or careers, that it’s never too late to pursue what calls to you, and that adventure into new territories doesn’t belong only to the young.

If I can leave one legacy behind, I hope it’s this — that courage doesn’t fade with age, and dreams don’t have expiration dates. The truest art, and perhaps the truest life, begins the moment we stop measuring ourselves by time and start creating from the heart.