Yuxuan Francis Liu
Writer
An unrecognizable path—through political science studies, through policy and consulting work, through cities, through inward philosophical reorientation—led here.
“The current of life is the personification of Tao 道”
The Wandering
The path I took was not linear, and I no longer think it was meant to be.
I have briefed the Idaho National Laboratory on cyber threat analysis as a policy intern and as part of a research team, consulted for multinational corporations in Beijing, translated current-events news content at a media company in Shenzhen, and advised students navigating one educational world and another.
Each role placed me inside a different space of how people organize their lives — how institutions operate, how power justifies itself, and how individuals find language for what they believe.
I moved between places and different modes of living: between the analytical and the poetic, between the systemic and the personal, between English and Chinese, and the space between the two where neither quite suffices.
I thought I was going out to see the world. What I was doing, I understand now, was coming to know myself — in the midst of all those forms of human action.
Through all of it, writing was the thread. Not always visible. But always there.
The Inward Turn
Somewhere in the middle of my professional work, I began to feel the edges of my own way of thinking.
I just could not allow myself to be guided by frameworks and external scripts, as I was constantly disturbed by questions about my own life's work, a proper way of living that is in accordance with who I am. It's an inward inquiry into what the ancients understood that we have since lost.
The turn toward Taoism was not a departure. It was a recognition and rediscovery.
And the real understanding and inquiry were happening in the margins — in the reading and companion of Chuang Tzu 莊子, the early philosopher who defined Taoism, and Wang Wei 王維, whose poetry holds the weight of intellectual honesty that penetrates my heart:
My early years are not worthy of words: 少年不足言
When I saw the Tao, I was already old in years. 識道年已長
How can I regret past affairs? 事往安可悔
The rest of my life luckily can be nurtured. 餘生幸能養
The Work Now
This inquiry has no endpoint.
It continues now in Ink & Space — not as a popular summary of ancient wisdom, but a sustained attempt to understand what these traditions might still speak to us about living in our own way while navigating the changing, formless shapes of reality.