Hello everyone, I’m TextsWithTea, and I’m the creator of this blog. I’m a Chinese American who grew up with an interest in Chinese culture. When I was in college, I used to go to the East Asian Library where I’d spend hours browsing books and reading from them. While I ended up graduating with degrees that are completely unrelated to Chinese, I’d say my true passion probably lies with studying Chinese texts. This blog is an outlet for anything that I find interesting in my journey of learning about Chinese, and more broadly, Asian culture. Hopefully along the way I can meet a few people who share my passion in this subject as well.

While so far I intend this blog to focus on Chinese culture, I might blog about Vietnamese, Korean, or Japanese culture one day in the future if it’s on a topic related to the East Asian cultural sphere. I’ll also occasionally blog about any historical or social science texts that I find interesting and possibly related to the topics in this blog.

There are several other reasons I started this blog. I often have problems finding longform content on Chinese texts. While it isn’t hard for me to find a few results discussing subjects like wuxia or Chinese philosophy, they are often short form content that only briefly answer the question at hand. As a result, I hope to cover more in-depth reviews and thoughts on what I read pertaining to these topics.

Another reason I started this blog was because when researching Chinese philosophy, I’m often left with results that are of dubious accuracy. For example, there are many quotes attributed to Lao Tzu or Sun Tzu that are simply not from them. It becomes frustrating to look for quotes purportedly by a Chinese philosopher, only to find out it was made up by some random guy who lived 50 years ago. When writing this blog, I will aim to do research and make sure I provide accurate quotes and other sources to the best of my ability so readers can further explore them if they want to.

Through this blog, I hope I can help demystify concepts in Chinese culture that are commonly viewed as esoteric or woo-woo, such as feng shui, Chinese zodiacs, etc. We live in a time when these concepts are growing popular, and while I think there is some basis for some of these concepts, such as how hanging a heavy object above your bed can cause uneasiness for your subconscious, it becomes concerning to hear stories of feng shui consultants telling their clients that unless they spend thousands of dollars for an ornament, they will receive bad luck. Learning the basics can help defend you from people who are trying to take advantage of you.

Last but not least, I hope to instill in the reader a greater appreciation for Eastern thought. I have great respect for the Western tradition, having fostered the scientific process that brought forth tremendous advances in technology. However, there are many questions posed in fields such as psychology that remain unanswered. The psychologist Carl Jung gained inspiration from studying the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower. In a similar fashion, I hope that Eastern thought can help us solve unanswered questions posed by the Western tradition.