Writing, building, and learning how to see home again.

I write this from Hangzhou, a city of tea hills and lake fog. I lived here once before, two years building payment systems at Alipay, back when I thought the next step had to be somewhere else. So I left. Berlin came next, and three years at Klarna, and a life I didn’t expect to grow as roots-deep as it did.

Most of what I loved about those years happened away from the desk. I spent weekends on trains heading nowhere in particular — the Alps in summer, Zurich when I needed a city that worked, Annecy for the kind of lake water that doesn’t look real in photos. But the place that surprised me most was the one closest to home: Brandenburg. The flat fields that go on until the sky takes over. The pine forests that swallow sound. The lakes — so many lakes — where Germans of every age strip down and wade in like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, and somehow, by the second summer, it is.

One January I waded into the Havel at minus one, watched the steam rise off my own shoulders, and understood something about that country I couldn’t have read in a book.

I kept notebooks through all of it. Some of them turned into the essays you’ll find on this site.

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: I went to Europe because I’d believed its marketing. The films, the philosophy, the idea that the good life had a postal code somewhere west of me. And Europe was wonderful — really, it was. But the longer I lived there, the more I started seeing my own country with eyes that weren’t mine before. Distance has a way of returning things to you. I relearned China from a U-Bahn seat. I came home a different person than the one who’d left. Not to the old job. To a question I couldn’t have asked before I went away.

What changed, really, was my sense of direction. I stopped asking where the impressive life was supposed to be and started asking what I could build from what I had actually seen. Coming home didn’t feel like retreat. It felt like beginning with better materials.

These days I’m building something of my own around that instinct:

I write and film about China — the messy, fast-moving, often misunderstood version that doesn’t fit neatly into a hot take. I vlog the trips, the food, the small cities nobody outside China has heard of yet. And I’m working on the ground as a guide for foreigners who are finally coming to see this country for themselves. For years I was the one being shown around, and I know what it’s like to land somewhere new and want a real person to walk you through it instead of a guidebook. I’d like to be that person for someone else.

This website isn't the work. It's the window into it. Field notes, outdoor stories, and photos — all the observations that start from being somewhere and looking closely.

When I’m not doing any of that, I’m probably on a mountain somewhere. I write about those, too.