On Making Things

There's a question I've never really sat with: if I truly do love creating, why did I let it slip away, little by little?

Before college, I was full of enthusiasm for making things.

In elementary school, under the influence of the kids around me, I got into watching Hong Kong costume dramas — to us, martial arts and ancient weapons held an incomparable magic. I couldn't catch every episode at home, so whenever the same show came back around on TV, there were always gaps in the plot I couldn't bridge, and I was desperately curious about what happened next. That curiosity turned into creative fuel: my friends and I started drawing stick-figure comics in our notebooks to invent the rest of the story ourselves. Looking back, that kind of derivative creation has a name — fan works — but of course I had no idea at the time. I just did it, and loved every minute of it.

Eventually fan works stopped being enough. We began casting our classmates as characters, writing in their real-life personalities and speech habits, which made those stick figures feel funny and familiar to us. Creative differences split us up, and each of us kids started drawing a story of our own. We poured the feelings we couldn't express into our plots: the girl you liked became the lady of your protagonist's fortress; the person you couldn't stand became a villain to be soundly thrashed. Maybe I admired you, liked you, but was too shy to say so — in my comic, I would confess. Maybe you did things that drove me up the wall, and politeness kept me from calling you out — in my comic, I would beat you up without mercy. Call it Ah Q's spiritual victory method, applied to stick-figure comics. Highly innovative.

In middle school, the class schedule finally included my favorites: art class and music class. Every brushstroke the teacher demonstrated up front, every craft project, every note plucked at the fingertips, every blast of brass — all of it held a kind of fatal, natural charm for me. The famous figures in our textbooks became canvases for our doodles; sheet after sheet of A4 paper found a higher calling as we researched which fold would make a paper airplane fly farthest; at the school arts festival I would even play a small part in a classmate's act. The summer after middle school graduation, I went and learned the drums — back when I barely listened to rock at all.

High school, everyone says, is when you're supposed to buckle down and study. Even so, I never stopped making things: carving a pencil lead into a heart-shaped lock under my desk, drawing my favorite anime characters onto the class display board, playing band shows on the open ground outside our classroom, turning our sports-day class flag into a mighty war banner, making handmade gifts for the girl I liked, choreographing a dance for the talent show... The problems that seemed impossibly hard back then, the fallings-out with this or that classmate, all the other things that felt so important at the time — I remember none of it now. But those moments of making survive as threads of memory, each one able to carry me back for a wander.

Then came college — and it's not so much that I stopped creating as that creating became my field of study: landscape design. I always felt that everything I did in college was somehow different from everything I'd done before, though I could never say how. It wasn't until recently, reading a book of game philosophy — The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia — that I began to understand the difference.

The Grasshopper is almost entirely a rigorous argument about what it means to play a game, and it barely touches on creation at all. But in the third appendix, its author Bernard Suits attempts a definition of play itself (playing games ≠ play): to play is to divert resources never meant for the purpose — resources allocated for instrumental activities, redirected toward an activity that is its own end.

In other words: before college, since my time was supposed — legitimately — to go toward instrumental activities like classes and exams, all those big and small, gloriously nonsensical acts of creation were, in themselves, a form of play. But once creating became a productive activity, half the joy drained out of it. When you create to earn better grades, to please a client, the fun of play is gone and it becomes, entirely, work. Plenty of people find enormous joy in their work, of course. I am clearly not one of them.

This also goes some way toward explaining why I've always felt baffled and quietly unhappy when I'm asked to tag along on a trip or a food outing and stand through take after staged take of posed photos. Nobody is doing anything wrong — we simply want different things. I set out to enjoy the food, the scenery, the strange remove of an unfamiliar city; when I record something, it's to capture the feeling and the stir of that one instant. Pretty photo or not, the moment of recording it already completes the whole emotional gesture. But inside the endless loop of pose, dissatisfaction, reshoot, pose again, I can't feel my own presence in the moment. I'm so sensitive to that deliberateness that the whole thing starts to feel like a job. Checking again and again whether the last pose was good enough, whether this stance looks worse than that one — those moments always leave me a little desolate, because everyone else is delighting in it, and I'm stuck in a daze.

Too serious, too serious — maybe I've been taking this whole business of creating far too seriously. When the creating I did in college turned creation into "work," creation itself never went anywhere; only my attitude toward it changed. I began to see it in nakedly practical terms: what mattered was whether it could please my professors and win me a high GPA; what I actually wanted to make became secondary. A few years of that, and learning to create quietly turned into learning to read the room. Learning at school is inevitably shot through with falseness. When teachers judge students' work, students will inevitably cater to teachers — until the standard of judgment is itself, in large part, a kind of fiction. And I had never once recognized that before.

Of course, small flaws aside, college was a lovely time. I was less fevered about creating, but the coursework still had its share of flashes of insight, wild ideas, and moments when everything suddenly opened up. The design projects that seemed terrible then don't look so worthless now; every line drawn with care, every hammer swung with intent, every step walked with effort seemed to settle me, slowly, into myself. It's just that outside of class, there wasn't much creating left that was done for pure joy.

After graduation I stopped treating creation as a hobby altogether. Every day I told myself I was busy, there was so much to do, so much to catch up on — hardly any time even to be alone with myself. And as my taste slowly improved, as I saw a bigger world and saw truly good work, I couldn't help turning harsh toward anything less than good, always catching myself thinking: this really isn't worth showing anyone. Reason by reason, I built myself a cage and shut myself inside it.

A while ago I scrolled back through my old WeChat posts, and it suddenly hit me how much creating matters to me — no matter whether, in the moment, it was done for myself or for others, for joy or through real pain. The future me is always my own first reader, and may well be the last one who ever comes back to look. Even a few bare keywords jotted in a journal can turn out, in hindsight, to hold the full force of a moment: they become a time machine, carrying you back into your own past, back into what you were thinking and feeling then — the exhilaration and the struggle alike. With that kind of tenderness and respect, I want to keep creating. The bar is low: just mess around, accept the premise that I won't make anything great, and feel, from inside it, the flow of time.

The times move fast. Back in my elementary school days, creating still meant pen, paper, and handiwork, and I made so many things, joyfully. Now words, images, audio, and video can all carry a creation — and I've all but given it up. Maybe I never forgot the joy creating brought me. Maybe I've just grown more and more restless, and forgotten that stick figures once had to be drawn stroke by stroke, that essays are typed out one character at a time — and forgotten that I was never a serious creator in the first place.