Newton X. Liu
"So tell me, aren't you that wild man
who's red hot and seduced by the ocean,
willing to self-destruct under the chain of love?
Aren't you that miserable but arrogant man who faces death
but never stops singing and flying?
...
A Child on the beach keeps nagging her mother
by insisting to tie the sun to her hat-string.
That little heart does not like darkness.
Perhaps this is child's logic:
if I don't like it, it won't come."

(translated from Yang Lian's "To the Sun")

All right, let's start from the very beginning. I was born in the countryside outside of Xi'an, closer to, though not resembling, the terra-cotta warriors unearthed under our bare feet than anything else there both physically and spiritually. If I have any (too many actually) faults, or if I have any strength, both the blame and credit should go to the unruliness of the Yellow River which has nurtured as well as tortured us ever since we came into existence.

Please don't ask me why there isn't any picture of the Yellow Earth Plateau that brought up us the rough, the tough, and the stubborn bunch. Guess nothing is tender and beautiful about that stretch of perpetual poverty and robust sadness. To lighten things up, let's also tell you that Hua Shan, a gorgeous peak of magnificent rocks, was just a few miles away from my village. I swear I have seen it many times in my dreams.

Life also chooses me as I attended Jilin University and majored in Chemistry as the country rushed many of us young bright minds into science and technology.

After college, many of my classmates celebrated their good fortune of getting a job assignment close to or at their home city. As a country boy, I was happy to be exiled to the Great Southwest of China. Chengdu University of Science and Technology, now merged into Sichuan University, was where I spent 3 years as a lab technician. At the time I was young and eager to travel so I had a great time going to conferences and purchasing equipments in some absolutely gorgeous spots of the country, such as the Three Gorges, the Stone Forest of Yunnan and Jialing River.

I know I am one of the few fortunate souls who have the opportunity to rectify something imposed on us either by politics or our own instinct of survival as I later left chemistry and went to graduate school majoring in Rhetoric in University of California at Berkeley. There I wrote my doctoral dissertation on poetry: Poetry as Modernization: "Misty Poetry" of the Cultural Revolution. It was like that I finally had the opportunity to exhale and relax.

Now I work as program manager/vice president of Bridge to Asia, a non-profit organization based in the San Franciso Bay Area, contributing to the modernization of education in developing countries in Asia, mainly China, Vietnam and Cambodia. Please click on the highlighted text to find our most recent newsletter.

I was good at teaching when I was required to teach freshmen English composition at Berkeley, though my students were, maybe some still are, amazed at the sight that a Chinese boy with accent and yellow dust showed up to teach them English. It was the time that I learned to write and speak a little bit in English. For this, I owe a deep bow to all my students who were also good friends.

Here are some of my writings if you like to read.

Travel Inspired

Articles and Essays Essays translated from Chinese Poems translated from Chinese (women poets) Poems of My Own Stories (in English) A Novel (in English)
The little man has grown up

Middle School Graduation (2007)

I have more pictures of the once "little emperor."

Feel free to comment.

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