The person behind this website is a gay guy living in London with his Hong Kong boyfriend of 13 years. He has Autism Spectrum Disorder and Schizoaffective Disorder.

I hope to use some of this material and publish it as a novel one day. Offline, like in the good old days. One of those paper books with a nice smell that you can buy in a bookstore. Or on a Kindle if that’s your thing—Kindles are good on the eyes (especially when reading while sunbathing) and they aren’t that heavy.

I have a Ph.D. in the humanities and I used to be a part-time lecturer at a uni up North. I quit my job in early 2022 because it was taking a toll on my mental health. I also have a well-paid, younger boyfriend of Hong Kong heritage supporting me. We live in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

I am one of those people who were born with relatively little—comparatively speaking of course, considering the war zones, refugee camps, and all the other horrible things going on all over the place right now. Those people are much, much worse off than I am. But in my own way I worked my way up. I made my own luck. So perhaps you could say that my work intervenes in questions of class (and yes, I care deeply about democracy, specifically in the Chinese context—I have studied Mandarin Chinese from age 17.)

Anyhow, I was also lucky enough to be born in Europe and to have had the help of the welfare state. My dad died when I was two. My mum never went to university but somehow she found a job as a teacher (she is an artist in her free time). And we got more child benefit because she is a widow.

When there were still COVID-19 lockdowns, I was going on socially-distant bike rides during the “one form of exercise” thing on a single-speed Muddy Fox bike I bought online years ago for around 100 pounds. Early summer 2020 I invested in a new single-speed bike. It was from Parkers of Bolton, cost £250, and I assembled it myself. Recently, I had the single-speed bike turned into a fixie at a cool bike workshop in Islington. Fixies are a lot of fun too. While I was biking around London, I took some polaroids and put them in a scrapbook.

The exercise has been tremendous for my mental and physical health, though in May 2020 I overdid it and I ended up in a nice NHS hospital under section 2 of the “Mental Health Act 1983.” I had some sort of fit in my brain and the doctors and nurses couldn’t figure it out, they thought it was alcohol-induced psychosis. I recovered quickly and was there for about three weeks. The staff and the patients were all really nice. Sadly, in the summer of 2021, I ended up at another mental health institution in Milton Keynes after I decided to quit drinking on the Summer solstice. I was diagnosed with Affective Bipolar Disorder and was on medication (a sedative) for about a year. The meds weren't working for me. In 2022 it happened again: I ended up in another mental health hospital in Potters Bar and was prescribed new medication that did the trick for a while. I am now on my third type of medication, Clozapine.

I am still figuring out what it all means. Especially given that recently, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, and even more recently, my diagnosis was adjusted from Bipolar Disorder to Schizo-Affective Disorder.

I enjoy writing and taking pictures. At one point, I was also a part-time arts professional. I curated an exhibition of an art student when I was in grad school in New York and I used to write bios for artists at an artist residency program (one of them hired me as her artist assistant—I had lots of fun sourcing materials for her). One summer I interned at a gallery in New York, where my tasks included helping a freelance art installer/artist (we got along great).

In London no one in the art world will hire me. I am not sure if that has something to do with my name—what with Brexit and all. Now that I’m a British citizen I will just include that on my CV to make sure.