When I first read Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, I saw myself reflected not in the story’s alien world, but in its quiet exploration of how words reshape reality. The protagonist learns a new language that alters her sense of time. She begins to see her past and future as one continuous whole. It’s a strange, beautiful idea: that understanding something deeply enough could change how you exist in time.
Words have always felt like bridges. Small, deliberate steps toward understanding. Every time I’ve entered a new environment, I’ve relied on them to connect me to the unfamiliar. But over time, I’ve realized that language is more than communication; it’s the architecture of perception.
That’s what words have done for me. Reading and writing have never just been hobbies; they’re ways of mapping how I belong. Novels and literary theorists have accompanied me through shifts in place, perspective, and identity. They’ve given me continuity when the world felt fragmented, and through them, I’ve learned that to read is to momentarily live inside someone else’s consciousness.
Chiang once said that what interests him most isn’t creating new worlds but understanding this one. That’s what I hope to do in my own writing. Not to invent, but to reveal. My current project explores “untranslatable words,” terms like han or saudade that hold emotions too layered for direct translation. These words fascinate me because they remind me that language is both a mirror and a limit. Each culture builds its own emotional vocabulary, and in reading across them, we learn to see the world through multiple lenses.
Chiang’s fiction also taught me that communication doesn’t end at words. In Exhalation, his characters, mechanical beings confronting their own mortality, remind readers that understanding comes from reflection and empathy, not noise. I’ve come to believe that silence can be just as expressive. Sometimes, silence is the space where care lives, a pause that holds patience, not absence.
The more I write, the more I realize that language and silence are not opposites but partners. Words can build connection, but so can listening. And in both, there’s an acknowledgment of our shared humanity.
Ted Chiang’s stories don’t offer answers so much as questions: How does language shape love? How does knowing change living? His curiosity has influenced the way I approach not just writing, but life itself—as a dialogue between understanding and unknowing, between what’s said and what’s felt.
I may not fully know where my story leads, but I’ve learned to trust the process of writing it — word by word, silence by silence. For me, that’s what interconnectedness truly means: to keep translating the world, again and again, until empathy becomes its own language.
